PPJG Original Article (See attached copyright notice. All rights reserved.)
Posted September 26, 2009 6:20 pm CST
by Paul Griepentrog 
The Lost People: Part II
A way of life was put on trial in Neillsville, Wisconsin on September 23, 2oo9, in the case against Emanuel Miller Jr., having been charged under complaint for civil forfeiture because he refused to register his property under the state’s premise registration program. The morning session was devoted to the evidentiary hearing in which the state, represented by Clark Co. district attorney Darwin Zwieg and Bonnie Walksmuth, a court appointed attorney representing Emanuel Miller, presented evidence on behalf of the parties.
The afternoon session was devoted to the trial phase and concluded around 4 o’clock, at which time Judge Jon Counsell gave instructions that upon the completion of the trial transcript, there would be thirty days to file motions, fifteen days after to file rebuttals, oral arguments would occur seven days later, and then he would make his final decision.
Close to a hundred Amish were in attendance both from the local area and those who had come from other groups in a show of solidarity for Emanuel. There were three reporters and eight non-Amish present other than the witnesses for the state and defendant. Conspicuous by their absence were the representatives of the groups claiming to be fighting NAIS. The only group showing support was the Wisconsin Independent Consumers and Farmers Association (WICFA) by the presence of their president, C.J. Cordell and his wife Jessica.
The first phase of the hearing heard testimony from Emanuel Miller Jr., Emanuel Miller Sr., and Amos Schwartz, Deacon for the group in and around Taylor Co.; each giving testimony concerning their Biblical beliefs in that although they could not state with absolute certainty that the premises number was a precursor to the Mark of the Beast, they knew it was the first step in the NAIS protocol that would lead to the individual numbering and tracking of animals. They believed the need for caution in order to prevent them from being drawn into the NAIS program only to discover later that they had violated their beliefs and would then have no recourse to remedy their error. When asked what they would do if forced to register and be subject to fines, jail, or be forced to move they responded that they would accept or endure the consequences and stated: “If a faith is worth living for, it’s worth dying for.”
Upon questioning by D.A. Zwieg regarding the entry of information into databases as part of back tagging livestock to sell, fire numbers, and other aspects of daily life, the Amish gentlemen responded that these acts were done by others and outside their control or consent. Darwin Zwieg tried to separate Wisconsin’s premise identification program from NAIS despite the cooperative agreement held by the state and the USDA to implement the USDA’s business plan. Andrew Johnson a field representative for Dairy Farms of America a company, to which the Amish farmers sell milk, testified that as part of his field kit issued by the company contained a document from the state that the national trace back system would be made mandatory despite the state’s claims that individual tagging would be voluntary.
The afternoon’s session delved into the states witnesses, the three foremost individuals to offer testimony were:
- Duane Brandner compliance officer for animal health division,
- Dr. Paul McGraw head of the animal health division, and,
- Cheryl Daniels administrative attorney for the state department of agriculture.
It was during the testimony of these three individuals that Judge Counsell began to directly question the witnesses to further his understanding of the necessity of the premise number. It was during the questioning by Judge Counsell of these witnesses, that the responses to the questions posed became inconsistent with existing ag administrative code and the USDA’s business plan. There were several of these inconsistencies and I will deal with them in a later article after I have received the trial transcript.
However, there are two instances that stand out, the first being Dr. McGraw’s response to questions posed by Judge Counsell regarding the necessity of the premise registration system. Judge Counsell questioned whether the premise registration system had shown to be a benefit to disease control in Wisconsin to which Dr. McGraw responded “No”.
The judge then asked if had been shown to be a benefit in any other state it had been implemented and again the response was, “no”.
In the judges questioning of Cheryl Daniels the question was posed as whether the premise number was part of the 15 digit individual animal identifier number. A shocked look came onto Ms. Daniels face as she responded “no”; an answer in direct contradiction to the USDA’s business plan.
There was of course much more that occurred that day in court than what I could cover here, however, the conversation outside the courtroom during the breaks was just as insightful.
Having lived in an area with an Amish community I was surprised at their attitude, as it was one of cold anger, born of misinformation and broken promises from persons representing state and national groups that had lulled them into a false sense of security; a blight that exists throughout the anti NAIS movement today. My hope is that the people involved will come to the knowledge of the truth without having to face the stark reality of the courts and move to correct this unnecessary program.
Emanuel is not the only farmer facing prosecution for failing to register a premise; Pat Monchilovich is also scheduled for trial in October on the same charges.
You see, I also have a vested interest in these cases having received a visit from Duane Brandner in late February informing me I would be charged for failing to register.
Paul M. Griepentrog
(C) Copyright September, 2009. All rights reserved. This article may not be reprinted or redistributed either electronically or in hard copy, in whole or in part, in any form without the express permission of the author. For reprint permission contact skfarms@centurytel.net
The PPJ Gazette 
Ozarks Property Rights Newsletter
Nov 09, 2009 @ 15:13:48
Health and Freedom « Sendin57’s Blog
Nov 04, 2009 @ 20:38:33
Wisconsin Prosecutes NAIS Non-compliance
Oct 26, 2009 @ 16:45:08
Oct 18, 2009 @ 01:22:37
there are many groups out there claiming to be fighting all of these things, and most of them probably have good intentions. I personally don’t know of any that are helping with this fight, so I cannot recommend anyone or group to you especially to send money to. We don’t take any donations of any kind here at PPJ.
Marti Oakley
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Oct 17, 2009 @ 05:34:34
God bless everyone having to deal with the government in court. We are citizens, not criminals. Is there a fund to help out those going up against the government?
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NAIS Enforcement Commences against Amish Farmer « Amish Internet Blog
Oct 17, 2009 @ 01:48:23
Oct 09, 2009 @ 00:12:58
Thanks Ceci:
I agree with you wholeheartedly. I do not eat “fast food”…ever. I do not eat junk food….I do not allow my grand children to eat that crap when they are with me. I buy from local producers who have yet to be forced into planting gmo. I buy from local meat producers what little meat I eat, including poultry. I grow my own veggies usually but couldn’t this year due to health constraints.
We have been approached here on PPJ also by the aryan/white supremicist hate groups and have also received the degrading cartoons, racial slurs, and other rathering sickening material that circulates. These individuals and groups try to attach themselves anywhere they can as most parasitic creatures do. Most generally they come off publicly as some sort of uber-patriotic group on the surface, then you find out that what they are really promoting is this ugliness. We do not participate here, in those things.
It is absolutely frightening to me to see the low level of understanding, and even less self education in what has been taking place for years. I run into people daily who are more concerned about what kind of cell phone or ipod they have than what may be happening to our country.
I find it equally frightening that those who still “have” some of what they did, fail to recognize the epidemic poverty that is growing everywhere.
When MacDonalds is selling hamburgers for 99 cents….don’t these people ever wonder what it is they are really eating?
Marti
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Oct 08, 2009 @ 21:37:16
Marti Oakley,
I refer to white supremacist among us. A very small minority of extremists have aligned themselves with the NAIS opposition. I receive emails in private from one every now and then. They are motivated because they hate President Obama for being African American. Prior to Mr. Obama it was hatred for African Americans in cities. They’re own words.
The NAIS is a corporate boardroom concept. Saying that is not believing in a conspiracy theory, that’s just normal operating procedures from our government’s lobby set-up and our university endowments (i.e. vet schools for example).
Corporations make our government policies. Douglas Rushkoff has done a recent job outlining this in his book,”Life Inc. ”
The reality is we let them. We join them. We go to universities. We defend them. We covet working for them. The reality of NAIS is that we have neglected to protect farming and our community food systems from them.
When I opposed NAIS back when the first Draft appeared it wasn’t because of my “rights” it was because I was connected to food, slow food, local food, organic, independent farmer’s struggles for market distribution, farm labor, whatever people want to call this “food movement” nowadays the struggles have been with us a long, long time.
In full disclosure I keep horses. I’ve been around them all my life. As a city girl horses were a part of my life. So was farming actually, although I never lived full-time on a farm I was exposed. I’m talking NYC, Miami. Today I live in Oklahoma.
What I had the hardest time with regarding explaining NAIS’s downside to people who kept animals was explaining that their support of factory food brought this upon them. It took a long time to get people to see they needed to connect to the food system they disparaged and mocked.
It took a lot of polite conversation, alot of not to stepping on any toes, to get people to trace each ingredient in that church potluck dinner to a corporation and then to see how a farmer actually makes a living and where NAIS fits in.
For someone to yell about their “rights” was hypocrital if they remained that disconnect to food.
It is never intended for anyone to have to go off the wagon of factory food consumption to oppose NAIS, that’s become an impossibility for the majority of Americans but admitting iit is admitting that the NAIS is very deep-rooted.
Waving a Big Mac in one hand and a N0-NAIS in the other is a complete hypocrisy unless you have some shame about the Big Mac but you want to get better.
I’ve said this before, an urbanite in a rented apartment is not motivated to oppose NAIS while you show photos of your grandkid on his pony and scream about your “rights. ” And go through the drive-through at McDonald’s I might ad.
When I moved to Oklahoma I was surprised to find so much corporate control over food production, subsidized corporate farms, lots of hunger, poverty, terrible infastructure, a mandatory NAIS law in place (although it remains unenforced) but with a general attitude of giving lots of lip service to “rights” while lawmakers work behind the scenes on important legislation. (i.e. passing a mandatory Premise ID for all hog showing without public knowledge, announcing it online at the ag department website while the majority of rural households, the ones likely to be showing hogs have no internet or poor internet service available and had no idea it became law.)
With that said, I do not encourage the fringe and I ask that you don’t either. When I get an email with a cartoon or comment regarding my president’s skin color I defend him. I have defended all of my presidents against childish stupidity. I see corporations running my country while people play at calling the president a moron , or he’s an adulterer, or now he’s a “socialist.” Do they even know socialist their own town is? Their own state?
If I wanted to rant at the emailer I’d say that the he or the she who wrote that is a moron if they wrote it while munching away at Doritos. We’re pretty damn near a fascism where Doritos runs the country.
Obama didn’t take over their supermarket with factory food and build macmansions and Walmarts onto their best farm land or over sacred grounds. Bush didn’t do that, Clinton didn’t do that. Corporations do. For profit runs the country. Just look at the food system in your own state, acknowledge the wrong, and oppose NAIS with that knowledge.
Who gives a shit how much someone knows about the WTO running the world? Bears shit in the woods, it’s a fact. If someone has to bring it up again while opposing NAIS please let him or her do it with a caveat that he or she is actively doing something for the food system in his or her own local community. Corporations (i.e. the WTO) didn’t take your most productive farmland at gunpoint – at least not in this country….
But they did take it. We need to work putting the food system back into local control. And call out the white racists. Either they change or there’s no room for one in our movement.
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Oct 05, 2009 @ 22:56:24
Ceci,
I have no idea how you wove hate into this as the cause any of us are using to fight this stuff. The blight referred to is the disease aflicting individuals who will say or do anything to shove this stuff through.
Anger maybe…..ought to be…what drives us. The individual who wrote this article is directly affected by this and has been fighting it for more years than most of us know about.
Your last comment was what should be getting these shills attention……these corporations will have no further use for them once the deed is done.
Thank you for writing this. M
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Oct 05, 2009 @ 21:05:02
Sorry so long. Anyone has my permission to pass it along in full.
I have a question.
You write:
“Having lived in an area with an Amish community I was surprised at their attitude, as it was one of cold anger, born of misinformation and broken promises from persons representing state and national groups that had lulled them into a false sense of security; a blight that exists throughout the anti NAIS movement today. ”
What are you referring to, what is the “blight”?
Personally I know there are extremists who now bandwagon with us unfortunately. Yet these very people in general, collectively sacrifice very little to help a human being in need in real life. They’re very much a figurative representation of the Jews who left a man for dead lieing on the side of the road while the Samaritan, a person of an ethnicity they looked down on, stopped to save his life.
Why are they hopping aboard the anti-NAIS movement? Hate I think. Hate is destructive. Nothing good will come of joining a cause if you are motived to do it by hate.
I watched with dismay as a Texas man in one of the NAIS hearings, paraphrasing, said that he never thought he’d join a cause supported by a long-haired hippie type (or city dweller). So late in the game too for that kind of mindset. We’ve been against NAIS for years and I still have to fight that bigotry. It’s not us versus them “city slickers.” It’s all of us, we the people, Americans-of-all-types, against corporations.
I’m glad for the independent livestock food grower who sees that big picture, those rare few who do, they don’t act like a buyer should fill out an application indicating race, marital status, et al, before he or she is considered worthy enough to buy their product or to support their farm.
NAIS is a mandatory law in Oklahoma for instance, my state, meanwhile there’s lip-service to independence. There are frequent gun shows, ammo hoarding and unabashed white racism. How does that help repeal the NAIS law or any law that hurts agriculture?
While dairy farmers fold across the nation the average Oklahoman doesn’t realize that the state imports milk. We can support our own dairies in this state but corporations using our vast resources have destroyed a free market in dairy – in just about any ag sector. How independent is that? Oh, and how is this all Obama’s fault? Or Bushes fault? Or whoever the hell it is at any given time for the past decades? It’s the corporations who are doing this.
There is also an attitude that “a poor man never gave me a job.” What an ignorant short-sighted view of life that is. With that misguided philosophy corporate heads of oil and of farming easily put the mandatory NAIS law in place here. It benefits them to keep folks ignorant like that.
Oklahoma has a high divorce rate. Divorce creates poverty, hurts everyone. These broken lives can’t join a NAIS opposition or any meaningful opposition really. Not in great numbers. These folks are barely surviving emotionally, dealing with financial ruination and are more in a position of needing help than otherwise – in large numbers.
Our food banks are short of provisions all the time. There is a high hunger rate here. Foodbanks are forced to seek corporate help from corporations who have destroyed the local food economies to begin with. Where they have been complicit in destroying the economies of communities by creating joblessness, converting farming land to housing and contributing to this hunger and poverty are now somehow praised as the saviors.
There is a high number of “food deserts” in Oklahoma where people can’t find food within ten miles of their homes despite corporate farms growing food all around them in some cases.
I met a man yesterday who went into hog farming here in Oklahoma in 1981. I peg him at around 60ish so he would have been in his 40s back then. Between ’81 and ’87 he never made money hog farming, not a penny. “Sam” did the conventional thing, the CAFO, corporate model. Lost money. Was forced to get out. Broken dream mostly. That was the era Oklahoma saw a rash of farm-related suicides alarming enough to make national news.
Speaking of corporate farms all hog farming in America is now corporate. (There are the independents but the nation’s “food system” pork distribution is corporate). It’s where execs place the value of a sire hog at like $60,000. A farmer cannot compete as an independent in that corporate environment and profit.
The National Pork Producers Council is behind the push for NAIS claiming they speak for the pork industry. They speak for themselves as corporate heads but not for the farmer, not for America’s independent hog producers, certainly not for the consumer and not for fair markets.
“Sam” also told me that for the first time in years Thoroughbred yearling sales at Keeneland were down over 40 percent. I checked it out, it’s accurate. When the rich stop playing with ponies I think it upsets the natural order of things. It can get a little uncomfortable for the rest of us underlings because while they play at rattling other market sectors by squeezing blood from turnips we get jerked around, blindsided and used because according to their logic we’re going to get them their pony money back. It’s the way it’s been for like a million years.
So we need to stop this hating business when it comes to opposing NAIS. It’s open hunting season in the corporate mind’s heads and we’re the game.
Today all Oklahoma CAFO hog farmers are corporate farms. I wish I had to the time to talk to them individually, to those who are currently running these farms for corporations. I’d like to hear what their income is. How long he/she’s been at it. Probably not a nice overall picture from what we historically know of corporate hog farming in recent years.
I know some farmers who have a spouse who works either at the public school or in the medical profession or at Walmart so they can keep the family land. Farming is something they do because it’s in their blood but not for money, they’re not earning a living running a farm for a corporation, not from what I hear.
Corporate farms operate on a different economy of scale anyway, so that if there is a six-figure income claimed by a particular farmer CEO there’s a balancing debt to go with it so huge that a serious ripple in the market at the trading game would ruin the farm, as evidenced by a huge corporate dairy farm which shut down in Colorado. Went belly up due to magic numbers in commodity trading AND a stupid bank run by the locals who didn’t like the new change in Head of State.
Nice way to give yourselves the pink slip people as you wave good-bye to all those healthy cows headed for the hamburger factory. And nothing happened. Except you destroyed your local employer because hate blinded you.
There are some independent farmers who in just the past 2-3 years have been able to earn some income through the Oklahoma Food Cooperative distribution system. Thank God for the vision of Bob Waldrop who was personally touched by one of those suicides back then. He is an urban man living in Oklahoma City. Oh, the irony in that. Not only is he urban, he’s that long-haired “hippie-type,” he’s a practicing Catholic and somewhat of a liberal. Not “one of us” so I’ve heard. But saving “us” from corporate violance.
The farmers who know him, know his vision, love him. It’s how it should be. We have to love each other, help each other as AMERICANS. We are being run by corporations who are using us, using our resources, using our schools and destroying our communities to control us through corporate machinations, successfully I might ad.
The NAIS is one of their inventions. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out. Thank God for Judge Counsell’s questions. He’s one of the good guys.
Hopefully he will probe why we need to export if we are importing so much in meat.
Shouldn’t we be able to sustain our own markets without the NAIS which appears to be solely driven to “opening” export markets? That question was given an “answer” to me by a corporate shill who basically shrouded his vast so-called knowledge of the livestock market in catch-phrases devoid of logic. By claiming that the export/import thing is a complicated mysterious market movement which I clearly am too stupid to get he would not possiblybe able to explain it to me. That’s partly true. I don’t get it.
But I get this; How can he can look a man in the eye and tell him he will do all in his power to help him market his beef,( i.e. help the coporation destroy him eventually) and sleep at night? Nice boots, corporate dude. Watch where you step. The corporation doesn’t owe you a thing either.
Ceci Hutchings
Oklahoma
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Sep 27, 2009 @ 17:37:52
Sep 27, 2009 @ 17:32:27
Sep 27, 2009 @ 00:57:28