Flip the coin, and farmers selling raw milk are generally having a better time of it. In McAfee’s case, for example, he’s seen sales increase by 25 percent at Organic Pastures.
“We’re a $10 million company now,” he said. “And that would be higher except our trucks just aren’t large enough to carry all the milk and milk products we produce. The raw milk industry is explosive and exciting.”
Things are going so well for him, in fact, that he’ll be building a brand new $3.5 million creamery next year. He describes the creamery as “very tourable with an educational area and quality assurance labs.”
He also envisions smaller raw milk dairies setting up “tourable” facilities and selling their milk and milk products to visitors very much like artisan-based wineries do now.
“They’ll be able to get good prices,” he said. “People will want to go to there.”
Hannah Smith-Brubaker, executive director of the Pennsylvania Farmers Union and co-owner of Village Acres Farm, agrees with McAffee that customer demand is the driving force behind dairy farmers’ interest in raw milk.
Her family, which includes two children ages 10 and 14, drinks raw milk and always has.
“It’s a superior nutritional product. I can’t imagine why a government agency should stand in the way of this,” she said, referring to the FDA’s ban on interstate sales of raw milk for human consumption.
She also said that raw milk provides a good discourse about food safety and puts the issue of direct sales from the farm to consumers on the table.
“It allows a farmer to have a good livelihood,” she said. “He’s selling the same unprocessed product to customers that he’s serving to his family.”
When she can’t get raw milk directly from the farmer, Smith-Brubaker said she’ll go to the store to buy it, typically paying $5 to $7 for a gallon, which she said goes almost entirely to the farmer. She contrasts that with far lower prices for pasteurized milk, with much of that going to the processor.
McAfee, meanwhile, believes that the day that safe and responsibly produced raw milk will be legal across the nation is coming. “This isn’t a black or white issue,” he said. “It’s an evolutionary process. I envision it as a 5 to 7-year roll-out.”
How safe is raw milk?
Last December, McAfee sued the FDA for allegedly turning its back on the dairy’s 2008 request for the agency to withdraw its current ban on sales of raw milk across state lines. Instead, he wants raw milk that is produced legally in one state, such as California, to be able to be shipped to another state that also allows sales of raw milk, such as neighboring Arizona.
Pointing to food safety concerns, McAfee said that he’s not asking for raw milk to be allowed across every state line in all cases because “sloppily produced raw milk can be dangerous.”
But in a Feb. 26, 2013 response to McAfee, Michael Landa, director of FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, made it clear that the agency isn’t going to budge on its ban on interstate commerce of raw milk.
Here are some of the points made in the agency’s response:
Even if milk is produced under strict standards that require low coliform and somatic cell counts — both of which indicate that the milk meets certain sanitation standards — those low counts don’t indicate the presence or absence of harmful, potentially deadly pathogens.
As of yet, there is no reliable method available to guarantee that raw milk from a state-regulated dairy or raw milk manufacturer is or will be free of pathogens.
There have been nine recalls (quarantines) involving raw milk or raw milk products in California since 2006, seven of which have involved Organic Pastures.
“FDA has concluded that your petition fails to establish that current testing, state inspection and state regulation programs can adequately mitigate the dangers posed by raw milk,” wrote Landa in his conclusion.
McAfee told Food Safety News that he has no intention of throwing in the towel on this issue and that he’s drafting a new petition with scientific information that will be put before the judge.
“It will refute all the false statements in FDA’s response,” he said. “We’re going to keep the heat on their feet on this.”
In his e-mail to Food Safety News, Western United Dairymen CEO Marsh said that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last spring issued guidance finding that the consumption of raw milk was the country’s top food safety concern.
“Whenever we experience one of the iterative raw milk recalls and quarantines of raw milk sales in California, sales of all milk and dairy products suffers, not just sales to consumers of raw milk,” he said. “Unfortunately, consumers read or hear of yet another raw milk recall and what they retain is that ‘the milk is bad’ and consumption declines.”
What about this business model?
While many raw milk supporters say that producing and selling raw milk is a way for dairy farmers to stay in business, Jon Bansen, an Oregon organic dairy farmer and a member of the Organic Valley cooperative, would offer another option.
“Organic dairying is a good business model even though there’s been some downward pressure on prices,” he said, referring to grocery stores with private-label organic milk.
Bansen also pointed out that because most organic milk is pasteurized, there’s less for a dairy farmer to worry about when it comes to being sued. That’s not the case, he said, for raw milk producers who have to worry that their milk might get someone sick if foodborne pathogens get into the milk.
On the business side of the equation, he said he gets about $3 a gallon for the milk from his Jersey cows, which is considerably more than the price conventional dairy farmers receive for their milk.
But it’s not a slam dunk.
“My costs could be more than $3 per gallon if I don’t do a good job of it,” he said. “And if I were buying organic alfalfa and organic grain, I’d go broke.” Instead, he pastures his cows and raises the grains and hay he feeds his cows, which puts his costs “well under $3 a gallon.”
Now that his son has returned to the dairy, Bansen has increased his milking herd to 180 cows.
He said it’s easier to manage a small dairy such as his than a larger operation, where it’s a challenge to keep a close eye on things.
“The organic model really is the best of all worlds,” he said. “But you have to really think about all of the biological processes involved with the cows and the health of your soil. But when you do, organic dairying is really an enjoyable system. You get a lot of satisfaction out of it.”
Not that it’s as easy as simply deciding to switch over to organic dairying. It generally takes 3 years to transition to organic, and a dairy has to be close enough to a processor that will take its organic milk.
Consumer demand is the driver. Some consumers are willing to pay the higher prices for organic milk products based on the belief that they’re healthier. Others choose organic because they believe organic dairying is good for the environment and helps small family-scale dairy farms stay in business.
According to Organics Trade Association, 6 percent of all dairy products sold to U.S. consumers are organic. In 2011, nearly 2.1 billion pounds of organic milk products were sold — a 14.5 percent increase from the previous year and the second year in a row that sales increased by double digits, according to information from the USDA.
