This page that allows you to add comments to NYC's many blogs.
Keep it clean and relatively civil, as this is a family-friendly site when I'm not cussing.
Your post will appear as another blog entry, below existing ones, except with a white background, and you will attributed at the end of the post.
Milk Wars. David Gumpert in The Nation takes a look at the raw milk wars arguing the demand for raw milk is slowly changing the face of agriculture.
For the past sixty years, there hasn't been much good news for America's small dairies. Thanks to rising land costs and intensifying price pressures, the bucolic sight of cows grazing in the countryside has become ever less common. Since 1970 alone, the number of dairies has plunged an astounding 88 percent, to 75,000, according to the US Department of Agriculture. The consolidation means that factory-style dairies with between 1,000 and 5,000 cows have become increasingly common.
The one bit of encouraging news for small dairies has been the growing market among health-conscious consumers for unpasteurized milk and dairy products like yogurt, butter and cream. There may be a half-million or more raw-milk drinkers in the United States, with the number growing "exponentially," says Sally Fallon, co-founder of the Weston A. Price Foundation, which encourages consumption of raw milk for its healthful enzymes, bacteria and proteins.
Small dairies have rushed to meet this need via a completely new business model. Instead of selling milk in bulk to processors who offer take-it-or-leave-it prices of $1.50 to $2 a gallon, some small dairies sell directly to consumers at whatever price the market will bear, typically from $5 a gallon to as much as $10 a gallon. At those prices, dairy farmers actually begin thinking in terms of a long-forgotten word: profit.
In New York state, which regulates direct sales of raw milk to consumers by issuing permits to dairies, the number of raw-milk dairies with permits has doubled to twenty from ten in 2005. The same sort of minirevival has occurred in other states that allow raw-milk sales direct from the farm, like Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. In California--one of the few states that allow sales of raw milk via Whole Foods Market and other retail outlets--the largest raw-milk dairy, the 350-cow Organic Pastures Dairy Company, has seen its annual sales climb by 25 percent annually, to more than $5 million.
Arguing that raw milk isn't safe and that consumers must be protected from its dangers, some government regulators and legislators are targeting small raw-milk dairies for tough enforcement actions, focusing most intensively on dairies in New York and California.
I know I grew up drinking raw goat milk and I'm still here today to live.
Of course, it's important to drink milk fresh, and you can get very sick from drinking raw milk or any sort of the wrong kind of bacteria gets in it. That's why it's so important to have a very clean milking parlor, and take aggressive steps to keep dust, mud, and muck out of the milk.
Read Milk Wars in the Nation.