raw milk sales in Mich BUSTED

I didn't say hobby farm, I said hobbyist, and only as regarding income purposes. If your farm, hobby or otherwise, earns you more than so much per year you do have the option or writing off a good bit of your farm expenses on your tax return. If you don't earn the set amount you are not legally (for tax purposes) a farm business.

Legal or moral obligation???? Big corporations have no moral obligations, so therefore the laws HAD to be passed and should be enforced to protect public health. My clientele is not the general public. If someone buys from me they are free to do their own operation inspection. Now say I want to buy eggs from the store that were produced by Buckeye Egg. I would have to go to their main production location and brave the stench and biting flies to check the facility, then I would have to go to their egg holding and egg washing facilities, don't forget the transportation companies too. Then I would have to check the streamline (where all the eggs come together for distribution) facility, packing facility, the individual store main facility, the local store warehouse facility, and the backroom of the store, oh, and all the OTR carriers as well as their individual trucks. My eggs go from my ducks to the sink for a quick bleach water scrub to the cartons to the fridge. Anyone that buys them takes them from their to their vehicle to their home. Processed ducks go from my property to the processor to sterilized coolers to my house to the fridge then freezer then to the customer. There are fewer chances for someone to slip up and contaminate the carcass and little to no chance for cross contamination from the previous load.

In reading over the posts I think that there exists a fairly common misperception that government regulations are in place to protect the consumer. They are not and while I agree that they are SUPPOSED to be, they simply are not. Regulations are in place to ensure enormous inflated corporate profits at the expense of your health and to further insure that little or no competition exists that would draw dollars from the corporate world.

Our mainstream food supply is loaded with toxins and additional USDA approved poisons are added to round out the cocktail. Regulations are in place to ensure that the major food producers can sell a product labeled "Organic" with little regard to the true nature of that product. This can hardly be seen as consumer protection.

In the meantime more and more regulations and enforcement are in place to stop those who might actually produce a truly organic product. This of course is a further protection of corporate profits and not protection for the consumer.

if you yelled at him like you yelled at the cop [another thread] and I was 8 yrs old... I'd believe you too... and maybe wet my pants.

Ok I have a dumb question... sice I'm not a dairyman or a milk drinker.

I know, growing up, all my po relitives lived on farms and guzzeled raw milk right from the cow, and no one died.
however, I know there IS a good risk for various diseases to be carried into the bulk milk via sloppy barn management.

ok dumb question... what does it hurt to pasturize the milk?
is it a religious thing or some natural medicine problem or is it a tin foil hat issue?

why are we "against" pasturization?

I am not sure what the problem is with some.
I have drank many a gal of pasteurized milk and still do. And I have even bought pasteurized eggs as the shelf life is a lot longer.
Now you can even buy milk in cartons that don;t even need to be refrigerated.
I am waiting for the day and I know they are testing it. To get Carbonated milk and then sell in with Soda Machines and such. That would be so neat.
Ann YES it is to Protect the American milks drinkers because it does kill ANY harmful stuff that MAY be in it. Not saying there is but there is a chance and most people just will not take that chance, a healthy way of living is very important to people.
My Mom will not buy ANYTHING food stuffs from outside this country. KNOWING we have very safe food production in this country.

Besides the numerous links to many articles I've posted in various topics at HT over the last year, here are a few links:

http://www.mercola.com/2004/apr/24/raw_milk.htm (if that subscription thing covers the page, put a fake email addy in and it will go away, then you can read)

http://home.earthlink.net/~optimal/

http://www.realmilk.com

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HAHAHAHA Europe laughs at us, our standards are so low.

I find food in dollar stores that has been imported from Europe. I buy it! It's safer and higher quality than food produced in the US.

Pateurizing milk does a great job of making milk safe because the dairies are not producing clean milk!!

Give me raw milk from a CLEAN dairy any day!

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Comfortablynumb:

You have somewhat identified the nut of the debate. Essentially does the requirement to pasteurize milk sold in public commerce outweight the potential health risk from allowing the sale of it unpasteurized.

The USDA, and through them the Depts. of Ag in the states, remember back when a fairly wide variety of health problems, such as TB, was associated with drinking raw milk. And TB, I do believe, is still one of the leading causes for rejecting immigrants who have been approved to come into this country. Remember Milk Pox? Those opposed to it say pasteurization somehow changes the very nature of the milk.

Going back to the very nature of this thread please do note share milk arrangements are not illegal in MI - at least not at the present time. Those milk transfers do not need to be pasteurized. However, from what I read the group in question was outright wholesaling and retailing unpasteurized milk and milk byproducts in both intra-state and inter-state commerce. Sorry, but I just do not, in any way, consider what they were doing as falling under a legal share milk arrangement. It fell under the same standards as a commerical dairy.

Part of state/federal regulations is to save people against themselves.

And another link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...700108_pf.html

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Jeff54321 you hit the nail on the head.People are going to get tired of me pushing Eric Schlossers book Fast Food Nation! But it shows how our govt officials charged with protecting us get paid off and how, by big buisiness
Chas

*reading links*

I see.... its like the marijuana debate.

both sides have proof pot does or does not do a body good.

since we in the USA seem to adore our factory farms... please pasturize my milk,factory farms are filthy places, i will take some nutritional supplements or better yet, just eat some foods that make up the difference.

Irony abounds, what ever happened to the right to choose???

A good compromise would be like the lead disclosures that have to be signed with each sale or lease of any building. List dangers, purchaser agrees to take risk...the end.

I personally CHOOSE to pasturise my milk, cows have been tested, but MO is a bangs free state so cows don't have to be tested to be sold, so nobody elses cows are tested....Bulls are always jumping fences here....and as i hand milk I see what gets in the bucket, I can only strain out so much...and i know exactly where those flies have been, that being said if you want raw milk you should be able to CHOOSE it.

that being said... you can't sell pasturised milk either.. just like you cant sell a home cooked pie, unless you have a licensed kitchen ect....not worth it for someone who milks 2 cows.

the egg thing is true here as well, you can't sell eggs unless inspected, not sure about on farm sales.

and the spinach thing Ya'll noticed how quick they were to lay blame at the cattle farm next door....just one more reason to impliment nais....it couldn't a been some picker hadda go real bad and went....

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All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent. Jefferson
my stores facebook
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lexing...7930013?ref=ts

plus...you forget mmost consumers are stupid, and sue happy.

some moron will read how good raw milk is for you, some other moron will sell them raw milk with poop particles and dead fly bits in it, the buyer gets ecoli or TB or hong kong hangnails and starts a legal domino effect.
and a waiver you sign doesnt go very far, when it comes to negligence.

if we make it illegal to sue over dirty milk then every moron wth a cow will be selling 6 bucks a gallon milk and spreading ecoli or whatever else they contaminate the milk with far and wide...

it will be mayhem.. cats and dogs living together... mass hysteria!

and if you want raw milk... get a cow or a goat and keep quiet. drink up.
[will you show up at the ER with ecoli and need public asistance to cure you?]

Pasteurization destroys the vitamins and good bacteria in milk. They replace the destroyed nutrients with garbage that cause diseases. Read about it yourself at http://www.realmilk.com/why.html and at http://www.mercola.com/2004/apr/24/raw_milk.htm

The big dairies want to force all Americans to drink their unhealthy milk. They have a campaign to pass laws making raw milk illegal. They have been very successful in every state.

Many commercial dairies are so dirty that their milk is contaminated with feces and the chemicals they pump into the cows thru their feeding program. They add chemicals that make cows give more milk so they can make larger profits. They also add chemicals to keep sick cows alive so they can continue milking them. They don’t care about the cows other than keeping them alive long enough to get all the milk they can get out of them.

The milk from cows living under those conditions is contaminated. They have to pasteurize it to kill the contaminates. Then they add vitamins, calcium, etc. to it to try to get it back to the condition it was before they pasteurized it. How much sense does that make???

Here’s a list of health problems that have been linked to pasteurized milk:

Diarrhea
Cramps
Bloating
Gas
Gastrointestinal bleeding
Iron-deficiency anemia
Skin rashes
Allergies
Colic in infants
Osteoporosis
Increased tooth decay
Arthritis
Growth problems in children
Heart disease
Cancer
Atherosclerosis
Acne
Recurrent ear infections in children
Type 1 diabetes
Rheumatoid arthritis
Infertility
Leukemia
Autism

Raw milk has not been linked to any of these health problems. Even people who are allergic to milk can often drink raw milk with no problems. That suggests that people aren't allergic to milk at all, they may be allergic to the fillers that are added to commercial milk.

Here’s a list of health problems that have been linked to raw milk:
Public health authorities advocate pasteurization to destroy any disease-producing bacteria that may be present.

Notice they say "may" be present. To the best of my knowledge, bacteria is only present in cattle that are either diseased, taking meds, or milked under unsanitary conditions. A healthy cow that is milked in a clean sanitary method, gives clean safe milk to drink.

So now you are informed, the choice is yours. You can choose to drink commercial processed milk, or farm fresh raw milk. Oops, many of you don’t have that choice anymore. The big dairies don’t want you to have a choice so they have lobbied states to pass laws that you can only buy from them. You are now so “protected” that you no longer have free choice.

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Can you get Hong Kong Hangnails from sterilized milk?

Yea, but drinking a glass of nonruined milk isn't going to cause me to be a danger on the road LOL

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The 7th Day is still God's Sabbath
ICOG7.ORG
Layton Hollow ADGA Nubians
Taking Reservation for 2015!

Raw milk can transmit TB and a related bug, mycobacterium bovis. Along with bacteria du jour. That's why there are extra inspections for the right to sell raw milk.

But there's always some idiot somewhere who has to ruin it by selling dirty product illegally, isn't there?

you said it.... ya ever buy a lid of grass with bird dooty drops on the nugs?
its a bummer man...

I don't know what it is about raw milk that gets people so excited. It's silly when you think about people dying from eating raw spinach. Frankly, I've never heard of anyone dying from drinking raw milk.

In case anyone is interested, pasteurized milk is not sterile. It has to have a bateria plate count of less than 1000. Many, many farms have bacteria counts less than 5000. That's extremely clean milk. Also, people here seem to think that the bacteria being killed by the heat is bacteria from the cow. Mostly it's not, mostly it's from the milking equipment. Very rarely will a cow cause a surge in bacteria on a plate count. It can happen, but it's not the norm.

Bottom line is, if the cows are healthy, then the milk is healthy. The driving need for pasteurized milk, IMO, is a need for a product that has a LONG shelf life. Which is a valid reason for pasteurizing, but it's no reason to knock raw milk out of the market, either.

If I had to buy milk, I wouldn't. When my cows go down the road that's going to be the end of my milk drinking days.

Jennifer

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-Northern NYS

We drink raw milk from our cow. When the cow is dry we use way less milk and buy it from a local dairy that sells raw milk--it is legal here in CA and there are a couple dairies who do raw milk only. We know the owners, it is a very small dairy and we have visited the place. I have heard horror stories about contamination at big dairies (NOT raw milk dairies) and the assumption being that it will all be fine once the milk is pasteurized.

I believe in the health benefits of raw milk. I know people who have had huge improvements in their health after switching to it. I know my sister and her son are allergic to pasteurized milk yet can drink raw milk with no trouble. I believe people should have the opportunity to make the informed choice to buy raw milk. However, I agree with the person who said (maybe on this HT awhile ago?) you should only drink raw milk if you know the name of the cow--or at least the name of the farmer.

I think cow shares are a good thing. The consumer knows exactly where the milk is coming from, the farmer knows who is drinking the milk.

Someone refered to the spinach/e coli thing a few posts back. If the infections had been from raw milk, can you imagine the hysteria? Also, I agree that field worker hygiene could have someting to do with the e coli. We have had to repeatedly tell one neighbor (a berry grower who provides porta potties for his crew) to tell his workers to stop using our pasture as a toilet. We know it is humans because dogs don't use TP or leave boot prints.

That's what I thought too when we were contacted by the W.A.P. Chicago chapter leader who told me what their arrangement was.

I became very upset when she tried talking me into supplying her group under the same type of 'cow share' arrangement. I had to keep repeating to her that we could and would make all the milk we had available to her chapter members BUT they had to follow the existing IL laws concerning raw milk sales. The first being they had to come to the farm to get it themselves.

I'm afraid IL might eliminate raw milk sales if so many try to go around the law. We have very good regulations concerning raw milk sales in IL. Go to the farm with your own containers and pour the milk into your containers.

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