Waste Not, Want Not: The Costly Aftermath of Michigan’s Raid on Nourish Cooperative

This is a follow-up report from the government raid at Nourish Cooperative (which is a farm cooperative that provides farm-fresh food) on May 28, 2024. Link to full story posted last week, here.

Briefly, on May 28, 2024 (the beginning of the nationwide fearmongering around avian influenza in raw milk), Nourish Cooperative was raided, and over $90,000 worth of raw dairy products were put under “cease and desist” order by the state of Michigan.

Meaning, all of that nutrient-dense food was “under seizure,” just sitting in our fridge and freezers. For over two weeks.

It is pretty expensive to just pay energy bills to keep products in fridges and freezers that we can’t sell. Plus, we do not have endless fridge and freezer space to put new product in (that we are able to sell like raw aged cheese and meat).

So, on June 8, after it was pretty clear the government was not going to let us sell this product, we emailed MDARD (Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development) asking if we can please remove this product from the fridge. We needed the space, and well, product was starting to sour, and kefir glass bottles were starting to explode. (That is to be expected as kefir continues to ferment, more and more gas is created). The fridge needed to be cleaned out ASAP!

Some of the Healthiest Food on Earth Tossed in the Dumpster

Six days later, on Thursday June 13, MDARD finally was able to get two inspectors to our property to witness the product disposal (after several email requests — business must go on!) Hilary and the other inspector, Christopher, the lead feed inspector at MDARD, showed up to the farm around 2:30 pm ET. Their job was to witness the destruction of raw dairy products in our fridges.

We asked Christopher and Hilary whether we could keep some of the product for personal use and dump the rest into a large bin so that we could feed it to our animals. They called an unknown connection at MDARD, who denied this request. There was no reason provided.

The product had to be thrown in the dumpster. But as government employees, they can’t throw anything away. So, they forced US to do it. The first step was to get a count on all the products in the fridge under seizure, to ensure that none of the products had been used or sold since their last visit. All products were removed from the fridge and then counted. The pet food supplement products included:

Once all products were accounted for, it was time to discard them in the dumpster. And we couldn’t just put the jars in the dumpster, the required process involved taking off all lids of each product, throwing the lids away, stacking the products into cardboard boxes, and then utilizing the tractor forks to move over 25 large cardboard boxes to the dumpster.