Movie Review: Farmageddon

Farmageddon

Directed by Kristin Canty

 

Opens September 23

in San Francisco

Check your local listings for a theater near you. 

 

Kristin Canty is the Director/Producer of Farmageddon; The Unseen War on American Family Farms.  She is a first-time film maker, small farm advocate, fresh milk drinker and a mom.  One of her children was ridden with multiple allergies and asthma as a pre-schooler, and when medications couldn’t help him, she found that raw milk helped him recover.  Since then, she has tried to buy most of her family’s food directly from local, organic farms. When Kristin learned that farmers and co-ops all over the country were increasingly getting raided by the government, she set out to  make a film about it. She hopes that when people see it, it can change the tide of public pressure so that our government stops harassing and adding costly burdens to our small, organic farmers. Kristin lives in Concord, Massachusetts with her husband, four children, two dogs , two cats and 11 chickens.

 

 

 

 

This movie was defiantly an "out of the box" movie for me to review, but I'm always eager to share new things I've tried with all of you. What I didn't expect to experience was the amount of harassment local farmers receive from the US Government, and for what? The sale of raw milk. Sounds crazy right?

 

Synopsis:

Americans’ right to access fresh, healthy foods of their choice is under attack. Farmageddon tells the story of small, family farms that were providing safe, healthy foods to their communities and were forced to stop, sometimes through violent action, by agents of misguided government bureaucracies, and seeks to figure out why.

Filmmaker Kristin Canty’s quest to find healthy food for her four children turned into an educational journey to discover why access to these foods was being threatened. What she found were policies that favor agribusiness and factory farms over small family-operated farms selling fresh foods to their communities. Instead of focusing on the source of food safety problems — most often the industrial food chain — policymakers and regulators implement and enforce solutions that target and often drive out of business small farms that have proven themselves more than capable of producing safe, healthy food, but buckle under the crushing weight of government regulations and excessive enforcement actions.

Farmageddon highlights the urgency of food freedom, encouraging farmers and consumers alike to take action to preserve individuals’ rights to access food of their choice and farmers’ rights to produce these foods safely and free from unreasonably burdensome regulations. The film serves to put policymakers and regulators on notice that there is a growing movement of people aware that their freedom to choose the foods they want is in danger, a movement that is taking action with its dollars and its voting power to protect and preserve the dwindling number of family farms that are struggling to survive.

 

People should have the right to choose what they eat and drink, not the government. Some eye-opening facts and situations left me scratching my head at what the government looks at as a "problem". I guess it's not a right to feed our kids the healthy foods we so choose, the government needs to tell us what we can and can not eat.

 

The movie is told mostly from the farmers' point of view and while I would have enjoyed more actual facts from the government's side overall Farmageddon serves as a good tool for those seeking a healthier lifestyle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Getting 4 Raw Milk Sheep

KD