Synopses & Reviews
In the mid-1990s Linda and Larry Faillace had a dream: they wanted to breed sheep and make cheese on their Vermont farm. They did the research, worked hard, followed the rules, and, after years of preparation and patience, built a successful, entrepreneurial business. But just like that, their dream turned into a nightmare. The U.S. Department of Agriculture told them that the sheep they imported from Europe (with the USDA's seal of approval) carried a disease similar to the dreaded BSE or "mad cow disease." After months of surveillance--which included USDA agents spying from nearby mountaintops and comically hiding behind bushes--armed federal agents seized their flock. The animals were destroyed, the Faillace's lives turned upside down, all so that the USDA could show the U.S. meat industries that they were protecting America from mad cow disease--and by extension, easing fears among an increasingly wary population of meat-eaters. Mad Sheep is the account of one family's struggle against a bullying and corrupt government agency that long ago abandoned the family farmer to serve the needs of corporate agriculture and the industrialization of our food supply. Similar to the national best-selling book, A Civil Action, readers will cheer on this courageous family in its fight for justice in the face of politics as usual and the implacable bureaucracy of the farm industry in Washington, DC.
Review
"If this were a novel, you probably wouldn't believe it. But the story of a Vermont farming family driven out of business by a government agency is true-and truly frightening.... If you can read the book without getting mad, you're not reading it carefully." --Booklist
Review
"Linda Faillace's Mad Sheep is a tragic tale--tragic for the lives of those poor sheep, tragic for the shattered hopes of a family, but above all tragic for America. If you have ever been part of a family farm, Ms. Faillace's gripping account of how political-corporate corruption assaults the integrity of our system of democracy and free enterprise will seem hauntingly familiar. If you have not been part of a family farm, Mad Sheep will be downright terrifying." --Eugene Jarecki, Filmmaker (Why We Fight, The Trials of Henry Kissinger, and others)
Review
"
Mad Sheep documents the ugliest display of governmental ass-covering and the manipulation of questionable scientific data for political purposes that I have ever read. It will make your blood boil."
--Gene Logsdon, organic farmer and author of The Contrary Farmer, among many others
Review
"In the end the madness was found not in the sheep or with their shepherds, but in a society that has forgotten the importance of its own food and the purpose of its own governance. A riveting read." --George Schenk, founder of American Flatbread
Review
"Most people remember the character of Inspector Javert, the policeman in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables whose relentless pursuit of Jean Valjean makes a hash of justice, fairness and decency. Hugo's point is impossible to miss: Javert's mania for the letter of the law is a kind of madness that moves him to murder its spirit.
The Faillace family had the misfortune of attracting their very own Javert in 1998, when Larry and Linda, who bred and raised sheep with the help of their three children, were asked to meet with a USDA functionary. They assumed it was something to do with scrapie prevention. The Faillaces had cooperated with the national effort to wipe out the brain-wasting disorder - a prion disease in the same class as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a.k.a. Mad Cow disease - when they endured years of agonizing regulatory delays while assembling their herd of rare sheep, bred from imported livestock. Taking no chances, they went the USDA one better by nudging state agriculture officials to activate Vermont's scrapie prevention program, which until then had existed only on paper.
Linda Faillace remembers thinking cheerful thoughts about the person they were to meet, a senior staff veterinarian with the USDA's Animal Plant Health Inspection Service named Linda Detwiler, who was known for her involvement with the sheep industry.
'Now she was coming to see our operation, I told Larry, to congratulate us on doing such a great job: importing excellent, healthy sheep from Europe and New Zealand, getting the scrapie program up and running in Vermont, and stimulating the sheep industry, particularly the dairy sheep sector. But Larry disagreed. Something was niggling at him. 'This does not feel good,' he said.'
Larry might have suspected that no good deed goes unpunished. Nevertheless, the real topic of the meeting came as a shock. Detwiler informed the Faillaces that the USDA believed their sheep might be harboring a variant of BSE, and they would have to suspend operation immediately. The implications were dire. An infected herd would have to be destroyed, and with it would go the family's fortunes as well as their emotional attachment to animals that were never raised for slaughter. The Faillaces reminded Detwiler that no sheep anywhere in the world had ever been found carrying a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy other than scrapie; moreover, they kept detailed records of every sheep's entire lifespan which proved that the USDA's claim was not only unlikely but impossible. Detwiler said she had information she could not divulge.
With that, the Faillaces were plunged into the American version of your basic Kafkaesque nightmare. By the time their worst fears had come to pass with the seizure of their flock early in 2001, they were lied to, spied on by federal agents, and run through a legal wringer. The USDA secured its final victory with the aid of a researcher whose laboratory was later exposed as a filthy mess, overrun with uncaged research mice.
Larry and LindaFaillace had devoted their lives to raising happy children and fine animals. If they had been cynical people or at least schooled in bureaucratic warfare, they would have hired a fierce practitioner of Washington, D.C., blood sport the day after that first meeting, and they might have prevailed. As it was, they fought the agency with skill and persistence that must have surprised Detwiler, her unseen superiors, and the business interests that manipulate the USDA from the shadows.
The agency had picked a fight with the wrong couple. Larry had a Ph.D. in animal physiology and Linda knew TSEs from her experience working as an assistant to a British scientist in the early '90s, when Larry taught at the University of Nottingham. They knew the horror of the British Mad Cow epidemic at first hand, they knew the USDA's safeguards against BSE were grossly inadequate, and they had every reason to believe the agency was engaged in covering its bases, to use the polite term. But they never reckoned on the malign nexus of Detwiler's personal ambition, the ethical squalor of an agency that had spent decades collaborating with the industry it was supposed to regulate, and the current bureaucratic police state. The story behind the USDA's vendetta remains untold as the Faillace's lawsuit against the agency goes into discovery. Doubtless it will confirm the pithy words of another French writer, Honor é de Balzac: 'Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.'
This is an infuriating book in many respects. Although Linda Detwiler has gone on to a career consulting for fast food chains, the usual gang of idiots is still in charge at the USDA. But it is also a compelling book, because Linda Faillace never lets her anger interfere with her careful rendering of the facts. She's a born storyteller who might consider a sideline as an author of political thrillers - Mad Sheep is one of those books that makes going to sleep at a decent hour unthinkable."
-Acres USA review by Chris Walters, October 2006.
Review
Taking (Live) Stock - Seven Days review by Sally West Johnson, October 11, 2006.
"Five years ago, the Faillace farm in Warren made national headlines when federal agents seized the family's flock of sheep — the government suspected the animals might have been exposed to deadly mad cow disease. The animals' one-way trip to the slaughterhouse culminated a bitter, three-year battle between a Vermont farm family and the USDA. During that time, accusations of lying and deceit had flown thick and furious on both sides. The conflict grabbed the attention of a nation that was already terrified by the outbreak of mad cow disease in Britain, but also worried that the government might be trampling on the rights of the Faillace family.
Now, five years later, Chelsea Green has published Linda Faillace's, Mad Sheep: The True Story Behind the USDA's War on a Family Farm, a book about her family's experiences. In a time when fears of food contamination run rampant, the book gives us the producers' side ofthe story, and suggests that the government's attempts to "protect" us may be dangerously misguided.
Although Faillace has no experience as a writer, she tells her story in a clear, engaging manner that draws the reader into the life of a family and a community. At the same time, she convincingly portrays a massive and immovable bureaucracy that was intent, in her view, on sacrificing a couple of hundred sheep to avoid casting any suspicion on the U.S. meat industry, and in particular on beef and beef products, which account for millions of dollars in exports.
This book never pretends to be an arm's-length, objective look at the facts. It's the testimony of an angry woman who witnessed the near-destruction of her family and its livelihood in a Kafkaesque chain of events, some of which bear an uncanny resemblance to the events preceding September 11, 2001, and other recent national catastrophes. Faillace makes a strong case that the federal government withheld information that did not support its goal of destroying the sheep. The tale she tells is one of duplicity, of science corrupted to serve the purposes of politics. You don't need to understand all the science — and there is a lot of science in these pages — to come away from the book with a weary sense of déjà vu at the behavior of the government bureaucrats, who, says Faillace, sometimes gave out one set of facts in the morning and contradicted themselves in the afternoon.
The story begins in the mid-1990s, when Larry Faillace, a doctor of animal physiology, gave up a teaching job at the University of Nottingham to return to the United States and start a business with his family — Linda, Francis, Heather and Jackie. They chose Vermont as their home and planned to create a "dream team" of sheep bred for meat, milk and breeding stock. Unlike the Merino flocks of the 19th century, which were used primarily for wool, these multipurpose sheep had the potential to introduce a new, viable form of agriculture to the state.
In 1998, the USDA showed up on the Faillaces' doorstep. The agents expressed concern that the imported sheep might have been exposed to a variant of a class of diseases called TSEs, or transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, the most notorious of which is the bovine variety known as "mad cow disease." The disease, properly known as BSE, gained worldwide notoriety in 1986, when it was discovered in the U.K. By 1993, it reached epidemic proportions, resulting in the deaths of more than 50 people.
That crisis precipitated the "war" of the author's subtitle, which culminated in 2001 when the USDA seized the Faillaces' 125 sheep, along with a flock belonging to Houghton Freeman (of the Freeman Foundation) in Greensboro. Both flocks were destroyed, Faillace contends, before the government offered conclusive proof that any of the sheep were sick.
Faillace tells her story chronologically, weaving together chapters of human drama with passages detailing the arcane science of testing for a disease that is poorly understood, especially with regard to its ability to jump species. The human part is effective: A family with three small children finds a home in Vermont, scours Europe and New Zealand to locate exactly the right sheep, and then builds a true family business. Son Francis acts as pasture manager, daughter Heather is mother to the flock, and daughter Jackie becomes a skillful cheesemaker who, under the tutelage of Belgian cheesemaker Freddie Michiels, produces artisanal cheese under the label Three Shepherds of the Mad River Valley. Readers who enjoy this story may find it more difficult to slog through the pages and pages of science. Still, those technical explanations are essential to a book that accuses the federal government of lying and the state government of standing idly by as events unfolded.
Parts of this story have elements of comic opera. Federal agents skulk around the back roads of Warren trying not to draw attention. The national media alight in town, causing a Vermont version of gridlock. Angry protesters spraypaint trees with the words "USDA lies" for the benefit of the photographers.
At the heart of the story, though, is a family that feels betrayed by its government, three children who are devastated by the loss of both their sheep and their belief in the basic fairness of things, and a system that appears incompetent at best. That system is epitomized in the person of Dr. Linda Detwiler, the USDA's former resident expert on TSEs and the person Faillace singles out for particular blame because, Faillace believes, she was willing to do the government's dirty work by scapegoating the Vermont sheep.
The author's ending manages to embody a sense of hopefulness while avoiding sentimentality. The hard finality of the slaughter is softened by a portrait of a community — whether defined by geography or friendship — that pulls together in times of hardship. The Faillaces live in both the community of Warren and the broader community of friendsand sheep people. It's that support which enables them to think positively about their future, even after the flock they worked so long and hard to build is dead."
Review
Rural Vermont review by Grace Gershuny, October 2006
"This book relates the dismaying story of the Faillace family's unsuccessful battle with USDA to stop the destruction of a flock of unique and beloved imported sheep. The sheep were carefully researched and selected to introduce high milk producing genetics into the options for sustainable small farm enterprises. The rationale for quarantining and later destroying the flock was the need to protect the public (more importantly, the beef industry) from fears of "mad cow disease," which the government decided might be carried by these sheep. The dust jacket of the book, published by Chelsea Green, describes it as "the unforgettable story of one family's struggle against a bullying and corrupt government agency that long ago abandoned the family farmer to serve the needs of corporate agriculture and the industrialization of our food supply." The book delivers as promised.
Many of us in the Vermont alternative agriculture community have followed this story, and Rural Vermont is credited with helping rally support for the Faillace family. It is an outrageous story, told in the first person by a primary protagonist. Reading it filled me with admiration for the author on several levels. First, she writes well, and was obviously taking very good notes the whole time she was caught up in the events she describes. She has done an excellent job of relating the story on the personal level without making it about her, or even her family or the sheep they struggled so valiantly to savethe bigger issues and principles are always foremost, most notably her staunch insistence on scientific reason, fairness and truth. She is also scientifically literate, and convincingly builds the case for the utter impossibility of any trace of BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or "mad cow disease") in the Faillace sheep. Linda and her husband went to great lengths to safeguard against the possibility of scrapie in this flock (the sheep version of BSE), and to document their evidence. One could nit-pick about the barrage of technical details and some self-conscious techniques of scene-setting, but the book is crafted with the skill of a journalist, building the background and connecting the sequence of events, always holding my attention and making me want to read oneven though I knew what the outcome was.
Linda Faillace's intelligence, courage, integrity and humor shine through her words. Her dedication to her family and parenting skills are remarkable; the story is also a case study of how they used Holistic Management to develop their farm enterprise plan with full participation by all family members, and with each of the three children taking an active role in some aspect of the farm or cheese making business (though I kind of wished that at least one of them was a 'normal' teenager who didn't want to have anything to do with something that his/her parents were involved in). The magnitude of the forces arrayed against the family, and the criminal abuse of power by a handful of USDA officials documented in this book, are enough to convince anyone that the government is not to be trusted—after reading it, a small farmer could be excused for refusing to cooperate with a national animal ID program.
The most remarkable feature of this book, however, is the author's refusal to demonize the bad actors at USDA, to stoop to their level of misrepresentation, or even to exaggerate. The support and good efforts of some officials was acknowledged, although these were few and far between. In all this painful recounting of an incredible nightmare there is no name-calling, no attack on all USDA (or federal government) activities as evil or villainous (except perhaps by the author of the forward, who describes it as a "tale of good and evil"). No call is made for retribution, though justice might include placing public responsibility on those who knowingly falsified information for political ends. The call to action issued in the final pages of the book is not for an attack on the "enemy," but for all of us to channel our outrage towards creation of a better food system. Any activist seeking to promote justice and a better world would do well to emulate this attitude."
Review
Sane sheep, mad people in 'True Story'. Stowe Reporter review By Shawn Kerivan, October 12, 2006.
"In the end, the United States government, its canine teeth and bushy tail cloaked with cowhide, was wrong.
In the end, midlevel bureaucrats seeking to advance themselves squashed Linda Faillace's dream of a sheep dairy farm.
In the end, the sheep died, and the only madness found was allowed to live on in the form of an apathetic, ignorant government.
To call "Mad Sheep: The True Story Behind the USDA's War on a Family Farm," by Linda Faillace, a cautionary tale would be a mistake. It reads more like a journal, full of honesty and imperfection that render it too real. Linda Faillace's recounting of her family's failed attempt to import dairy sheep from Europe tells the story of a thousand American dreams, a story of sacrifice and accomplishment, of faith and hard work. But it also tells the story of a bogeyman, and in the final act, when Vermont's congressional delegation banded together to stand behind the U.S. Department of Agriculture's condemnation of the Faillace flock, we discover that the bogeyman is "We, the People."
That's not how Linda, her husband, Larry, and their three children — all of them prominent players in this tragedy — envisioned things when they set out to create a new kind of farm. Inspired by their time living in England, where Dr. Larry Faillace worked as a research scientist at the University of Nottingham's School of Agriculture, the Faillaces discovered that the varieties of sheep used for milking by the English and Europeans — East Friesians — produced nearly ten times the amount of milk per lactation as did American varieties. And, like millions of Americans before them, they saw a way to combine their passion with their business. They bought sheep, and with the help of U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy's office, among others, imported them to Vermont.
But within two years, things began to sour for the Faillaces. The USDA, in the form of its senior staff veterinarian, Dr. Linda Detwiler, informed the Faillaces that the agency was concerned their sheep had come in contact with contaminated feed, and were susceptible to BSE — mad cow disease. The USDA wanted the flock surrendered immediately.
The Faillaces never seemed to recover from that initial blow. Assaulted by an alphabet soup of government agencies, stalked and harassed by low-level dupes, and finally abandoned by their own representatives, the Faillaces never actually thought they'd lose their sheep until the animals were marched off to be slaughtered. And, in the final irony, they were eventually discovered to be disease-free.
What the Faillaces never considered as this tragedy unfolded was the public's hypersensitivity to health scares. At a time when news reports of mad cow disease in England were making its big splashes across American television screens, they were importing sheep — ruminants — from Europe. They attempted a complicated, intricate operation, replete with international machinations, regulations and bureaucratization. And they pulled it off. For that, they're to be admired.
But while their ideas were sound and the potential was both huge and rewarding, they bore their fruit into a toxic atmosphere, devoid of much public and private sympathy for their project. For most people, their tragedy simply played out on the evening news alongside myriad others that day. Like sheep, the public went along with the flock.
In writing this book, Faillace chose to tell things from her own point of view, and that lends the book its emotional immediacy, infecting the reader, drawing the story closer to home. But that choice also opens the author up to all the subjective pitfalls of the first person. Every mistake she makes hits harder, and her innocence, endearing and inspirational in the beginning, becomes painful to watch, until the author finally breaks down. It's gut-wrenching.
The lessons of this book have little to do with sheep farming, and lots to do with us as a people. Our government derives its weaknesses, as well as its power, from us, and only through an intelligent and informed engagement can we control it, make it just.
The quote by Thomas Jefferson that leads off this book contains a prescient message, applicable not only to the Faillace's story, but to the events unfolding day by day around us: 'When the government fears the people, you have liberty. When the people fear the government, you have tyranny.'"
Review
"If you think your government wouldn't really lurk in the bushes to spy on you and use its police power to bully you--get ready for a rude awakening. Mad Sheep sounds like a crime thriller Agatha Christie would dream up, but it's a real life nightmare lived by the Faillace family." --Jim Hightower, Hightower Radio
Review
"Mad Sheep is one of those books that makes going to sleep at a decent hour unthinkable."--ACRES USA
Review
"Mad Sheep will enrage you. The real crazies in this true and tragic tale are the bureaucratic bullies who tortured and tormented heroic Vermont farmers while allowing a deadly dementia--mad cow disease--to emerge in America. The sheep are dead, lives destroyed, mad cow disease here, and the worst is that these bunglers are still running the show." --John Stauber, co-author, Mad Cow U.S.A.
Review
"From the hearthside warmth of children farmer-entrepreneurs to the arrogant, hardhearted, tyranny of government bureaucracy, Mad Sheep touches the soul with tears and righteous anger. Though it reads like a fiction political thriller, this story of intrigue, bureaucratic falsehoods, and tyranny is true. Linda Faillace gives Americans yet another reason to mistrust every official announcement from the United States Department of Agriculture." -Joel Salatin, founder of Polyface Farm and author of You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Start & Succeed in a Farming Enterprise
Review
"[Mad Sheep] shows how far a corrupt government agency will go to protect industry. This is a truly Kafkaesque story." --Dr. Tom Pringle, founder, Sperling Foundation
About the Author
Linda Faillace is a writer, shepherdess, songwriter, and owner of a country store dedicated to supporting local farmers and locally grown food. She has studied mad cow disease since the early 1990s. A champion of organic and sustainable farming, farmer's rights, and strong local communities, Linda lives with her husband, Larry, and their three children in East Warren, Vermont.