The Great Raw Milk Debate

I've been asked a few times now several variations of the following questions: Do you get to drink raw milk on the farm? And can you get me some?

The answers are no and no. But the topic has come up often enough that I think it's worth discussing.

Raw milk is a topic that can be pretty polarizing. People feel strongly about it from both sides - from the public officials who cite it as one of the leading causes of dairy-related illness to the moms who drive for two hours to purchase it where it's legal. Since the FDA banned inter-state raw milk sales nearly thirty years ago, illegal raw milk sales have skyrocketed. Now, many raw milk lovers have to get their dairy fix using methods that more resemble a drug deal than anything, from joining secret milk clubs to buying their milk labeled as pet food.

The sale of raw milk is illegal in Washington, D.C. and in the state of Maryland, where the dairy is located. Hence, no raw milk for us. We milk straight into the pasteurizer, where the milk is pasteurized at the lowest possible setting, which some people believe makes a better-tasting milk than ultra-pasteurization, where milk is heated for just a couple seconds at extremely high heat.*

According to Clare, one of the biggest differences between our milk and store-bought variety is actually the fact that we don't homogenize our milk. Homogenizing milk is the process of breaking up the fat molecules so they stay suspended in the milk. If you let unhomogenized milk sit long enough, the fat drifts up to the top, creating a layer of cream with the milk underneath. (Check out the picture.) Clare believes that homogenizing not only makes milk harder to digest - she's had lactose-sensitive customers who can drink the farm's milk with no ill effects - but also ruins the taste.

Here's my two cents about the raw milk debate: cows are dirty, dirty, dirty creatures, and they have an unfortunate tendency to get manure all over themselves. When we milk, we dip the udders in disinfectant and clean them off before putting on the machines; we also use a filter to catch any pieces of dirt or hair or what have you that sneak in.

But mistakes happen. Just this week, one particular cow with a sick sense of humor took a huge dump on me right as I was getting ready to put the machine on her. It's entirely plausible that in a situation like that, manure could make its way into the milk supply... and it only takes a little bit to make people sick, if that little bit has some E. Coli hanging out inside. Hence, I am inclined to view some judicious pasteurization as a good thing.

Additionally, while many pro-raw milk folks tout the various health benefits that raw milk supposedly provides - benefits they say are destroyed by pasteurization - Marion Nestle goes to great lengths in her book What To Eat to explain that the jury is still out on those claims. According to Nestle, the body of scientific knowledge for raw milk benefits is somewhat shaky, with studies going both ways on the issue.

Which brings us to the question of taste. Having never tasted raw milk, I can't comment on how Clear Spring Creamery's milk compares. But I can say definitively that this farm's milk gives your average grocery store milk a good spanking every day of the week, and is the best milk I have ever - EVER - tasted. Frankly, I really don't see how raw milk could taste any better.

That being said, I feel that anyone seriously dedicated to drinking raw milk should go to great pains to research their suppliers. That means going to the farm, asking questions, getting a tour, meeting the cows, and so on. Raw milk buyers need to hold their suppliers to the highest possible standards if they want their dairy to be E. Coli-free.





*A quick pasteurizing tutorial: Pasteurization, named for Louis Pasteur who came up with the modern process in 1862, is the process of heating a food at a certain temperature for a definite length of time and then cooling it.

Her First Calf

Her First Calf
Wendell Berry


Her fate seizes her and brings her
down. She is heavy with it. It
wrings her. The great weight
is heaved out of her. It eases.
She moves into what she has become,
sure in her fate now
as a fish free in the current.
She turns to the calf who has broken
out of the womb's water and its veil.
He breathes. She licks his wet hair.
He gathers his legs under him
and rises. He stands, and his legs
wobble. After the months
of his pursuit of her, now
they meet face to face.
From the beginnings of the world
his arrival and her welcome
have been prepared. They have always
known each other.

The Truth About Cows

Cows have long eyelashes.
Cows are curious.
Cows are timorous.
Cows are great mothers.
Cows want to know what is in the bucket I'm carrying.
Cows do not moo politely.
Cows sometimes sound like angry dinosaurs.
Cows do not like it when their calves disappear.
Cows are not generous with their food.
Cows are not clean.
Cows do not hesitate to poop on whoever is behind them.
Cows like clover.
Cows disdain vetch.
Cows do not like to be touched without permission.
Cows have wet noses.
Cows have dainty ankles.
Cows eat their afterbirth.
Cows explore things (like my sweater) with their tongues.
Cows do not like the 4-wheeler.
Cows have large, luminous eyes.
Cows respond to kindness.
Cows are sneaky.
Cows think I don't hear them when they walk behind me.
Cows are creatures of habit.
Cows are superstitious.
Cows are patient.
Cows can get a little frisky.
Cows have grass stains on their knees.
Cows don't always understand death.
Cows can get depressed.
Cows are picturesque.
Cows like to be photographed.
Cows will win a staring contest.
Cows do not have a strongly developed sense of philanthropy.
Cows don't like to get their feet wet.
Cows want to know what you're doing.
Cows are methodical.
Cows are graceful, except when they're clumsy.
Cows are easily startled.
Cows like salt.
Cows hate it when they're blamed for global warming.

The Digs At Clear Spring Creamery

I have now been at Clear Spring Creamery for exactly one month and one day, and I realized that I have yet to put up pictures of my new digs. For shame! So here we are.

Mark and Clare have put me up in a camper - one of the little trailer-types that you hitch to the back of a husky vehicle. It's quite a step up for me from last year... remember the tent?

Don't get me wrong - I loved last year. And the tent was not bad at all. But at the end of the day, I spent very little time there. We ate all our meals at the house, the shower was at the house, the internet was at the house, my cell phone only got reception on the front porch of the house... I'm sure you get the general idea.

One of my biggest challenges at Brightwood was not having much, if any, alone time. I'm pretty evenly divided between being an extrovert and an introvert, and if I have too much or too little alone time, I start getting cranky. And sometimes, all I wanted was to be able to fix my own dinner and eat it alone, then enjoy a book and some tea and revel in my solitude.

It looks like the pendulum has swung the other direction this year, for I am the only intern. Being the only intern, I have the trailer entirely to myself. This is good, since it is tiny and there is only one bed. A HUGE BED ALL FOR ME.

....and a bathroom! (I'll spare you a picture of the toilet. But it's clean, I promise.)

I'm not too concerned about not getting enough human interaction, since I'm working with Mark and Clare during the day, and I've been eating dinner with their family (which includes their kids, Paul and Paige) once or twice a week. It's a nice balance. The other nights, I'm free to use my tiny kitchen to my heart's content, which can involve some creative repositioning of certain elements.

The camper comes equipped with a stove and a non-working oven, so Mark and Clare got a very large toaster oven (with a convection oven setting, even!) for all my baking needs. I have so far used it to make a sweet onion tart and a spinach-mushroom quiche, both of which were delightful. (It's in the corner, looking suspiciously like a Cold War-era microwave. See it?)

I tend to spend my evenings reading and drinking tea to my heart's content.

And my fridge is full of dairy products. Wonder how that happened?

Udderly Delightful

The udders on a cow can tell you a great deal... how close the cow is to calving, or if she's already been milked, for example. So, feeling sort of like a pervert, I walked around and took pictures of different cow udders to illustrate this point.

When a cow gets closer to giving birth, her udders will fill and look tight with the milk that's inside. Before that, her udders will tend to look looser. Also, heifers* tend to have little udders that will become larger after a year of milking.

After milking, the udders will soften and look looser. In older cows, they will soften so much that they look like an empty leather bag. All of these pictures were taken many hours after milking in the afternoon, however.



*Heifers haven't had a calf yet, while cows have. Who knew?

The Miracle of Birth

Last week, I was taking an early evening stroll when I happened upon a cow giving birth. Since I had my trusty Nikon with me, I got some very aww-worthy pictures of the mama cow welcoming her little calf into the world.

My Morning Milking

The countryside is greening up here in Maryland. The trees are blooming, and after a bit of rain last night, the clover is shooting up by the inch.

The warm weather definitely makes milking in the morning a tad more enjoyable than it was my first few days, when my nose dripped an endless cascade of snot and my fingers went stiff and numb with cold, despite dunking them in hot water as often as I could get away with it. But there was still something rather nice in the way I could see the cows' breath as they stood patiently in line, waiting to be milked... not to mention the steam that billowed from the copious piles of manure they left all over the milking barn. How beautiful, I thought.

I've now been at the farm for two weeks, and milking the cows is clearly the one task that I will clock the most hours performing over the next five months. And after a couple weeks, I feel like I'm getting the hang of it, minus a few novice mistakes here and there.

Milking is a dirty, dirty job, and as a result I will not be bringing my camera anywhere near the milking barn. But I'll do my best to describe it. You know, with words and stuff.

Mark and I start the milking process at 7 each morning. First we have to do all the fun prep work, which includes spraying down everything in the barn with water (it helps the poop not to cling so much, meaning an easier clean-up later), putting in a new filter for the milk, filling the feed buckets, taking caps off the milkers, and bringing out the various accessories we need.

By this point, the cows who have played this game before have lined up outside the barn. But there are still several stragglers who are either reluctant to be milked or just haven't figured out the swing of things yet. (One girl, who I've been calling Sneaky, is very good at evasive maneuvers.) So Mark and I round them up, and herd them into the milk barn. The cows who have been doing this for a while line up immediately, and we pour feed into the trough in front of them to keep them bribed occupied while we milk.

Before we clap the machines on their udders, we have to clean them, since they're usually pretty yucky after a day of wallowing in the glorious, muddy outdoors. We dip each udder in a solution that disinfects and softens the udder, and wipe them off with a paper towel. We also spray a little milk to check for signs of infection - a different color, or flakes in the fluid, for example. After the ladies are all cleaned up, we put the milking machines on them, which pumps the milk into a pasteurizer in the creamery.

The milking barn is set up so that eight cows can be milked on either side, with the milking machines in the center. Luckily the machines - and us - are protected from poop attacks by a poop shield. And there is a lot of poop from which we are shielded.

After all the cows have been milked, we let them out and commence with clean-up... which, so far, has been a formidable task. I use a high-powered hose to spray all the poop and pee and spilled feed into submission, and escort it down a drain at the end of the milking barn. Then I put the caps back on the milkers, take out the filter, and bring in the various buckets and hoses that need to be washed. And another bout of milking is complete.