Till the Cows Come Home

by Philip Walling

  Although this nonsense has largely been discredited, it still nags away at millions of otherwise sensible people, particularly overweight ones, who are induced to buy processed ‘low-fat’ food products, made palatable by the addition of sugar. This attitude has affected the liquid milk market, which paradoxically has benefited hugely from the campaign against its products. The dairy processor can now get as much for milk denuded completely of its fat (red top) – little more than white water – as he can for proper milk. Skimmed milk used to be fed to pigs; now the processors can sell the skimmed milk separately from the cream and butter and cut out the pig.

  One day I happened to mention the subject to my farming cousin John, a strong, lean and very fit man in his late fifties who loved fat of all kinds, particularly cream, home-made salted butter, the crisp fat off beef and lamb, and pork crackling. His particular favourite was pig-foot pie, which his wife made him as a treat – pig’s trotters swimming in fat, with carrots and onions, under thick pastry, with a patty pan holding up the middle.

  He had thought about the cholesterol question, as had most people at the time, because of the relentless badgering in the media from government scientists, ‘health professionals’ and food manufacturers. It was so pervasive and convincing that I had begun to worry that my father (who was also in his late fifties and very fit) might be silently developing heart disease because he ate animal fats, in particular butter and cream. John cocked his head to one side with one of his wry half-smiles.

  ‘When I was growing up in the 1920s and 30s,’ he said, ‘we lived off the fat of the land: butter, cream, milk, eggs, as much meat as we wanted. We always had home-cured bacon and ham, black pudding and brawn, and liver and kidney when we killed a sheep. We had cock chickens, a few ducks, and a goose at Christmas; and we grew all the vegetables we needed. Every Friday my mother bought fish from the fish van. When rationing came with the war, we hardly noticed. We never went short. Nobody checked up on how much we were eating. We just carried on as before. And we helped out anybody who was living on rations if we trusted them to keep quiet. If eating fat clogs your arteries, then I must be a walking medical miracle. I think it’s a lot of nonsense. The best rule you can follow is to eat as close to the soil as possible; the less your food’s messed about with, the better.’

  Once upon a time, my little milk round would have been nothing out of the ordinary. Every town and village up and down the land would have had a farmer or two delivering untreated milk door to door that he had produced from his own cows. Now there are only about a hundred farmers left in England and Wales who deliver their own raw milk.

  Phil and Steve Hook (P. G. T. Hook and Son) from Longleys Farm, Hailsham in Sussex, cleverly thrive by producing raw milk as it used to be. They have not increased the size of their 70-cow herd or their 150-acre farm, or installed a fancy milking parlour, nor do they feed imported high-protein cattle cake, or sell their milk to any of the wholesalers, or process it in any way. They employ a staff of 17 and now claim to produce half of all the raw milk sold in England and Wales. They deal direct with their customers and charge a proper price that guarantees a decent return. They have milk rounds in Sussex on Mondays and Fridays and also send milk and butter nationwide by courier in polystyrene-lined insulated boxes. Their local deliveries are in returnable glass bottles at £1 a pint, while their national deliveries are, of necessity, in plastic bottles, but they will collect the polystyrene boxes for recycling.

  Despite considerable pressure from the government to force all milk to be pasteurized, 2 per cent of consumers still want unpasteurized milk. This demand keeps the government from banning it altogether, even though it has been trying since 1946, when compulsory pasteurization was first proposed. Selling it retail in shops was banned in 1985. It can only be sold directly to consumers by registered milk producers at the farm gate (or through a farm catering operation), at farmers’ markets (by the producer), or by a distributor from a vehicle used as ‘shop premises’ (milk rounds).

  The cows must be healthy and free from brucellosis and tuberculosis, and must pass frequent and exacting health checks. The milking and dairy premises must comply with Food Standards Agency hygiene rules and, crucially, the milk must bear a cigarette-packet type of approved health warning. Raw cream does not have to have the health warning but must have ‘made with raw milk’ displayed on the packaging. Selling raw milk is banned in Scotland, yet the Hooks and a few other producers send it there by courier, even to the Highlands and Islands. This is an encouraging interpretation of the rules.

  There is strong and growing opposition to the routine compulsory pasteurization of milk. It is arguably no longer necessary because all cows are TB tested and any found to have the disease are compulsorily slaughtered. It has been found that countries with the highest milk consumption also have higher rates of osteoporosis. This is hard to understand until you realize that in these countries it is processed, pasteurized and homogenized milk that is consumed. Processing by heat treating makes milk acidic and causes leaching of alkali from the body. There is some medical opinion that removing the good bacteria in cow’s milk also affects resistance to disease and causes allergies and illness.

  Many of the Hooks’ customers claim their milk has cured asthma, eczema and hay fever, and lowered their cholesterol. One customer in the Midlands has it delivered every week for her son, who has cystic fibrosis, on the advice of the boy’s consultant clinician. There are claims that raw cow’s milk can shrink tumours. The Food Standards Agency concedes there has not been a single incidence of food poisoning linked to raw milk in England or Wales for over a decade, but it does not look favourably upon it. Nor do the big dairy processing companies, which hardly lose an opportunity to denigrate its safety. But the Hooks’ milk is more stringently tested than most milk destined for pasteurization, and they are scrupulous about doing weekly laboratory tests for a range of different pathogens to make sure they keep ahead of the FSA.

  From the producer’s point of view, once it has been pasteurized, milk becomes a commodity and is subject to the laws of supply and demand. Raw milk, on the other hand, is a niche product for which people willingly pay a premium. Although their cows only produce about 4,500 litres a year each, their milk sells for on average eight times the wholesale price. This is what people are prepared to pay for ‘white gold’. And yet in the hands of the processors and supermarkets it becomes ‘white water’ and is sold at a loss. The answer for dairy farmers is surely to go direct to their market and cut out the host of middlemen who profit from their product. They should take back control. This is a much more sensible and sustainable way to farm than making farms ever larger, more intensive and industrial. It also keeps families farming a little piece of their own land in the country.

  If dairying had not been taken over by the big processors, we might still have locally produced grass-fed milk in every part of Britain. Not milk from cows kept in huge sheds and fed on imported soya meal and maize. But almost compulsory pasteurization means that whatever the quality of the milk, it can be made safe by heat treatment, giving the advantage to industrial dairying, and to processors who dictate the price of the commodity.

  In common with 20 other US states, it is actually unlawful in Indiana to sell unpasteurized cow’s milk and milk products for human consumption. In neighbouring Illinois and Wisconsin, producers may sell it from their own farms, and in Missouri they can sell it from a milk round. The US Food and Drug Administration bans the sale or distribution of cow’s milk and milk products across state boundaries unless they are pasteurized and meet the standards of the US Pasteurized Milk Ordinance. As of April 2016, the sale of raw milk in shops was lawful in 13 states, and 17 permit raw milk sales from the farm where it is produced. Eight states that prohibit milk sales allow raw milk to be obtained through the legal fiction of ‘cow-share’ agreements, in which a person can buy a share in a cow and thus be entitled to consume his own cow’s milk. It is not unlawful in the US for anyone to cons
ume raw milk, though anyhow, preventing it would be impossible to enforce. And except in Michigan, which forbids the sale of raw milk for any purpose, all states allow it to be sold for animal feed.

  This allows the Yegerlehner family, who farm near Clay City, to sell all the milk they can produce from their little herd of 30 grass-fed cows: they make cheese, butter, ice cream, yoghurt, in fact anything that can be produced from cow’s milk. But everything they sell must be labelled ‘Pet Food Not for Human Consumption’. The FDA knows full well that most of it is consumed by human beings, but there is nothing they can do to prevent people eating pet food if they want. It is an odd state of affairs that pets in America eat better than their owners.

  The irony is that because the milk is sold for animal consumption, there is no proper licensing system. There are minimal, if any, hygiene inspections, and so long as producers do not make a great noise about it, the FDA turns a blind eye. In fact, Alan Yegerlehner, who makes the cheese and butter, maintains his own high standards of hygiene and has never had any complaint or reported illness from any of the pets or their owners consuming his produce. The farm is in the middle of nowhere, just like much of rural America; the nearest city, Indianapolis, is over an hour’s drive away. The Yegerlehners would benefit from internet advertising for their produce, but as it’s illegal, they simply cannot say publicly that it is beneficial for human health.

  Their little herd is managed with the lowest possible inputs. They have gone back far beyond the modern agro-industrial complex to an earlier time when farmers sold what their land could produce without artificially altering their environment with chemicals, fertilizers and expensive machinery. The pastures are natural grassland, mob-stocked – what we would call rotationally grazed – and managed to allow the build-up of forage during the growing season so that the cattle have enough to last them through most of the winter. Their calving and milking is naturally timed to coincide with the growth of grass in the spring. And as the growth and quality of the grazing declines in the autumn, the milk yield declines with it, until by December the herd is dry and milking ceases until the first cow calves the following spring.

  ‘We enjoy our fireside and read books in the winter,’ says Kate Yegerlehner. ‘It’s lovely to have some time off when you don’t have to get up to milk cows.’ And even when the cows are at their peak production, they only milk once a day. Milking is a leisurely affair, which does not dominate the day as it does with herds that need to be forced to produce as much as possible. The two cheese rooms are refrigerated wagon trailers fitted out with shelves, and the raw-milk pet food is sealed into plastic bags to await delivery to drop-off points and farmers’ markets in Indianapolis.

  In some countries where pasteurization is rigorously enforced and sales of raw milk have been banned completely, the legal fiction of cow-sharing has attracted the heavy hand of the state. In Canada, in 2010, such a cow-sharing arrangement landed Michael Schmidt, an Ontario dairy farmer and advocate of raw milk, with a prison sentence. At first the magistrate acquitted him of 19 charges of distributing unpasteurized milk. But the Ontario Court of Justice allowed an appeal by the prosecution and reversed that decision. Schmidt was then convicted of 13 charges of breaching the ban on selling raw milk, fined $9,150 and put on probation for a year. His appeal to the Ontario Court of Appeal was dismissed. The court issued an injunction preventing him from distributing raw milk in the state. In 2011, he began a five-week hunger strike in protest against his treatment. Then in 2013, he was found guilty of contempt of court for breaching the injunction and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment, suspended for a year. His appeal was dismissed in 2015. The story of his 25-year fight is the subject of the film Milk War.

  Schmidt is an outspoken advocate for our right to eat what we want, and refused to keep his head down. The authorities have raided his farm numerous times, seized and destroyed equipment, and taken various enforcement proceedings against him. He is the most prominent of those campaigning against the blanket ban on raw milk being sold in Canada. The farm, which has been at the centre of the Canadian raw milk battle for over 23 years, is owned by 150 families, who are members of the Our Farm Our Food cooperative. In March 2017, the campaign culminated in a ten-day trial of four of the owners, who were charged with obstructing a police officer during a well-publicized raid and dramatic stand-off in October 2015. At the trial, the police put on a great show of force. Four heavily armed uniformed officers were in court, with three others waiting outside. The trial was adjourned several times; eventually, after nearly two years, the court found Schmidt guilty of obstructing a ‘peace’ officer and sentenced him to 60 days in prison, which he can serve at weekends. At the time of writing, the judgement and sentence are under appeal, without much hope of it being successful.

  The police had wrongly claimed (deliberately, the defendants said) that the men were members of the Freemen of the Land, a libertarian organization classed as an ‘extremist’ group in Canada. Categorizing these farmers as extremists caused no end of trouble for them and their families, with their names being added to a national database of people who posed a violent threat to the state. Border agencies and other state enforcers were alerted to their dangerous proclivities, which affected their lives in a host of different ways.

  The Canadian state was determined to make an example of the people involved. Farmers may have led revolutions in the past, but surely consuming unpasteurized milk from their own cows didn’t require armed police to raid private property, seize computers, documents and milking equipment, and fix CCTV cameras to trees. The authorities behaved as if milk were poisonous. Schmidt points out that in over 20 years, nobody has been harmed by his milk and that drug-dealing is treated more leniently than selling unpasteurized milk. The state has even threatened to take the farmers’ children into care if their parents give them their milk. The judge in Ontario issued a permanent injunction against all those involved in the farm cooperative, prohibiting any further raw milk production without a licence, on pain of criminal penalties.

  It is hard to understand the court’s reason for closing the dairying operation when the judge only found Schmidt guilty of obstructing a police officer. It can only be by implication that the cow-sharing agreement was deemed unlawful, although I haven’t read a transcript of the decision. The Canadian authorities are so determined to prevent the sale of raw milk that they will stretch the law almost to breaking point. The same thing happened in California in 2011, when the FDA raided Rawsome Foods, destroyed 800 gallons of milk and arrested its proprietor, James Stewart, for selling unpasteurized milk without a licence. Eventually the business was forced to close, while Stewart accepted a plea bargain and was fined rather than risk an expensive trial and a possible long American-style prison sentence.

  In 2014, the UK Food Standards Agency came under some pressure to relax the rules relating to the sale of unpasteurized milk. It was argued that pasteurization had done much to degrade this once highly valued food. But the dairy industry, represented by Dairy UK, was vigorous in its opposition. It would prefer all milk to be pasteurized and was opposed to any relaxation of the rules. It argued that allowing the wider sale of raw milk to satisfy the 2 per cent of milk consumers who had shown an interest in it would cause ‘significant food safety issues’. In other words, raw milk is dangerous and letting more people buy it and drink it would increase the risk of harm. People must be protected by the state from their own folly. This chimes with the view of generations of officials that pasteurization of milk is unarguable, and if all milk were pasteurized by law it would be a great advance in public health.

  CHAPTER 9

  My Little Herd of Heifers

  WHEN I FIRST started farming, I knew next to nothing about keeping livestock. Apart from a few hens and some geese, I’d never had anything to do with the welfare of farm animals that belonged to me and for which I was solely responsible. My year at agricultural college was fine in theory, but it didn’t tell me anything about t
he art of breeding domestic animals. I had no idea about the difference between good-quality cattle and ones that would cost you more to keep than they turned out to be worth. I had no idea that some would convert their rations into production while others would be so high-maintenance that they would eat their heads off for little reward.

  Because I began farming as an outsider and in a small way, I was rather awed by big cattle, so I decided to start with some small ones, which I naively thought would be easier to manage. I had seen some Dexters in a field near Carlisle and thought they might just fit the bill. Little, black, tough and slightly hairy, these were Irish crofters’ cattle, and I thought they would be hardy enough to thrive on my rather indifferent hilly grazings, where there was enough room for them to stay out all winter without housing.

  I happened to mention to John, my farming cousin, to whom I turned for advice, that I was thinking of buying some Dexters.

  ‘Dexters?’ he scoffed. ‘What the hell for?’

  He turned to his son, who was a little older than me and who was passing across the yard with two full buckets of milk on his way to feed the dairy calves.

  ‘Mick, d’you hear that? He’s talking about buying Dexters.’

  Mick snorted and carried on into the calf pens.

  ‘They might suit my land and they’re cheap to keep, and I think they’re rather attractive little cattle,’ I replied defensively.

  ‘Oh, they might be pretty little things, but that’s all they’ll ever be. They’re hobby cattle. They’re cheap to keep because they’re not worth spending money on. You generally get out what you put in.’

  This was my first lesson in cattle breeding.