Data About Raw Dairy and How to Find Raw Milk Near You

If you live in a state where the sale of raw milk is approved, but you’re struggling to find dairy farms that sell unpasteurized milk, here are a few avenues you could try to get connected to a dairy farmer.

All of the advice in this blog post is for United States residents only. The information included in this blog post is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness. I am not a doctor. I am not a raw dairy farmer. If you have questions or concerns about raw milk, you should contact a medical professional or a raw milk dairy farmer for more definite answers to your questions.

When my family and I switched to raw milk, I was able to find a raw milk farmer in my state with no issue. In Arkansas, and a large majority of midwestern states, the sale of raw milk is legal so long as the sale is from the physical location of the farm.

With the popularity of social media, I was able to get connected to a raw milk farmer with no problem!

But what if social media wasn’t available? Would I have been able to get connected?

The answer is yes. And I’m confident the answer is yes for you, too.

If you are struggling to find a raw milk farmer in your area, I hope the resources in this blog post can get you to where you want to go.

All of the links included in this blog post will also be available, by title, at the end of this blog post.

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How to Find a Raw Milk Farm Near You

There are several different ways to get connected to a raw milk farmer in your area –

Social Media
Other Internet Resources
Word of Mouth

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to log on to your social media account and search for something like “farms near me.” But don’t just search for locations. Search groups, hashtags, and accounts.

Social media can be a cheap and quick way to find farming resources in your area.

If you don’t have a social media account, there are other online resources you can utilize.

A Campaign For Real Milk’s Raw Milk Finder is one of those websites. You can easily search your state and zip code to find a local farm.

The thing I love about ACFRM’s milk finder is that it also includes goat’s milk!

Raw milk is not just specific to cow’s milk. Raw milk is the broad term to include cow’s, sheep’s, or goat’s milk.

The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put together a map (as up to date as 2019) that shows each state’s restrictions on the sale of raw milk.

There are three main categories raw milk sales fall into – in a retail store, directly from the farm, or sale is prohibited.

This map is a good tool because raw milk is not federally legal to sell across state lines.

Do you like to drink raw milk and garden in your backyard?

Diving into the science behind raw milk is exciting for me. But so is growing pumpkins and doting on my chickens!

If you like to discuss controversial topics and talk about chickens, sign up for my email newsletter! Every week I talk about what we’re doing.

History of the Sale of Raw Milk in the United States

Today, raw milk is available for sale in the majority of the United States. But would you believe it hasn’t always been this way?

During the rise of urbanization in the early 1900s, dairy cows were located next to larger processing plants like whiskey distilleries. These cows were being fed the remains of the grain mash from those whiskey distilleries.

The poor diet and terrible living conditions compounded the cow’s illnesses. They were producing a sickly, bluish-tinted milk.

To disguise the obviously tainted milk, dairy farmers added chalk, flour, and other substances to the milk to market it as country milk. In reality, they were producing “swill milk.”

Thousands of children from New York to Chicago to San Francisco died because of the contaminated swill milk. It caused the public to cry out for distillery and dairy management reformation. And a pushback to raw milk.

Read more about the history of milk here.

Have you ever read Upton Sinclair’s 1905 novel “The Jungle”? Sinclair notes quite a few problems with the meat-packing industry. Improper management was a widespread problem at the turn of the 20th century.

When Louis Pasteur pioneered pasteurization in the 1860s, it’s said that people in America were hardly sold on the idea. President Theodore Roosevelt’s surgeon general later released a report vouching for the efficacy of pasteurized milk as a way to combat the health crisis.

Pasteurization is a heating process intended to kill bad bacteria from milk, eggs, cheese, juice, and more.

President Roosevelt later passed the Federal Food and Drugs Act in 1906, also known as the Wiley Act, which added an advisory capacity to the entities scientific mission. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was originally the Bureau of Chemistry.

The health crisis continued when a 1910 tuberculosis epidemic infected thousands of cows and eventually spurred other milk and pasteurization regulations.

The Bureau of Chemistry became the Food, Drug, and Insecticide Administration in 1927. The name was shortened to the Food and Drug Administration in 1930.

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United States Raw Milk Laws

By 1987, the FDA issued a regulation that stated the sale of raw milk was not legal across state lines. However, the FDA claims it won’t take action against those who purchase raw milk across state lines for personal consumption.

Today, raw milk sales are left up to the states, not the federal government.

Since raw milk sales are left up to the states, you must reference your state’s laws to know whether or not your state allows raw milk sales for human consumption. As of 2016, 38 states approved the legal purchase of raw milk.

In Arkansas, raw milk is not available for sale in retail stores or at farmers’ markets. It’s available for pickup from the farm location only.

Raw Milk and Human Health

The information included in this blog post is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness. I am not a doctor. I am not a raw dairy farmer. If you have questions or concerns about raw milk, contact a medical professional or a raw milk dairy farmer for more definite answers.

The 1987 FDA regulation concerning the intrastate sale of raw milk was put in place due to the concern of E. coli, listeria, campylobacter, or salmonella presence in raw milk. These, and other bacteria, can cause illnesses. Usually, they’re referred to as “food poisoning.”

In a press release published in 2007, the FDA claims the CDC identified 45 outbreaks of food-borne illnesses linked to unpasteurized milk and cheeses from 1998 to 2005. From those outbreaks, there were 1,007 illnesses, 104 hospitalizations, and 2 deaths.

The FDA updated the information, again citing the CDC, to say from 1998 to 2018 there were 202 outbreaks linked to raw milk and cheeses. Of those 202 outbreaks, there were 2,645 illnesses and 228 hospitalizations.

If you were to divide the outbreaks and illnesses by the 20 years the data has been reported, that’s 10 outbreaks per year and 133 illnesses per year.

According to the British Columbia Fresh Milk Research Project, a herd share association and nonprofit in British Columbia, there have been 155 outbreaks related to pasteurized dairy products in the United States between 1966 and 2015.

Of those 155 outbreaks, there have been 153,877 illnesses, 282 hospitalizations, and 82 deaths.

If you were to divide the outbreaks and illnesses by the 49 years the data has been reported, that’s 3 outbreaks per year and 3,140 illnesses per year.

Food poisoning outbreaks aren’t limited to dairy products. For FDA Public Health Advisories from foodborne illness outbreaks, visit this website.

These bacteria can be found in fecal matter (manure, poop), milking machines that haven’t been thoroughly cleaned, and other surfaces. The bacteria are transferred into the milk if an udder hasn’t been properly cleaned or the unsanitary milking equipment touches the udder.

Improper cattle management accounted for the “swill milk scandal” around the 1850s.

Improper cattle management (or human contamination) and fecal contamination are two of four ways raw milk becomes contaminated by pathogens, according to the National Library of Medicine (NLOM). The other two ways are direct passage from cow’s blood to cow’s milk and mastitis, an udder infection.

There are no United States-based scientific studies that cite the benefits of consuming raw milk over pasteurized milk.

Some claim that raw milk can improve allergies, eczema, asthma, and lactose intolerance.

The Stanford Prevention Research Group published a blind study in 2014 examining 16 people’s response to lactose intolerance when exposed to whole raw milk, organic whole milk, and organic soy milk.

The study concluded symptom severity did not differ between pasteurized milk and raw milk.

Unlike lactose intolerance, the Raw Milk Institute (RMI) points to a study from the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (JOAACI) that examined raw milk’s impact on histamine responses.

The JOAACI published a 2011 study that tested about 8,000 school-aged children from rural Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The study found when the children drank raw milk, they were less likely to develop asthma, hay fever, or atopy. What’s more, boiled farm milk showed no protective effect.

All results were adjusted to account for familial history of the allergies, and whether or not the children were exposed to farm site allergens.

The same journal also looked into raw milk consumption and ear infections. This 2015 study on almost 1,000 infants from rural Austria, Finland, France, Germany concluded early life consumption of raw milk reduced the risk of respiratory infections and fever by 30 percent!

The RMI claims allergy protection ceases when milk is heated above 149 degrees Fahrenheit and that whey proteins may be responsible for raw milk’s effectiveness against allergies.

This 2020 Ireland study may support that. The NLOM followed 24 participants through a 12-week cook course in Ireland. The participants largely ate from the organic farm and consumed raw milk and cheeses.

After 12 weeks, the NLOM found participants had an increase in beneficial bacteria in their gut, which was spurred by the introduction and consumption of unpasteurized dairy products.

Do you think there are benefits to raw milk? Comment on this blog post and let me know.

As of March 2024, the FDA was investigating bird flu virus in dairy cattle. By June 2024, CBS was reporting bird flu samples were found in milk even after it was pasteurized.

Study after study concludes that there will be some sort of contamination that may impact public health. It’s up to you to balance what information is available to you, state laws, and your conscience to make the decision that’s best for you and your family.

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Why Give Raw Milk a Heat Treatment?

Pasteurization isn’t the only reason to heat raw milk.

Cooking with raw milk may require heating it to certain temperatures. For example, I make yogurt from scratch. In order to do that, I heat my raw milk to 180 degrees Fahrenheit.

I also make some soft cheese that requires me to heat the milk.

Does heating milk impact or decrease the nutritional value? Some say no. However, there are no scientific studies done in the United States on raw milk to verify those claims.

Why My Family Drinks Raw Milk

During the 2020 pandemic, we realized how reliant we were upon the industrial food system. A system that was showcasing troubling issues when faced with production coming to a screeching halt.

We decided to start chipping away at our reliance upon that food system.

My husband was raised on a farm and longed to continue the legacy of farmers in his family (he’s a third-generation farmer. Learn more about our journey on my About Me page). So partnering with local farmers until we could produce what we consumed ourselves was a natural way for us to bridge that gap.

Shifting to raw milk was a change we delayed making. It wasn’t until our son began suffering from seasonal allergies, and we were told he was facing prolonged clinical treatment if he didn’t grow out of them, that we decided to make the switch.

Our testimony is this – raw milk has helped our family with a myriad of issues. And we would recommend raw milk to anyone who is comfortable with assuming the risks of consuming an unadulterated food product.

We are in good health, of sound mind, and readily stay up to date on studies and news concerning raw milk.

In terms of the benefits of raw milk, we will leave that to you and your family to consider.

Raw Milk Products – Moo or Noooo?

Was that too cheesy? HAH!

I hope that this blog post helped you better understand the history of raw milk production in the United States, introduced food safety questions you can ponder, and encouraged you to do your research on the science behind raw milk.

Remember – I am not a doctor. I am not a raw milk farmer. If you have any questions, ask a medical professional or a raw dairy farmer in your area.

You should also take the time to verify the studies in this blog post! You get to make the decisions for your family. Make them from facts – not fear!

You can verify the information in this blog post by scrolling to the “works cited” section at the end of this blog post.

WHEW!

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