Sharon Palmer: The Strange Case of a CA Goat Farmer's Arrest and Jailing

Apparently in this country you don't have the right to sell or buy directly the products made at the farm!

On the morning of December 18, a week before Christmas, a woman showed up at Sharon Palmer’s Healthy Family Farms in Santa Paula, CA, wanting to purchase some goat cheese—for an upcoming holiday party, she said. What happened next was that Sharon found herself in serious trouble, though there are two versions of exactly how she got there.

Knowing that her dairy’s license prohibited retail sales and limited her to selling her cheeses only at farmers markets, Sharon refused the request. When the woman persisted, talking about the upcoming holiday gathering, Sharon decided to give the woman two pounds of cheese, and refused to take payment.

The cheese she gave the woman—in fact all the cheese at the Wheeler Canyon facility—was made at her old licensed facility, a 30-acre farm in Fillmore. She had just moved to the larger farm in Santa Paula a few weeks earlier, but because she didn’t yet have a license to produce cheese there--her pasteurizer had been damaged in the move--she was relying on inventory she had previously made and frozen in the old
licensed facility. While the stranger, an undercover investigator, distracted Sharon, other investigators were at a nearby farmers market operated by Sharon's niece, and confiscated about $1,000 of her cheese.

Shortly after she gave the stranger the cheese, Sharon left her farm to run some errands. About twenty minutes down the road, she was pulled over by a Ventura County sheriff and told she was under arrest, handcuffed, and placed in the police cruiser. She was asked if officials could inspect her facility, implying that if everything was okay, she would be released. She agreed.

The cruiser returned to her farm, where a caravan of about a dozen police and other cars, including a crime unit van, were parked —representatives of the five agencies mentioned in the sheriff’s press release.

Sharon, who is a single mom, was taken out of the police cruiser, still handcuffed. When her two daughters, ages 12 and 13, and son, age 9, saw their mom, they got hysterical. The various officials taking videos didn't care--they kept her standing in handcuffs with her children for two hours while they searched her cheesemaking facility.

The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department posted its version of events via a press release, which stated in part that “a detective from the Agricultural Crimes
Unit and investigators from the California Department of Food and Agriculture Milk and Dairy Food Safety Branch, Ventura County Environmental Health Department, Ventura County Weights and Measures, and Ventura County Code Enforcement [that’s five agencies] took part in an undercover operation focused on purchasing illegally produced and potentially unsafe goat cheese being produced at the location and being sold at farmers markets.”

The release said Sharon was “arrested and charged with Food and Agricultural Code Sections 35283(a)—Processing Milk or Milk Products without Pasteurization, 35283(b)—and Processing for Resale Milk or Milk Products without a License. Palmer was booked into the Ventura County Pre-Trial Detention Facility.” It also included dire warnings about raw milk--"miscarriage...swollen neck glands and blood stream infection."

A local paper, the Ventura County Star, published a summary of the sheriff’s news release, and a reader noted the link on this blog shortly after the paper's account came out.

To learn more about raw milk and where you could buy real milk check this web page.
Get to know your farmers, buy from farm markets, avoid GMO foods.
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