Dan Nephin of Lancaster Online reports that federal food inspectors, armed with a court order and escorted by police, inspected a Lancaster County farm on Monday linked in March to tainted milk said to be responsible for a person’s death.

Amos Miller, who owns Miller’s Organic Farm, had denied inspectors access in April, but relented in the face of a court order from a federal judge.

U.S. District Judge Edward G. Smith issued the order June 30 after the U.S. Department of Agriculture asked the court to enforce its inspection efforts.

“I didn’t want to give them the green light,” Miller said Monday afternoon at the farm.

Two meat inspectors, accompanied by an Upper Leacock Township police officer, inspected the farm for about three hours, he said. The inspectors had left by around noon.

The inspectors didn’t take anything and allowed the farm to continue operating, he said.

The USDA was unable to provide information about Monday’s inspection.

The farm sells a range of foods, from raw milk from several animals — including camels — to fermented vegetables to meat from grass-fed animals.

Miller described his roughly 2,000 customers across the country as a private membership association that does not sell to the public. As such, he said, he doesn’t believe the farm is subject to federal inspections.

“We don’t want to be against the government. We’re just concerned that they’re taking our freedoms away,” Miller said.

In court documents filed last month opposing the inspection, Miller said his membership “mistrust the status of the regulatory framework of the federal government and believe that said framework causes more harm to American citizens than good.”

He also argued the private membership association is a form of “expressive association” subject to First Amendment protections.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posting, the farm was the likely source of raw chocolate milk responsible for a death in Florida and an illness in California.

The death and illness occurred in 2014, but was only linked to Miller’s in January, after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration notified the agency that genome sequencing of listeria from Miller’s raw chocolate milk was closely related to listeria from the two people, according to the agency.