Full list: Milk News

From the New Yorker
Posted by Dana Goodyear, April 23, 2012
“I’m an advocate for flavor,” Dan Barber, the chef and co-owner of Blue Hill and Blue Hill Stone Barns, told me. “I think milk has a superior flavor when it’s not pasteurized. And I love the challenge of working with something that’s changing constantly—even weekly.” To be clear: Barber does not serve raw milk at his restaurants—that would be illegal in the state of New York, where only on-farm sales are permitted—but for home experiments he does have access to a reliable supply of it, from his two-hundred-acre farm in the Berkshires. (It is not illegal anywhere to drink raw milk.) His farm’s sweetest milk comes in June, when the spring grass is in but the wild garlic and onion flavors are not as dominant, and in the fall, in the flush that follows a good rain.

In Barber’s experience, though, whether or not milk is pasteurized is secondary to what the cow—in his view, a “vector for the grass”—eats: not only are pasture-fed ruminants eating food they evolved to digest, but also their milk reflects the subtle, seasonal changes in the field. “Grain-feeding is a little like pasteurization,” he said. “It’s a dumbing down, an evening out of the flavors.” In the battle over raw milk, which I write about in the magazine this week, Barber sees a more important point being lost. “The picture is not just about pasteurization,” he said. “It’s part of a much larger question about how you’re raising the cattle and what quality of milk you’re trying to produce. To some people, having a U.S.D.A. official tell you that you have to heat the milk to a certain point takes away your American right to live, but I’d say you have a much more egregious problem if you’re importing transgenic grain from Iowa and polluting the Gulf of Mexico with so much nitrogen that it’s causing dead zones.”

But back to flavor. At Stone Barns, Barber serves “single-udder butter”: butter made from the pasteurized milk of a specific cow. (For example: Clover is an alpha-type who goes hard after the best grass; her butter is typically a darker yellow than that of Sunshine, an erratic, moody cow.) In September, Barber said, Alain Ducasse—who grew up on a farm—visited Stone Barns; Barber served him some toast and a sampler of single-udder butter and eagerly waited for his reaction. “He wasn’t overly complimentary,” Barber said. “I was like, Oh, man. It’s one of the best things we do!” He recalled that Ducasse asked him two questions: Has it been raining? Where are the cows pasturing?

As it happened, the Berkshires were being drenched by Irene, though Ducasse didn’t know it. He just tasted a washed-out flavor in the milk. In answer to the second question, Barber said that he’d recently been at the farm, and knew that the cows were right next to the barn, in the field with the richest, best-fertilized grass. Ducasse politely disagreed, telling Barber he believed the cows were on weak grass. “A week later, I talked to my farmer and he told me that after my visit he had moved the herd to the back pasture—the weediest, least mineralized spot,” Barber said. “It shows you that what we’ve lost in a couple of generations is the ability to taste those values that are truly delicious and healthful for us and for the property.”

Nutritional science has not yet caught up with the interest among chefs and deliberate eaters in less processed and untreated ingredients—and regulatory science sees reason to be wary of raw foods, milk especially. Barber says it makes sense to him that wild foods that taste especially good might have some as-yet unquantified value. “My personal opinion—not from hard evidence—is that nutrient-density benefits follow from flavor,” he said. “Over the course of ten thousand years, we bred and improved and preserved things not to sell to a foreign market but because they tasted better. I believe advocates of raw milk are right because the taste buds say so.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/04/is-raw-milk-worth-it-the-case-of-the-single-udder-butter.html#ixzz1t53uEeF0

Listen at Vermont Public Radio
Nancy Eve Cohen, 4/23/12
Yogurt has always been associated with good health. Now demand is growing for a new kind of yogurt – the Greek variety. Sales more than doubled last year. And just as this market shift is healthy for consumers, it’s also good for dairy farmers.

Fans of Greek yogurt say the thick, creamy yogurt fills them up with the right stuff. It has a lot more protein – double or even triple the amount that’s in conventional yogurt. That’s because Greek yogurt is made with a lot more milk.

Tom Moffit is President of Commonwealth Dairy in Brattleboro. His plant makes yogurt for retail stores who want their own brand. Moffit said he’s getting as much as 45,000 gallons of milk delivered every day.

“Part of the reason we are receiving so much as a yogurt maker is because we make a lot of Greek yogurt,” Moffit said. “Greek yogurt takes about five times as much milk to make than conventional yogurt.”

Moffit said he’s making almost all Greek now.

He leads the way up two flights of stairs to a catwalk that overlooks six stainless steel tanks each full of 8,000 gallons of skim milk that’s fermenting. That’s where the milk is cultured. But to become Greek yogurt it goes into a centrifuge that separates out the whey, the watery part of conventional yogurt.

“That’s what makes the Greek yogurt so thick and smooth and creamy,” he said. “You’re taking all the liquid out of it so we’re going to open this up and you can see fresh Greek yogurt that has just been made.”

But making such a rich yogurt requires much more milk than the conventional kind – two to five times as much. And Moffit says up until last month, when cows began producing more milk – as they do every spring – he couldn’t always get enough.

“Milk has been a challenge for us,” Moffit said.

It has also been a challenge for other yogurt makers. In New York state there are 29 yogurt plants, many of which make Greek yogurt. Pepsico says it’s opening a $206 million yogurt plant there. Moffit says that’s a big plant.

“We’re really concerned about the long-term prospects in the northeast for milk supply,” he said. “Its been a struggle for us. We expect over the next few years it will continue to be a struggle and I kind of scratch my head and wonder where all that milk is going to come from.”

“Five years ago we didn’t know what we were going to do with all the milk and now with the yogurt plants coming on it’s been drying up the milk supply,” said Robert Gilchrist, who markets fluid milk for Agrimark, one of the biggest milk-cooperatives in the region, with 1,200 farms. He said Agrimark couldn’t always deliver enough milk to yogurt makers when they wanted it last fall.

“Not on the days that they wanted,” Gilchrist said. “Most everybody got the milk that they needed, but they had to change their production schedules.”

Gilchrist said he expects the supply will be very tight again next fall.

Diane Bothfeld, Vermont’s Deputy Secretary for Dairy Policy says this is good news.

“I don’t think we’re concerned,” Bothfeld said. “We’re excited. It’s a great opportunity for our farmers in the region.”

When it’s harder for yogurt makers to get milk, they’ll pay a premium for it – a price above the floor price set by the federal government. Bothfeld compared the demand for the milk supply to the demand for a star baseball player.

“You’re going to have to pay to move that player away from that team to someone else’s team,” Bothfeld said. “So this milk all had a home and now there are new processors that want milk and they have to get it away from someone else who was making another dairy product.”

Bothfeld said she wants to find ways to push this opportunity further. Right now dairy cooperatives collect the premiums and share the extra money equally among all their farmers. Bothfeld said one idea being discussed is directing premiums to the specific farms that produce milk with a higher protein content, something Greek yogurt makers want.

As Bothfeld said, “The farmer had to change some feeding practices and management to get that extra protein. Is there a direct payment for that?”

This spring the milk supply has increased and the price paid to farmers has dropped. But back at Commonwealth Dairy, President Tom Moffit said he has persistent concerns about the future milk supply. He pointed to a machine that’s pumping Greek yogurt nonstop and said, “This filler is making 90 cups a minute of two-pound cups of Greek yogurt, so its using about 630 pounds of milk a minute. That’s a lot of milk!”

Moffitt says he doesn’t see an end to the demand for Greek yogurt. Or the milk that’s needed to make it.

Julie Harker
February 23, 2012
Full Article 

A group that supports the sale of raw milk says the new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) on illnesses caused by raw milk is flawed. In a news release, Sally Fallon Morrell, president of the Weston A. Price Foundation says the CDC cherry-picked data to make a case against raw milk. She says consumers need to know that the incidence of foodborne illnesses from ALL dairy products – pasteurized or not – is “extremely low.”

The CDC says it reviewed data from 1993 through 2006 and found the rate of outbreaks from raw milk and milk products was 150-times greater than outbreaks linked to pasteurized milk.

Fallon Morrell questions the CDC choosing data only up through 2006 – saying in 2007, 135 people became sick from pasteurized cheese contaminated with E. coli and three people died from pasteurized milk contaminated with listeria. She says the CDC’s decision to start the review of data in the 1990s – following significant outbreaks in the 1980s from pasteurized milk – and cutting the data short raises questions about their bias against raw milk.

The CDC article can be found here.

By Stephen Dinan
February 13, 2012
Full Article 

The FDA won its two-year fight to shut down an Amish farmer who was selling fresh raw milk to eager consumers in the Washington, D.C., region after a judge this month banned Daniel Allgyer from selling his milk across state lines and he told his customers he would shut down his farm altogether.

The decision has enraged Mr. Allgyer’s supporters, some of whom have been buying from him for six years and say the government is interfering with their parental rights to feed their children.

But the Food and Drug Administration, which launched a full investigation complete with a 5 a.m. surprise inspection and a straw-purchase sting operation against Mr. Allgyer’s Rainbow Acres Farm, said unpasteurized milk is unsafe and it was exercising its due authority to stop sales of the milk from one state to another.

Adding to Mr. Allgyer’s troubles, Judge Lawrence F. Stengel said that if the farmer is found to violate the law again, he will have to pay the FDA’s costs for investigating and prosecuting him.

His customers are wary of talking publicly, fearing the FDA will come after them.

“I can’t believe in 2012 the federal government is raiding Amish farmers at gunpoint all over a basic human right to eat natural food,” said one of them, who asked not to be named but received weekly shipments of eggs, milk, honey and butter from Rainbow Acres, a farm near Lancaster, Pa. “In Maryland, they force taxpayers to pay for abortions, but God forbid we want the same milk our grandparents drank.”

The FDA, though, said the judge made the right call in halting Mr. Allgyer’s cross-border sales.

“Intrastate sale of raw milk is allowed in Pennsylvania, and Mr. Allgyer had previously received a warning letter advising him that interstate sale of raw milk for human consumption is illegal,” agency spokeswoman Siobhan DeLancey said.

Fans of fresh milk, which they also call raw milk, attribute all kinds of health benefits to it, including better teeth and stronger immune systems. Raw milk is particularly popular among parents who want it for their children.

In a unique twist, the movement unites people on the left and the right who argue that the federal government has no business controlling what people choose to consume.

In a rally last year, they drank fresh milk in a park across Constitution Avenue from the Senate.

The FDA began looking into Mr. Allgyer’s operations in late 2009, when an investigator in the agency’s Baltimore office used aliases to sign up for a Yahoo user group made up of Rainbow Acres customers.

The investigator placed orders for fresh milk and had it delivered to private residences in Maryland, where it was picked up and documented as evidence in the case. By crossing state lines, the milk became part of interstate commerce and thus subject to the FDA’s ban.

At one point, FDA employees made a 5 a.m. visit to Mr. Allgyer’s farm. He turned them away, but not before they observed milk containers labeled for shipment to Maryland.

After the FDA first took action, Mr. Allgyer changed his business model. He arranged to sell shares in the cows to his customers, arguing that they owned the milk and he was only transferring it to them.

Judge Stengel called that deal “merely a subterfuge.”

Liz Reitzig, a mother who has become a raw-milk activist and is an organizer of the group, said the lawyers who pursued the case against Mr. Allgyer ought to “be ashamed.”

“Many families are dependent on the milk for health reasons or nutritional needs, so a lot of people will be desperately trying to find another source now,” she said.

By HOWARD WEISS-TISMAN
February 4, 2012
Full Article 

By Dan Flynn
2/6/12
Full Article

By John Moody
January 23, 2012
Full Article

Just after New Year’s Day, the Obama administration gave its official response of “No!” to the 6,078 signors of a petition on WhiteHouse.gov who requested federal-level legalization of all raw milk sales.

Written by Doug McKalip, Senior Policy Adviser for Rural Affairs in the White House Domestic Policy Council, the response is full of typical government double speak and sleight of hand with facts and figures.

For instance, the response starts off by saying, “We appreciate consumer concerns on food issues and understand the importance of letting consumers make their own food choices.”

But is there any evidence to support either of these statements? Zero. The Obama administration has continued the Bush administration policy of fast tracking GMOs and other dangerous foods while mercilessly targeting small producers of healthful things like Elderberry Juice.

They continue to oppose consumer choice by blocking GMO labeling, something Obama campaigned for in 2007.

The Obama FDA–with folks like former Monsanto executive Michael Taylor (who also served in both the FDA and USDA under Bush and who has publicly stated he supports the continued multimillion dollar crackdown on Amish farmers and raw milk buying clubs) at the helm of the “food safety division”–had the audacity to state that people have no inherent right to choose the food they eat or what they feed their children [read FDA's response to lawsuit].

Does this sound like understanding the importance of letting consumers make their own food choices? Of course, you are free to consume tainted cantaloupe, turkey, and ground beef from large, industrial farms in the FDA’s twisted universe. But don’t touch that milk!

The claim that “This administration believes that food safety policy should be based on science… In this case, we support pasteurization to protect the safety of the milk supply because the health risks associated with raw milk are well documented” is also spurious at best.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was recently forced to retract its long standing claim that two people have died from raw milk consumption for the ten-year period between 1998 and 2008 (they, in fact, died from consuming “bath-tub” cheese, queso fresco cheese commonly made at home and sometimes in bath tubs).  Read “The Power of Numbers in the War Over Raw Dairy–How the CDC Came to Admit a Death Wasn’t Categorized Correctly“.

Many of the “raw-milk” outbreaks used by the CDC and FDA involve PMO milk (i.e., milk produced in accordance with the federal Pasteurized Milk Ordinance adopted by most states), that either was improperly pasteurized or taken, as in a recent event in Wisconsin, without permission or the knowledge of the farmer or consumer and given raw.

Such milk isn’t real raw milk, milk produced by farms intending to provide it to the public as safe raw milk, often from small family farms that are grass- or pasture-based and committed to good husbandry and sanitation practices.

PMO milk that merely missed the bulk tank truck or improperly handled raw milk turned into cheese in someone’s bath tub should not be counted among the raw milk outbreak statistics if the government was truly interested in either safety or science.

Dr. Ted Beals and numerous other scientists and individuals have shown that raw milk is far less dangerous than many other foods people consume on a weekly or daily basis, even when adjusted for estimated rates of consumption that are half of what is most likely happening each and every day across the US.

Even more main stream groups and scientists are starting to no longer deny the relative safety of raw milk. In a recent Food Seminars International Webinar, “Raw Milk: Political Football or Food Safety Issue“, distinguished professor and researcher on food safety David Warriner conceded that raw milk is certainly no more dangerous than many other foods people are allowed to consume or activities they are allowed to engage in.

Burlington Free Press
Emily McManamy
January 9, 2012
Full Article 

Free Press: You and your husband run a tiny raw-milk dairy in Hinesburg. How does your perspective on the challenges facing Vermont agriculture differ from that of a farmer milking 100 to 200 cows and selling to the wholesale market?

Harris: Obviously the challenges we face day-to-day on our farm are very different, but I’m an advocate for all farmers. One difference is the economic pressures that larger farmers are under to expand their herds to make enough money to support their families. Some farmers who milk hundreds of cows would like to milk fewer, but they can’t figure out how to do it financially.

One thing that pushed me into selling unpasteurized milk was that there was no way I could afford to start a bigger farm that would sell to the wholesale market. Philosophically I love raw milk, but I didn’t really have choice. I was forced to direct-market my product.

Free Press: How good a job do you think Vermont is doing at making locally grown food — meat, milk, vegetables — more available and accessible?

Harris: It depends what you compare it to. Only 5 percent of the food consumed in Vermont is produced in Vermont. That sounds like a very low number, and we can do much better. In fact, people want to do much better, but they need more access to food that farmers grow and farmers need more opportunities to get their food into the hands of consumers.

Free Press: So, what are some of the barriers to that happening?

Harris: One thing we really are focusing on at Rural Vermont is encouraging Vermonters to feed other Vermonters. Markets in New York and Boston are important to some farmers in Vermont, but there are 6,000 small farms in Vermont, so the real agricultural economic powerhouse lies in the commerce between neighbors. Recently Rural Vermont has worked on making raw milk more accessible and making on-farm slaughtered meat legally available.

We’d like to build on those legislative successes. There is more to be done. For example, there is some ambiguity about federal and state interpretation of the law that allows a consumer to contract with a farmer to raise an animal that the consumer owns, and for that animal to be slaughtered and butchered on the farm without having to use a state or federally inspected slaughterhouse. We need to clarify that law.

In the realm of raw milk, we applaud the Legislature’s efforts. They have taken steps in the right direction, but there is more work to be done there. Speaking as an owner, we have to meet extremely strict milk-quality standards, way more strict than any farm that ships milk to the wholesale market. Despite the strict regulation and our dairy’s history of meeting the standards, we are still restricted in where we can sell our milk. We can’t sell at a farmers market; we can’t sell in a store — we have to deliver it to our customers or have them come to the farm.

Personally I would like to see retail sales allowed of raw milk in Vermont. Maybe the state is ready to do that. Retail sales of raw milk are legal in other states including Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. Vermont is behind the curve on this.

The other area where I would like to see progress, and Rural Vermont would like to see progress, is to have more flexibility in marketing raw-milk products. We are not allowed to sell any dairy product except whole milk. Even pouring off the cream is considered processing, so we are not allowed to sell cream or skim milk or yogurt or fresh cheese.

Providing access to slaughterhouses continues to be just a huge issue. Our farm is trucking animals we sell commercially, cattle and pigs, three hours each way to be butchered. What I hear from slaughterhouse operators is that the regulations are really onerous. What’s really sad about the food industry in general is that regulation tends to be one size fits all. If our tiny farm wants to make cheese, we have to follow the same rules as Kraft cheese. That makes absolutely no sense. There are inherent, undisputable differences in how we raise and handle our food, and how Kraft raises and handles their food.

We need a tiered regulatory structure that can accommodate different sizes of farm. That way, small producers can adhere to rules that make sense for them. I don’t need the state to tell me to make clean milk. My friend comes here with her 3- and 5-year-old children to buy her milk. I make clean milk because I care about those people, not because the Agriculture Agency said I have to meet some standard. There is a level of responsibility inherent in the direct sale of food from the farm to the consumer. Our laws should reflect that trusting, one-to-one relationship that does not exist when you go to the grocery store.

Free Press: Last year’s Legislature had a new report on how Vermont can increase the market for food raised in the state, the Farm to Plate report. My sense is that lawmakers only began to consider the report’s recommendations. Is there more they can do?

Harris: The Legislature will have a full agenda, with the budget and the aftermath of Irene, but we certainly we want to see lawmakers continue to work on helping Vermonters feed Vermonters, and on economic justice for farmers.

Lindsay Harris milks six cows with her husband, Evan Reiss, in Hinesburg. Their micro dairy, Family Cow Farmstand, sells raw milk. Harris also serves on the board of Rural Vermont, a farm advocacy group.