Raw deal? Farmers decry plan to restrict sale of unpasteurized milk

Source: southcoasttoday.com

William Coutu is a dairy farmer who doesn't like milk unless it's coffee-flavored or sweetened with chocolate. But lately it's the state's plan to tighten raw milk regulations that is leaving a sour taste in his mouth.

"This whole thing doesn't even make sense," Coutu, of Paskamansett Farms in Dartmouth, said of a proposed change in the state's standards and sanitation requirements for Grade A raw milk.

The rule would bar out-of-town "buying clubs" from purchasing raw milk at dairy farms and then distributing it to others at home.

...

Still, the Organic Consumers Association plans to thumb its nose at the rule by taking a cow to Boston Common today before a hearing on the changes, staging a raw milk "drink-in." On the steps of the Statehouse, they also will pour a symbolic amount of pasteurized milk from companies that support tougher raw milk rules, according to Alexis Baden-Mayer, political director of the Washington, D.C.-based organization.

Read more: http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100510/NEWS/5100314

---

*shrug* I have trouble seeing a club to split up driving to a farm as a "distribution business". On the plus side, I'm going to go pet the cow over my lunch break.

And just like they're trying to do with organic food. :argh: :grr:

according to http://www.certifiedorganic.bc.ca/rcbtoa/services/corporate-ownership.html">some sources "Big Agra" owns most of the organic food producers.

Think about it from their end. Why would you charge $.50 for a single apple when you could charge $2 by buying the very "organic" companies consumers trust?

Q3JR4.

If you're not paying attention, you'll be supporting the same folks.

There are, however, some authentic organic companies that still believe in producing real food, and even the organic companies owned by conglomerates still have to meet organic standards, which are more strict than the 'natural' label. You just have to do some homework.

Ideally, though, people should (gasp!) start trying to produce their own food again. :)

just don't let your cows near onion grass, makes the milk taste funky. Sweet alfalfa and hay makes the best milk.

Going out to the farm in three weeks for a week - my partner's family keeps a refrigerator full of two gallon jars in various states of skim, and the cows get hand milked twice a day every day of the year. The milk comes into the house in steel buckets fresh from the cow, strained through cheesecloth and then jarred and skimmed. Nothing in the world like it, but they don't sell it either.

The cream is the whole point!

Actually when I think back, on my grandparents' farm we would skim about a quarter of the cream off for coffee; the rest we just stirred into the milk right before we drank it. The skimmed stuff ("bluejohn" I think my grandmother called it) was just for pig slop.

not run through a separator.

my stomach is growling! Thanks a lot :P

I can see both sides here.

A buying club can buy 300# of pinto beans, then split them up, so why not every food product?

There were health issues in the past with unpasteurized milk and I can understand, liability wise, why they would want to limit it to personal use rather than sharing it with others.

raw milk that is collected cleanly and handled cleanly is perfectly safe.

I have ZERO problem with individuals selling raw milk to individuals, provided the cows have been appropriately vaccinated and tested to protect the public health.

There was a recall in December in Washington state because of contamination.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2011399591_rawmilk21m.html

And again this year in Pennsylvania.

http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/national/2008/04/18/safety-questions-about-unpasteurized-milk.html

and vaccinations. No one is being forced to consume the damned stuff. Inform people of the risks and let them, as GROWNUPS, decide.

TB and brucellosis each year by the vet and were kept in excellent health. The milking was done by hand and each cow's udder was washed with warm water before being milked. The milk was immediately taken to the house, strained and poured into clean containers and refrigerated. We sold the extra milk to neighbors. Not only did no one ever get sick from drinking the raw milk, it stayed fresh and good tasting just as long as the pastuerized and homogenized stuff that I bought when I married and moved away from home.

If I knew the dairy and it's milk handling practices, I would not hesitate to drink raw milk today.

I drink raw milk from my goats all the time.

But I HAVE got sick drinking other peoples raw milk.

There's a LOT of other stuff you can get from drinking raw milk.

There's some evidence of a link between Johnnes disease in cattle and Crohn's in humans.

I think raw milk is pretty safe overall and I think pasteurized milk tastes crappy, but there's no getting around that people get sick way more from raw milk than pasteurized.

risks and can look over the cow and see the medical records for it wants to go ahead and drink the milk raw, they should be allowed to. As long as they are informed of the risks and reasonable efforts are being made to minimize those risks, the government needs to butt out.

I am not talking about large-scale commercial sale. I am talking about a private arrangement between individuals.

BTW, I am commonly known ar Dr. kestrel at work, aka kestrel, DVM. I know a bit about the diseases cows can have and spread to humans. And I know that those diseases are largely a problem in factory farming, not home milkers.

:)

Actually I'm fine with letting them sell raw milk to who ever wants to buy it, but if I operated a dairy, I'd make them sign a waiver.

I think it's time to stop protecting people from themselves because they too often they turn conservative and start to breed like bunnies.


(keep forgetting spell check)

Exactly.

So pasteurize (Louis Pasteur, merci!) it please... but I don't care if you homogenize it.


From wikipedia:

Some of the diseases that pasteurization can prevent are diphtheria, salmonellosis, strep throat, scarlet fever, listeriosis, brucellosis and typhoid fever.

Pasteurization doesn't make it "safer", it extends the period in which it is safe. So I guess in that sense it's "safer", but not really. The point of Pasteurization is that the dairy can ship the milk much farther than they could before; the actual chance of the milk being contaminated during the time that it's still good is the same, but it stays "good" longer.

I eat raw fish and live oysters; raw milk doesn't worry me.

Two really badass diseases of goats were CL abcesses and CAE, Caprine Arthritic Encephalitis.

Both, but CAE especially has been greatly reduced by the "CAE" prevention program. The kids(baby goats) are taken from the mother at birth and fed colostrum that has been heat treated, so the CAE retrovirus is killed but the antibodies remain. Then the kids are bottle fed on pasteurized milk.

If pasteurization was just to extend shelf life then pasteurizing would not eliminate these two diseases which are spread from dam to the kids in the milk.

the reason for pasteurization was due to unclean proximity milk processing in city conditions of the 19th century.

The term Hog milk was used to describe bad milk of the 19th century.

Milk and pig farms shared common locations due to the exchange of feed use and slob exchange. This gave rise to milk born disease.

Although pasteurization did kill off a huge amount of the milk born disease it didn't kill it all off.

The separating of the two industries and their removal from city locations is what really brought around a tidal change in the defeat of the various diseases.

And this was done not by pasteurization but by the creation of the FDA and the USDA.

They recognized the need for the separation. And as early as 1905 (the last known US report on milk and it's effect on the population) stated that although pasteurization serves a purpose, it is no longer required. Effective inspections and maintaining clean conditions apart from other animal production is what it required to maintain milk safety.

The US hasn't conducted a study since. Scotland had done the last known study on milk. That was in 1946. Since the the dairy association continues to maintain that pasteurization is the only way to keep milk clean via their army of lobbyists.

If you ever looked into pasteurization and it's effect on the milk molecule you would understand why it's 1) no longer necessary 2) very damaging to the milk.

Also, the reason once stated for the need for homogenization was that it helped preserve milk longer on the shelf. This is a complete fallacy.

Milk, when it goes "bad" becomes clabbored. Not sour. Only homogenized milk goes sour. Clabbered milk is drank to this day world wide. It's an acquired taste, but perfectly fine for human consumption. I drink it.
Milk does not need to be refrigerated. The reason we refrigerate it is because it's homogenized.

Homogenization came about because once upon a time, when housewives bought their milk, they would always try to buy the milk with the most cream on the top. As a result there were many quarts and gallons that went unsold because the fat content was very low.

Homogenization eliminated that.

Independent studies have tracked the rise of heart disease and low bone density to the start and use of homogenization.

Contrary to what the AMA tells you fat, natural fat from grass fed cows is good for you. They make the claim that fat is bad for you based on biased info. The info comes from fat produced via factory farms. That stuff is garbage. You might as well drink a glass of heavy metals instead. Heavy metals will collect in the fatty tissues of any animal.

I have been drinking raw milk for the past 2 1/2 years. The farm we get ours from is inspected by the USDA because they supply milk to Blue Bell ice cream here in Texas.

I have visited their dairy, have seen how they feed their animals, and have checked out their facilities.

Bottom line is: if you are going to drink raw milk, do your research. Not all producers are created equal. And that is the issue, it's not the milk itself.

yes disease transmission was the problem "solved" by pasteurization, but it was not the only issue. Mass production is also part of the problem. When food safety regulations only seem affordable to large corporations and they are used to keep small time competition out of the market, their actual benefits become questionable.

There is risk in life. I don't think properly handled raw dairy products from known local sources are anymore risky than "safe" mass produced commercial crap of all kinds that gets recalled all the time.

off the farm. You can document that the milk was stored properly, etc. But when you get into these third party situations you have lost control. If the milk is repackaged, stored, or transported improperly and someone gets sick the farmer may be on the hook. He could literally lose the farm over one case of food poisoning. It is not worth the risk.

Is it delicious? Yes. However...the way a milking machine works is that a vacuum pulls on the teat, sucks the milk out and sends it into a holding tank (this is grossly simplified but the principle holds). Not every machine stays on all the teats all the time. Sometimes one falls off.

This is a cow

If one looks behind and about the udder one will find the anus. Cows poo all the time, even while being milked. e coli (and others) live in poo.

So if one of these vacuum-based milkers falls off after the cow poo, then some poo gets sucked into the machine and into the holding tank. Milk is opaque and you can't see the poo in there. THen one drinks the poo-milk.

If the milk is pasteurized then a little poo (and e coli) is no big deal. If not, then you are sick. People die from this stuff.

So, no raw milk for me and mine. And I don't think people should be allowed to make their own decisions on this because people are so weird about food they will ignore the evidence.

:spray: :rofl:

The labor required to cleanly milk a cow is part of the reason raw milk is so expensive. But, in general, most of our food is way too cheap.

Americans tend to freak out over the stuff that the rest of the world eats or drinks freely, but then they go on and ingest all sorts of nasty chemicals in "safer" products that Europeans and Asians would never even think of consuming.

...and not trucked 500 miles to sit on a convenience store shelf for several days.

Years ago, I worked for the dairy farmer down the road who delivered fresh milk every morning to the local neighborhoods. It's now tract housing and I have no idea where the milk in stores comes from. Land use is very different in the US.

There are places you can safely eat raw ground beef, too. Wouldn't try it here.

I'm pretty sure that I have heard multiple times that milk is viewed more as a food product than a beverage in most of the rest of the world. That milk is used in cheese, butter, yougurt, cooking, etc. but not that big a deal as in drinking multiple glasses of milk a day. I think it was said that we can thank the ad agencies for the milk producers for the US's consumption of milk as a beverage.

with the whole "people shouldn't be allowed to make their own decisions" part. Like we are children that need to be lead by the hand. No one is all knowing and all powerful. I will decide what I put in my own body. If I want raw milk, and I know the risks, then I'll do it. Simple as that.

to the clubs, who then make a donation back.

Where I live, mostly it is hand milked cows whose milk is "given" out this way. No machines.

When one hand milks, one cleans the entire udder before milking with a surface disinfectant- do a search online for the stuff people buy for hand milking- it is a fastidious and clean process. I guess if you are buying directly it is best that you go and see the cow and watch the milking. Better yet, offer to help out.

I have no idea about diseases because I'm sure after over 20 years of drinking my goats milk I'm immune to any of their bugs.

However I do know it's nearly impossible to keep minute dust out of an open bucket of milk even when you clip the belly off. Just your hands on the teats agitate the belly.

I use a Delaval type bucket milker with all silicone inflations short hoses that can be broken down every time and washed by hand. Some outside aire enteres the system but it's nothing like the exposure an open bucket has to the air.

Now I might agree using a big pipeline system that it automatically cleaned MIGHT be less sanitary than SOME hand milking, but in my experience the machine milked stuff I produce keeps nearly a week longer than the hand milked. And I milk into a stainless bucket and filter it with the filter disca and cool it quick when I hand milk.

Raw milk and raw milk products (cheese) are increasingly available here, but I'm still hesitant. No real reason, I suppose, but that lingering concern.

One interim step I've taken is that I'm buying milk in bottles from local farms (sold via local food co-ops and specialty stores. Price is the same as grocery store organic in cartons. I think it tastes better, and I don't have to deal with the issue of plastic or cardboard.

Back to mixed feelings, unfortunately. I believe that many small organic farmers sell their milk to organic processors (Horizon, Organic Valley, etc.), and so restricting to buying from local farms with the wherewithal to bottle their own milk does a disservice to other local farmers.

It's a bit ridiculous, when you think about, when so much thought has to go into the purchase of a container of milk.

But, I mean, do you eat bagged spinach? Non free-range meat? Fast food?

I guess I drank a lot of from-the-cow milk as a kid so it just doesn't seem strange to me. But it just seems so odd that people will eat at McDonalds but then be skeevy about raw dairy.

All local grass fed beef. All local chicken. Wild caught fish. Some bagged spinach, mostly fresh, often organic veggies. All veggies in season are from my spouse's garden, all organic, including my own horse manure. No chemical fertilizer on the grass, no weed killers on the lawn. No fast food, though a few other food vices. All in all, pretty much a lefty diet and lifestyle. Okay, I'll give the raw milk a try.

One of the advantages of living in CNY!

and knew exactly the conditions under which it was obtained and how the cows were raised. It's always a shock to realize what another person thinks is safe and clean compared to your own. Last night I was watching "Iron Chef" and couldn't believe my eyes when I saw one of the chefs using a piece of kitchen equiment with the bar code sticker on it that looked like it was right off the shelf. Just what I want in contact with my food: a piece of metal produced in China, shipped thousands of miles, touched by dozens of people, that has probably been sitting in an open bin for weeks.