“One of the first things we did was pass a raw milk bill so that people can once again milk cows with very little investment. Just one cow. Milk it by hand and sell the milk. The going price for raw milk right now is about $8.00 a gallon and people are tickled to death to get it. It’s easy for a backyard cow to give five gallons a day. That’s $40.00 a day, $280.00 a week, and it runs into money. If you got two cows, double that. You can milk three or four cows by hand until you eventually get a little milker if you want to or just milk by hand. Hand milked milk brings the premium.” ~ Senator Frank Niceley, February 2017
[CAF Note: As long-time Solari Report subscribers know, Franklin Sander’s The Moneychanger is one of my favorite newsletters. In 2017, Franklin interviewed one of our finest Tennessee State Senators – Senator Frank Niceley. Franklin has kindly given me permission to republish here. Do you have legislative representatives in your state and county who are making a critical difference? Please reengineer the time and money you normally dedicated to presidential elections and use it to support them. Remember, the swamp can ONLY be drained one county and one state at a time.]
By Franklin Sanders
I first met Senator Frank Niceley in 2004 or 2005 when I was working with a group to de-criminalize raw milk in Tennessee. I showed up at the Ag Committee hearing to find the only other person speaking in favor was Sally Fallon of the Weston A. Price Foundation. On the other side they had erected bleachers to seat all the bureaucrats who wanted to speak against it. We spoke, then the scathing bureaucratic denunciations began. At some ripe point, one committee member I didn’t know read the riot act to the bureaucrats. As I remember he said, “It’s easy for y’all to talk because you’re all sitting at a desk drawing a fat government check. You have no idea what a farmer goes through or what this would mean to him.” He cleaned their plows. I wanted to stand up and cheer, but restrained myself.
That man was Frank Niceley from Strawberry Plains, then a Republican state legislator but now a state senator. No stranger to hard work, Frank grew up on a dairy farm and worked as a dairyman and farmer. In fact, he still has an active farm in Strawberry Plains, Tennessee. In 1969 he graduated from the University of Tennessee with a BS in soil science.
Frank remains one of the greatest friends of human freedom in the Tennessee legislature. He was first elected to a four-year term in 1988, stayed out for twelve years, and returned to the legislature in 2004, serving a total of twenty years. He and his wife Cyndie have four children.
Back in November, Frank listed off to me the accomplishments of the Republican majority in the Tennessee legislature, so I asked him to share that amazing record with my readers. The surprising bottom line: freedom works.
Senator Niceley kindly made time for this interview on 7 February 2017. ~ F. Sanders
View the PDF of the interview.
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