I got into milk because I love cheese. The more I learned, the more I loved. Here, I describe why small, grass-fed, raw dairying appeals to me.

I’m not attempting to make an even-handed pros-and-cons analysis between all the different approaches to dairy production and consumption, only to summarize my personal interest in one way of doing it.

Small Dairying

Small dairying interests me for several reasons.

The first is that small dairying, like any small business, is inevitably neighborly commerce. As the producer, I am not trying to take advantage of the 25-30 households who get milk from my farm each week. On the contrary, those men, women, and children are on my mind every day – and not just their monthly payment, but their genuine well-being. I don’t want them to get sick because I take shortcuts; I also imagine those little ones relishing a glass of milk. (I know that many of them do!) This is a great motivator for me.

Beyond producer-consumer, small dairying has room for other neighborly interactions. I haul feed by the bucketful, not the trailerful, so I can work with my children to do the afternoon feeding. Morning milking takes about an hour, and after a few training sessions, anyone can do it. So I’ve been blessed to meet a few similarly-interested neighbors who are interested in taking a shift.

Second is that small dairying, like any small farming, requires and engenders a respect and affection for Creation. I know my cows by name; I know their personalities and tendencies; I know their preferences among the plants that grow in my pastures; I know which pastures have more or less of their favorites, in any season; I know where my cows have deposited manure, and how the soil and plants have thrived as a result. These invite me to pray, “Thank you!” to God. It’s a beautiful world and I’m reminded every day that it’s a gift to be alive.

Not every engagement with Creation is so rosy. I’ve done chores in freezing rain with leaky boots; I’ve heard cows mourn separation from their calves; I’ve scooped dead chicks out of a brooder where my heat lamp burned out; I’ve in too deep and needed a neighbor’s help. These remind me that the gift of life is a fragile one – my friend says farming is humiliating – and invite me to pray, “Lord, establish the work of my hands!”

Finally, small dairying – along with its accompanying cheesemaking – is a beautiful and particular heritage of Western culture. The people of Europe found a productive, tasty way to use their livestock and landscape. I love to think I can continue that practice, in my own way, benefiting from millenia of stewardship, discoveries, and development. (Of course, dairying was practiced in other parts of the world too – but only Europeans mastered aged cheeses!) Paul Kindstedt’s great book, Cheese and Culture, opened my imagination to enjoying this aspect of dairying. Western culture may have its warts, but neither the Jersey cow nor Brie cheese are among them!

These facets of the work interest me and I honestly believe that they’re good for the world. That is, more neighborliness and more attention to the world at our fingertips would do us all some good. I continue to strive for more of both!

Grass-Fed Dairy

Cows (and all ruminants) are amazing in their capacity to take up grass, which grows without any fuss, and make it to sweet, rich, delicious milk (not to mention meat and fiber). “You are what you eat” applies to our food, too, and grass-fed milk is head-and-shoulders superior to the alternatives. The process is complicated – I think we’re only beginning to understand the how – but here are a few examples:

• Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA) is a compound found in grass-fed meat and milk (and technically, in grain-fed products too – hundreds of times less of it)¹. In animal and lab trials, CLA has shown powerful anti-cancer effects, including reducing new cancer occurrence, reducing existing tumors and destroying cancer cells. Also, it’s been associated with improved immune function, prevention of diabetes, increased muscle mass, and reduction in artery plaque buildup².

  CLA is created by cows from grass, via their rumen bacteria:

  • Grass synthesizes linoleic fatty acids. (Grain has fatty acids too – but they are “oleic” and don’t react the same way in the rumen.)
  • In the cow’s rumen, microbes hydrogenate these fatty acids (that is, add hydrogen to them) as a way of defending themselves from chemical breakdown. (The acids might otherwise destroy the microbes!) For this to work, the cow needs to be on a regular grass-based diet. Otherwise, the cow’s rumen microbiome would contain other species and strains of bacteria which wouldn’t operate on grass compounds. (Our microbiome is the same way, conditioned by what we usually eat.)
  • After digestion, these saturated fatty acids are absorbed by the cow’s intestines and integrated into the cow’s meat and milk.

  Soil, sun, rain, grass, cow, microbes: they’re all necessary to produce this powerful compound.

• Vitamin K₂ benefits bone health and shows anti-cancer properties³. It’s chemically similar to Vitamin K₁ but supports healthy bodies in different ways. In nature, it’s synthesized from K₁; Humans can synthesize it somewhat, but the best way for us to get it is from foods where it has already been synthesized. Grass-fed milk is a good source. (The best source is natto, a fermented soybean dish – if you’re brave enough!)

  To make K₂, cows need a diet rich in green, actively-growing grass. Grain won’t do; neither will hay!

  Vitamin K was discovered in 1929, and at the time, researchers did not distinguish between K₁ and K₂. Modern research on K₂ is still young, starting in the West in the 1990s⁴. Interestingly, it was identified in Japan first, as MK-4, the form of K₂ produced in natto.

• Phytochemicals are a range of compounds found in green plants. They’re known to be available in grass-fed meat and milk in quantities comparable to plant foods which have known health benefits⁵. Not much research has been done on animal-source phytochemicals yet since we don’t usually think of animal products as meaningful sources of phytochemicals. (And foods from confinement farms aren’t sources of these compounds!)

My intuition is that these particular compounds are the tip of the iceberg, and that when cows graze and browse from a wide variety of plants, then we benefit too. These advantages are one reason I want to manage the herd seasonally, so that their lactation coincides with “grass season”: spring, summer, and fall.

Raw Dairy

Why raw? Well, it comes raw – so first, why pasteurized?

Nowadays, most milk is pasteurized and there are good reasons for this. During the industrialization/urbanization boom of them mid-to-late 1800s, country people began moving to the cities. They wanted milk, like they were used to. There were two ways to meet that demand:

• Haul milk from the countryside into the cities, without refrigeration (there wasn’t any yet) and often in open containers.
• Produce milk in the cities, confining the cows and feeding them spent grain from alcohol production.

Both approaches led to milk-bourne illness. Two solutions were proposed:

• Raise healthy cows and produce milk in sanitary conditions, so that milk is nourishing and safe. (This was espoused by the now-defunct American Association of Medical Milk Commissions.)
• Pasteurize poor-quality, contaminated milk, so that it doesn’t cause acute illness.

The second approach won out because it was easier to implement and cheaper. But the question remains: is it possible to produce nourishing, safe milk, apart from pasteurization? Maybe, maybe not; even before that, the question should be: does pasteurization have any negative effects?

Here are some points in favor of fresh milk:

• Milk has immune benefits when consumed fresh⁶. Many studies have observed improved immune function among children and adults who consume milk that hasn’t been pasteurized. (One confounding detail is whether or not this effect actually comes from living on a farm. Some studies identified an immune-protective affect among urban consumers in non-farming environments; others found differences between fresh-milk-consuming children and pasteurized-milk-consuming children in the same rural community; others couldn’t determine whether the effect was from living on a farm or from drinking fresh milk.) You can read more from the pro-raw milk side here: https://www.rawmilkinstitute.org/updates/raw-milk-asthma-and-lung-health.

• Chemical constituents are definitely altered by pasteurization. I know this is true from dairy processing: yogurt sets much firmer when the milk is pre-heated to 180°F and cooled to fermentation temperature. Ricotta is made at high temperature. In both cases, denaturing whey proteins causes a curd to form. I don’t know if this makes them worse for the drinker.

  Raw milk advocates point out that pasteurization is known to reduce enzyme activity⁷ (which aids digestion⁸) and minerals⁹, and to degrade fats¹⁰. Personally, my intuition is that adding a high-temperature treatment denatures the food – such a process is foreign to nature and has obvious effects on the food’s quality (whether you count those effects healthful or not!).

• What about bacteria? For my part, I don’t consider my milk “probiotic.” All bacteria in milk are contaminants; if they’re there, they came from the environment somewhere (or, God forbid, udder infection). That said, any farm product has a trace of bacteria, and that counts. My bacteria tests show around 2000 “colony-forming units” (CFUs) of bacteria per milliliter. That sounds like a lot, but for comparison, milk for pasteurization can have up to 100,000 CFUs/ml. (And sauerkraut can have 900,000 CFU/ml¹¹, kombucha can have 100,000,000 CFU/ml – but these are cultured foods, controlled to promote the growth of “good” bacteria.)

  However, although I strive to reduce the presence of bacteria in my milk, I consider its non-sterility an advantage. Researchers have observed “lateral transfer” in the human gut¹² where bacteria from the environment have passed genes to bacteria living inside people. The study looked at a particular starch in seaweed and identified genes for breaking down that starch in East Asian populations but not European populations. Lateral transfer (or horizontal gene transfer) has been widely attested elsewhere; in the case of seaweed, presumably, bacteria that survived processing passed their genes to bacteria inside the human eater. Those bacteria had an edge on their neighbors, since they could digest seaweed starches. As a result, that bacteria out-reproduced others. The bacteria “won”; so did the human. (This process only works if the particular seaweed remains a regular part of the eater’s diet. Otherwise, the “upgraded” bacteria has no advantage.)

  I hope that the same (or similar) mechanism might help with digesting milk. That is, if non-sterile milk is a regular part of my diet, then my gut might “upgrade” itself to digest it better. Maybe this would come from “lateral transfer”; maybe it would come from survival of environmental bacteria. I’m not sure, but I know I want to leverage the environmental microbiome in making use of farm foods.

• The process itself is dubious: it is energy-demanding (to heat and rapidly cool the milk), capital-intensive (requiring large, specialized equipment), and time-intensive. If this step can be eliminated, then I think we could have more small dairying. (And I think that would be good, as described above.)

So, although I wouldn’t deny the value of pasteurization in its context (which we do live in – I’ve been to a dairy!), I think there are good reasons to explore other ways of safely producing and distributing milk and processed dairy foods.

Conclusion

Is small, grass-fed, raw dairying going to take over the world? Maybe not – but that’s how dairying worked when milk received its reputation as a healthful food. Historically, transhumance connected lactating ruminant herds to lush, seasonal grasses, and the resulting dairy foods proved their worth. I’m interested in exploring seasonal dairying in my own context for all the reasons described above.

Footnotes