Milk, Milk, Everywhere, But Not Enough of the Real Stuff—Why There’s No “Going Back”
Friday, January 2, 2009 at 03:21PM 
It’s always tempting at the start of a New Year to attempt predictions about upcoming news and trends. In the arena of raw milk, one thing I can say with a good deal of confidence is that 2009 will almost certainly be a dynamic year. The subject has attracted a growing amount of interest from consumers. There is much more blogging about raw milk, more discussion, more debate. Moreover, it is clear that demand is growing nationally.
Trying to predict what will happen in the marketplace is trickier. That is dependent in significant measure on the decisions of regulators. If they are as determined to smother the growing national demand for high-quality unpasteurized milk produced by committed dairy farmers—per heavy-handed actions in New York and Pennsylvania—then it could be a very tough year.
If the regulators decide to do what they are supposed to do, which is to promote agricultural development and public health, then they will find ways to work within the existing patchwork system of distribution directly from farms and via herdshares, along with retail sales in the few states where it is allowed.
The vagaries of supply and demand are evident in two seemingly contradictory developments.
The first has to do with major adjustments in the agricultural marketplace. There’s an article in today’s New York Times about a shift in the conventional milk market, from fast-growing demand to fast-growing surplus (and declining prices paid farmers)—something that’s happening with any number of agricultural commodities as a worldwide economic recession takes hold. It’s something Mark McAfee of Organic Pastures Dairy Co. has been predicting for a few months now.
Then there is the phenomenon of uncertain supply for many consumers of raw milk. I received this email recently from a resident of Michigan, who asked to remain anonymous—not wanting to give regulators too much info about herself and location for fear they’ll try to make a bad situation worse:
“It's winter, the hardest time for farmers to milk. They're spending money on hay, the cows are less happy, and production goes down without pasture. We have a herd share and our farmer suddenly decided to give it all up and quit. So there are suddenly dozens of people left high and dry - no milk.”
This individual checked around, only to discover that other suppliers of raw milk were at capacity, and couldn’t take her on. She convinced a friend to sell her half a gallon of raw milk. “But another friend, with a baby who was just starting on raw milk, has been left wondering what to do about her kid’s future nutrition.”
While this consumer expects to find a new source of raw milk, she bemoans the effect on the community created by her old herdshare. “With milk apparently scarce around here, I have to decide who to‘bring along’ if I do make the connection, and who to cut out... This does feel like an underground drug culture. Which is so amazingly absurd.”
She expects the supply situation to improve in the spring, when cows get back to pasture and become more productive. The bigger problem for her, and for other raw milk drinkers who encounter supply difficulties, is, as she says regarding pasteurized milk, “There is no going back. I've never enjoyed drinking milk before, as it made me sick. Raw milk is the only milk I can consume...It is all so very frustrating. Here we have a commodity that is healthy and an important part of a diet, there is no substitute (other than goats’ milk), the demand is greater than the supply, and I have to finesse and wait and struggle and beg and pull up every connection I can think of just to gain access.
“It's just milk. But there are few foods more basic and part of everyday life. I want to be able to choose it, and I certainly want to be able to consume it...This just totally sucks.”
I agree. That’s the big problem for raw milk drinkers: there’s no going back. I, for one, can’t even stand to spend time in the dairy section of the grocery.
Maybe some of these conventional dairies being slammed by rapidly declining milk prices will begin to take a look at the raw dairy market, where demand, and prices, are on the rise. Their big challenge is to develop a true commitment to producing high-quality milk, and not the stuff they get away with for pasteurization.
Reader Comments (18)
I attended a Western United Dairyman meeting last month in Modesto CA and heard the voices of several hundred conventional dairymen saying the very same thing.
They said...
" We are disconnected from our consumers and we no longer produce what they can eat or want to buy".
This was the message from the best and the brightest dairymen in CA. There was fear in the room as they looked at huge milk surpluses and dropping milk prices coupled with increasing costs ( at least on many inputs ) and disconnected consumers with fewer dollars to vote with.
My message to them was...produce and sell something that matches the physiologic needs of the consumers. Try a probiotic sales angle and or try promoting raw milk so that the loss of sales due to lactose intolerance could be offset by consumers drinking pasteurized milk again if they drank raw once in a while.
I also suggested banishing SOY from the dairy case because milk does not come from a bean. SOY is for Biodiesel not humans.
Suffice it to say that my test of the will of WUD to change confirmed one thing: No one can change the mind set of these dinasuars. They will die or at least thin out of their own making.
Several dairymen did come see me afterwards and said that they drink their own raw milk all the time and thought that the paranoid anti raw milk laws were criminal.
One other note to mention....the new sexed semen technology has created a huge overstock of young heifers ( sexed semen allows for predicting the sex of the newborn calf now it is no longer a 50-50 chance- it is heavily female instead ). This increases dairyherd sizes even faster producing even more milk.
When will they get it....stop playing God with GMO's, or BST or sexed semen. All it does is screw-up the market balances and the consumer...while enriching the drug pushers and biotech. So as Bubba Gump said..."stupid is as stupid does" and for those that ignore or forget nature "payback is a ....."( explet del ) ie... not good. Stick with natural and stop trying to cheat.
So here we are....lots of change but yet no change.
Rebuild from the "raw milk raw roots" one meaningful person at a time locally, safely and surely.
Mark
As the incentives for farmers to switch to a direct relationship with consumers become greater,I'll bet that the USDA will try to discourage the farmers from switching somehow.I expect they will find lots of ways to make life uncomfortable for independent farmers as an example to those conventional farmers who might like to changeover.
Do you remember the Bird Flu scare across Europe last year? The organic free range chickens all had to be penned up so that they had no contact with wild birds.Recently I read an article by a farmer in the TB zone in upper Michigan.His solution to coping with TB was to take his cattle off pasture and go to total year round confinement,because that way the cattle could be prevented from having any contact with deer.I know from talking to the State Vet that he thinks that preventing any possibility of contact with deer is the most important practice in preventing TB in cattle.This is totaly contrary to experience which teaches that TB is a result of poor nutrition and the stress of confinement.The USDA wants to take control of the health of the National Herd through its disease eradication programs.In the near future they could make regulations about how we must manage our animals in order to prevent diseases from spreading.Forcing confinement on farms providing unpasteurized milk would put an end to consuming unpasteurized milk very quickly.
When I was buying fresh milk, I felt at the mercy of regulators and legislators who I do not believe have my best interests at heart. Now that I have my own cow, I don't fear having a very important part of my family's diet removed because of the absurd politics surrounding raw milk.
We the small producers having to compete for land with larger well financed interests now are still doing so and having to do so with extreme increases in our production costs.
It was my plan to produce raw milk at full capacity of animals on my place at $15.00 per hundred weight..if I ever get to full capacity with dropping demand due to less dollars being spent on raw milk products and food in general.. or the animals that produce them given your situtation...I will be lucky to come in under $38.00 per hwt.
This in a span of under two years, and we are looking at a 60 % drop in distribution since last June and a price increase of 75% just to break even.
It is my fear that the education of consumers that food doesn't have to cost anything is going to do what states have tried to do all along...reduce the number of small producers in at least a good share of the midwest.
The coasts will always have an interest in healthy good food, but to join in the traditional transportation of goods from the middle to the coasts will only repat what has always happend in this country...the middle subsidizing the coasts and leaving nothing for us in the end....just as we are seeing now.
Ohio & michigan counties are approaching 20% unemployment rates with overall state rates at 7.5%..not a good indication for asking the $8.50 per gallon just to break even considering production, transportation, bottling ect.
Our production future wholely depends on our countries abiltiy to rethink how we have done "everything"... not spend trillions on how to keep doing as we have always done.
Now is the time that we begin to draw those comparisons of the past to our present situatation..and begin to be a responsible country ..not only to the world but to ourselfs and understand that we cannot have it all and expect to do it indefenitly.
Nothing else matters if your hungry, and until we as a nation see food as the most important form of security...we will see a decline in small farms not only from economic stand point..but from a nations idea of worth and where we want to spend our money and how we truley want to live our lives.
As President of the Farm to Consumer Foundation it is my goal this year to inform small producers how to withstand this new assult on our calling to.. provide that true secuirity for those who understand its implications, not only for those who can afford it..but for everyone who deserves it.
Tim Wightman
from: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98964910&ft=1&f=1006&sc=YahooNews
"Grocery retailer Giant, which operates about 160 pharmacies in the mid-Atlantic states, is offering free generic drugs this winter. The company says it knows it will lose money, but says its pharmacists have heard many anecdotes about families struggling. "
a commenter notes that publix has been doing this for months already...
it makes my stomach hurt... maybe i should go to the store and get some free drugs to relieve the symptoms, perhaps prozac is in order...
hugh
If you have TIVO or My DVR it may be good to program them to save the whole series, so as not to miss the raw milk episode!
Kimberly
Tim Wightman
Tim, great post! The cost issue is pressing in Colorado as well.
Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Diversifying farm products (e.g., you can sell whey as a soil nutrient and an antifungal for plants. Whey has huge potential for alternate product development. Fruits & vegetables attract 'one-stop' shopping. etc) is the answer, along with aggressive advertising (classes needed!) and some paradigm shifts ($8.50/gallon for raw milk is NOT expensive! Subsidizing big AG is expensive. Doctors and dentists are expensive.)
This food you produce is under-valued already - I appreciate farmers who sympathize with the relative "face-cost" of farm-fresh food compared to processed food, but if we don't start promoting the financial benefits, consumers won't be able to make healthy decisions when it's time to cut costs.)
The consumer must learn to calculate the cost of food in terms of what that food saves in overall costs, and the farmer needs to show them how to do this. If not you, who?
Anne Sargeant, PhD wrote an article in the Fall 2008 Wise Traditions journal called "Healthy Eating Shouldn't Cost an Arm and a Leg" - a detailed comparison of the food, medical and dental costs for a family of 6 for a year on S.A.D. compared to a year on WAPF diet. In short, annual SAD medical & dental was $7,831. Annual WAPF medical & dental was $857.
But here's what really surprised me - a year of SAD food cost $16,000 vs $13,895 for a year of WAPF food. Both meal plans included supplements and dining out once a week, plus two restaurant lunches per week. The WAPF plan required more planning and kitchen time, and a freezer, admittedly a disadvantage to those who are addicted to convenience.
If it gets really tough to find work, well then, I'll start some chickens and a goat and make my garden what it should be. But I can't go back to dead food. I can imagine being broke and out of work, but being broke, out of work, depressed and chronically ill? Not to mention watching my family and friends suffer the same....
-Blair
Tim, bravo. I think change will be slow in coming until more consumers begin to give food its proper place in household budgets. In tough economic times, food seems to be the first place people start to cut their budgets, which seems totally backwards to me. Part of the problem is that most people are so separated from the growing of food that they don't have even the vaguest idea of what it actually takes to grow it, and are conditioned by decades of deceptively cheap, plentiful (non)food. Growing real food, plant or animal, is HARD WORK, noble work, and people who do it deserve to make a comfortable living. The results of the high costs of cheap food are on the verge of causing implosion, I think.
The sixth annual year-end survey was conducted by Hunter Public Relations (www.hunterpr.com), which surveyed more than 900 food editors and bloggers across the country and asked them to rate the top ten food-related stories of 2008.
The biggest food story of the year was decidedly the rise in food prices around the world.
http://www.qsrmagazine.com/articles/news/story.phtml?id=7754
During the time I was at the raw milk stand, three other moms rolled up to buy milk. All had young kids.
http://thebovine.wordpress.com/2009/01/02/milk-prices-to-drop-30-as-us-milk-powder-stockpiles-mount-while-smart-farmers-go-raw-organic-and-sell-direct/
It is worth it to me. The "store" milk has consistancy of colored water and tastes burnt and after reading the post on molecular changes to the cell walls....yuck. As other stated, trying to find non ultra-pasturized cream is very difficult and not something to waste my money on.
Your story rings true for so many of our raw milk drinkers in CA. We see women with candida abandoned by doctors and breast cancer survivors that are grateful and hateful of their doctors because only part of their health was restored...the rest was laid to waste. Men with IBS and serious digestive issues...
Ouir raw dairy solves these illnesses over several months. These consumers become passionate disciple of raw milk and its unique healing properties. This is growth using its best medium.
Sometimes when I see the nutritional answer so very clearly...I forget that for others it is shrowded in clouds until doctors either abandon them or make them even sicker.
What is the answer to awaken the consumers....?
I spent five hours at the Torrance Farmers Market ( LA Area ) yesterday morning. It was our first day selling raw milk in this venue. It was a great day for a first say.
I handed out "doctors prescriptions for raw milk" to people that passed by. The doctors prescription was very disruptive. More than half of the passers-by returned later to ask "what the heck is this?"....the dialogue then erupted and we were able to taste test and educate very effectively....no lactose intolerance and all the immune arguments.
I suppose that there is no magic educational tool or national awakening method. It is in the trenches with one on one dedication with great websites and the internet spreading the word. At some point a critical mass or tipping point is reached. Then the avalanche starts its slide....
Until then...one on one and "word of mouse click... click..." and word of truth and mouth are the best tools we have. Hard work. Nothing liike hard work. But very good work that is extremely rewarding for all involved.
Mark
http://www.daytondailynews.com/b/content/oh/story/business/2008/12/31/ddn010109rawmilk.html
More Word of Mouse.
-Blair
Could you describe the details of the prescription, and who signed it?
"I handed out "doctors prescriptions for raw milk" to people that passed by. The doctors prescription was very disruptive. More than half of the passers-by returned later to ask "what the heck is this?"....