In Mississippi, goat milk must be sold directly to the consumer on the premises of the production, you can only have nine goats, and you can’t advertise your business. For Debbie Huff, owner of Hidden Arrows Farm in Brandon, Mississippi, it’s an overly restrictive policy, but it at least allowed her to sell her product. That all changed in February 2020, when the Mississippi Legislature introduced a bill to ban the sale of goat’s milk altogether.
If the bill passed, those who violated the law and continued to sell goat milk could have been sentenced to 60 days in jail with fines of up to $500. The Mississippi Center for Public Policy (MCPP) stepped in and launched a campaign to prevent this misguided policy from passing.
MCPP: While the Mississippi Center for Public Policy supports broader food freedom bills, the sale of goat milk—more specifically the attempt to prohibit it—was not on our radar at the beginning of the legislative session. It wasn’t something we put time in prepping for. But very quickly and very quietly the House Agriculture Committee passed a bill to ban the sale of goat milk and include criminal penalties with it. Their goal from the beginning was to keep this quiet.
We didn’t let that happen. After it passed out of committee, we began to take action to notify the public of what was happening. We believe in personal responsibility and individual liberty. We believe you should have the liberty to purchase raw milk if you would like to do. We moved very quickly, and our audience began to organically mobilize its opposition almost overnight.
MCPP: Initially we thought the audience would be goat farmers or those that purchase goat milk, but that’s a very small audience. We soon found this became a liberty issue. This was about the government controlling what you can eat or drink, and more broadly, about government controlling you.
MCPP: The audience did. They latched on to this and began talking about it loudly where people in Mississippi generally talk about politics, largely on Facebook. They shared our content and then organically created their own, wrote on the Facebook walls of legislators, and made their opposition to the bill known. There was no public outcrying of support for this bill, so the message was 100-0 in the public sphere.
MCPP: This campaign showed us the benefit of speaking on specific issues, even if it appears very niche. We often talk generally about Mississippi’s regulatory burden and the need for reform. But when you talk about specific issues and specific regulations with real people who are impacted, such as Debbie and her family, it makes the issue very real. It also helps people become more interested and more engaged.
