Low Risk Raw Milk

Happy Thanksgiving. Today, we are thankful for low risk raw milk.

We are also thankful for all of our healthy cows and calves, our employees, and for all of our customers who appreciate quality, locally sourced food that is life and health to the body.

We strive our best 7 days a week, every week of the year, to sustain local low risk raw milk production for us and you.

We are thankful that we live in the state of Idaho that allows for this level of food freedom, where you can buy raw milk at your grocery store. There are not a lot of states that allow this in this country.

We must remain vigilant to maintain food freedom.

Recently, the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare (IDHW) had a press release that got picked up by pretty much every news source in and around the state claiming that raw milk has sickened at least 20 Idahoans with campylobacter and/or STEC since August. They didn’t name the dairies or the locations and gave the usual “we are working with our state and local partners”…

IDHW issues similar press releases pretty much annually.

Did you know that according to the FDA, the number 1 source of foodborne illness is plant foods (vegetables and fruits)? They are responsible for 49% of illnesses, followed by meat and poultry at nearly 30%.

FDA stats tend to run similarly every year, and they generally are as follows:

• Salmonella illnesses came from a wide variety of foods.
• E. coli O157 illnesses were most often linked to Vegetable Row Crops (such as leafy greens) and Beef.
• Listeria monocytogenes illnesses were most often linked to Dairy products and Fruits.
  • Dairy and Fruits remain the top two categories with the highest estimated attribution percentages, but the difference between the two categories is not statistically significant.
  • There was an increase in the estimated attribution of Listeria illnesses to Vegetable Row Crops from 3.4% in 2013 to 12.5 % in 2016 due to the impact of a large multi-state outbreak in 2015 linked to prepackaged lettuce.
• Campylobacter illnesses were most often linked to Chicken after removing Dairy outbreaks from the estimates.
  • Most foodborne Campylobacter outbreaks were associated with unpasteurized milk, which is not widely consumed, and those outbreaks likely over-represent Dairy as a source of Campylobacter illness.
  • For 2016, Chicken had a significantly higher estimated attribution percentage than the other non-Dairy food categories. The adjusted Chicken percentage increased from 9.5% to 30.3% after removing Dairy.

We take that second to last paragraph very seriously – the fact that campylobacter does seem to have a higher incidence in unpasteurized milk than many other food products.

So, how do we make sure we are producing milk that is as low risk as possible? While we don’t test for campylobacter, we do test every bottling batch of our milk for what is called Standard Plate Count (or Rapid Aerobic Count – SPC/RAC) and for coliform count (CC). Both of these tests considered the best standard testing to ensure our product is as low risk as possible. We do these tests in our own on-farm lab.

When the state of Idaho used to have standards for raw milk, they tested dairies monthly, and their allowable limits were 15,000 cfu/ml for SPC/RAC, and 25 coliforms per ml.

The Raw Milk Institute standard is 5,000 cfu/ml for SPC/RAC and 10 for coliforms per ml for CC.

https://www.rawmilkinstitute.org/common-standards

This November, our lab results currently are:

Interestingly, our coliforms in November and October are always higher than throughout the summer, though still well below the RAWMI common acceptable limit. We theorize this is because the two months this year have been VERY wet and muddy. The cows when outside do get muddy feet, and coliforms are common in soil. It’s a theory. Coliform count is not to be confused with E coli. There are many types of coliform bacteria and most are non pathogenic. They are used as a standard because they indicate cleanliness and risk for pathogens when they are high.

We’ll end this post with the following links. Both of these discuss why it might be time for government agencies to change their tunes regarding raw milk consumption and risk, and both of these use empirical data that suggest low risk raw milk exists!

https://www.rawmilkinstitute.org/updates/pathogen-growth-in-raw-milk

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7019599

Happy Thanksgiving!