state governments supported the move towards pasteurization and passed last making it harder to get run over time consumers accepted this move to pasteurized milk and the health benefits of our bodies nowadays are more used to a lower bacteria there will be lots of problems of the of raw milk it is essentially better for you because if you just a look at the enzymes and vitamins and nutrients in it by it's the pasteurization is a safeguard raw milk is whatever comes out of the cow it's a very clean it's a good it's a great product if it's not people are going to get sick and it's too dangerous to really to really do that without a past relation raw milk yeah it's got it's got microbes i most of those microbes that we get exposed to in that live in our gut are harmless they they don't make a sick and even if they do there's probably just low levels that if it's just a low level exposure it's not necessarily life threatening or a huge problem but there are microbes that get into milk that we know can be deadly severe gastrointestinal illness kidney failure strokes and death and the bug i'm talking about is eco elia one five seven it's rare it's not an everyday occurrence in every gallon the raw milk that you buy year it's like you're playing russian roulette with the with the milk and some horribly high odds ratio but it is a risk the state of maryland does not allow the sale of raw milk directly to the consumer and that does include the cow sharing programs and this is in concert in agreement with the federal drug administration f d a c d c which is the center for disease control the american academy of pediatrics the american medical association the u s intimate health association the world health organization and the reason why the state in maryland does not allow the sale of roe milk romel can contain a wide variety of pathogens which are disease causing agents i became an activist because banned in my state i live in maryland and initially when we first started drinking fresh milk we participated in a cow share program now a cashier is very similar to a timeshare where families will go in together on a cow and then get the milk from their own animal and that was legal in maryland when we first started drinking but then the health department changed the regulations to ban that that really upset me because here i am trying to feed my children  and the health department is completely undermining my authority as a parent all my research and same you don't know what you're doing and you can give us your family now i can go out and feed them fast food three times a day i've been through four pregnancies i could smoke through all of them and yet i can go to a farmer near me and purchase this amazing healthful nutrient dense fresh milk kids we decided to form a community supported dairy where we would have a small herd of cows and milk and then distribute that milk to the members of this group we did that and we had one hundred members or so but ag and markets did not like that they came and inspected us with several warrants they tried to get us through contempt of court they did several court actions to stop us from milking cows and distributing milk privately to members of our community supported dairy the state of new york started to ask elated foresman actions against the smiths first they would send in inspectors to the smiths farm and say you need a permit for what you're doing and the smiths would say no we don't need a permit the department of ag and markets with ben levy administrative fines against the smiths the department of ag and markets would then go in and try to execute a search warrant against the smiths ag and markets would confiscate some dairy products and order it to be destroyed so they escalated these unfortunate actions against the smiths over the course of about a year agone markets is the department of agriculture and markets in new york state that's what they call it that's a different name in each state and in their theoretically well look a little bit through their history of ag and markets and theoretically they were estab to support farmers so the agricultural products could get to markets and do anything they could to further that obviously that's not what they're  doing the ag and markets kept saying we have to inspect one more time and so finally gary thought well all right we'll get one more inspection they came with the director of of mill control the  assistant director and our inspector and they all came and pretended they were dispatched to do an inspection and then they did a seizure the cooler that was seized and labeled we had a few cells full of yogurt in here at the time and i don't think they had an the legal way to ban us from making your group other than to go through this inspection and say that it was unfit for human consumption in the they had this fancy red caesar noticed they can still see where it was taped on here and they taped it across the handlebars so that we couldn't open the cooler without breaking their seal so they took all of our yogurt and milk that they put us they locked into the cooler with these locks saying we couldn't touch and all that the only farm crop that's regulated more than raw milk is marijuana and it's seems ridiculous it was very hard for the family the kids were terrified they were scared for a long time of someone else coming because we could we even though we tried not to act too paranoid we had to talk about things like next time they come what are we go in most of the states that allow farmers to sell raw dairy direct from the farm like places like pennsylvania and new york state they can only sell milk and the ration the reason that they can't so you know butter and cream and cheeses and so forth is that those are considered to be processed foods and the more processing that's done in there or in the view of the agriculture the authorities york to confront the state department of i can markets to discuss the smith case you were going announce if i come back we can make an appointment but one of the things is that we have to get through these court cases question legislative history why did this live in past thirty nine nine hundred thirty eight those are the things we're looking into that question for you but that was also part of the court case which they can appeal or whatever if we did  relates to the court case people who the government don't really want to talk for some reason which bums me out because i think that if you feel strongly enough to shut down a farm that you should be able to talk about it the department of agriculture markets here in new york does allow the sa one of the twenty eight states i believe that allow the sale of raw milk at our farms with certain protections in place in order to protect both consumer and the producer and so that means strict regulations and requirements on behalf of the producer limited sales and those are things that we feel strike a balance between protecting protecting both producer and consumer and so we are very open to communication with our producers about the challenges and opportunity selling  here in new york state we will continue to do those have those conversations went to litigation is closed as an attorney and a former government employee i need to point out i'm scratching my head trying to figure out why is this so important to the government why are they cram stamping down on you know the little guy why don't they go after the foods that are inherently dangerous so to me that's the sixty four thousand dollar question is what's motivating these governmental officials to crack down on small family farms are they being financed by big agribusiness are they being financed by the dairy industry what's causing all this to these government officials come from big agribusiness companies and then going to government because we live near ithaca and cornell is that you know big employer down there a majority of our members are somehow connected with cornell a lot of them are in the sciences these are all very educated people who they're not people who don't know the difference between raw milk unpasteurized they're making very deliberate decisions to drink raw milk so it's kind of funny because i think about taking them all to the judge and saying which will stand up and introduce choices for our family and everything else i think that's what makes it so great a public health establishment should do a lot more to educate their e farmers on how to produce raw milk safely so that people consumers that can obtain it and those who don't want to obtain raw milk don't have to buy it raw milk is regulated on the state level and that's why we see such a hodgepodge of laws regarding raw milk in some states like california you can buy raw milk in stores in some states you can buy raw milk directly from a farmer in some states it's illegal for anyone to sell raw milk i do want to state that it's illegal nowhere to buy possess or consume milk the f d a requires that if milk is sold across state lines  does have to be pasteurized so if its state does allow the sale of raw milk that milk has to stay within the state it cannot be sold over state lines there's a terrible regulation now it's been on the books for over twenty years that prohibits raw milk for human consumption from crossing state lines and location there were several inspectors from the department of agriculture waiting for us and they were there they were from the meat division ha think they might have been looking for looking at the meat products to make sure everything was legal there which of course it is and in the process of looking at that they entered my truck and found a bunch of coolers wrong milk from south carolina u s d a grade licensed  but i believe that the the freedom to choose your own food is very important and i like knowing where my food comes from so i would like to have the raw milk sales in the state of georgia and allow dairy producers to make that choice of whether they want to provide that to the consumer to understand that the government rushed to protect us and i understand that the people that that made the mosque felt like that was the only way to go and what i use for my cornbread and what i use for making my tea cottage cheese my butter i've been working with look we've been for a while now and i've never heard of a single person getting sick on the raw milk that they've purchased the hurt or anything else actually but if they did it would be much easier to trace back where that problem was than say the milk that came from who knows where it's been shipped all over the country and the know from ten thousand cows mixed together in a vacuum and trying to find the law prohibits someone from crossing state lines buying milk from a dairy and bringing it back for their own personal use in their own home so i'm not sure where we go from here there's a lot of questions still up in the air some folks folks  angry about it you have to understand what it is what it is this is their way of doing business they'll degrade anybody they possibly can they'll ruin anybody they possibly can to keep an agenda of where everybody is that in there are parallels and don't you dare get when i go to pennsylvania for my mail i'm getting most of my food there you know i've got four kids i don't have time to go to a different farm for every item so the maryland farmers are missing out on so much more than just milk that the meat the eggs the chicken all those purchases are happening in pennsylvania as farm executed search warrants at his farm confiscated some of his production equipment confiscated some of his raw dairy products and to this day is continuing to harass him into getting a permit or license so that he have a permit if you're selling privately directly well someone new came into the department of agriculture and he would never answer this farmers question but his reply came in the form farm martin old has been raided several times by the pennsylvania department of agriculture i think it's just an attempt to send a message to other farmers i mean there are a number of other farmers who are selling you know raw milk without permits in that state and it's an attempt to intimidate them into going along with pennsylvania licensing requirements which mark objected to because under the licensing requirements he can only sell raw milk and raw cheese aged over sixty days he can't sell other value added products like of butter cream and yogurt need you thought he was  used to be there was only one kind of milk it was just milk nobody really thought about it as people are learning that there's a difference and i'm beginning to ask what the difference is the market has been expanding rapidly i've been buying raw milk here at the farmer's market for  afterwards the listeria gets in you've got a real problem and the f d a doesn't seem to think that that's a big thing because their response to that was not a big shutdown not a big fine not a big any media thing it was just  whatever and go on and we see this time and time time again that that it's ok to kill people but boy you even come close to sniffing with a with raw m runners of the movement i'm joel sell every single day i know it's a very high genic sanitary way and in course the lure goes into the ground and if you you know if you just pivot around you can look right down here you can tell that one there's three days photos of these birds of course number one they'd be in a great big they'd be in a great big confinement house you know fifteen thousand birds eye house that's the size of a you know a football field and a half and of course they would have to bring they bring in wood shavings for for some a little bit of batting not much just very little and then you got all this all this with a door that builds up and of course the chickens are done eventually you have to go in and you have to clean out all that litter in the manure so there's a mechanical and with energy a mechanical out with energy and of course all the time the birds are a very unhealthy environment so you know  energy doesn't when the farmer doesn't when the birds don't when the the eater doesn't when you know nobody wins in that system you don't have to be you don't have to be a rocket scientist to just look at this and say you know what this is the way it ought to be years ago every farm around here cured its own pork its own hampton virginia hams cured pork that was the thing that this area was known for and all of us did it but now you can only sell it if it's cured in a federal inspected facility which means we have to go from our federal inspected facility to another federal inspected facility to get it cured and then re important to the farm and what that what that means is that search you at this route and the processing cost that they charges even at nine dollars a pound we don't make a penny on bacon because it's all eaten up in this regulated processing so you know people talk about you know your food is expensive or you know that and try to paint us as as an elitist niche market because our food is higher priced most of the time this higher pricing has nothing to do with with production it has to do with these non scalable capricious regulations that keep us from being able to be efficient at accessing our neighbor with better food if you're large you have one set of issues if you're small you have a separate set of issues we think each farm should be regulated based on its size and the type of production operation that's actually engaged you can equate a slaughterhouse with to transport the animal an hour from the farm to a u s state the silly twice a week pick up the carcasses and bring back our facilities for us and i think it's a lot of work for what a u s state facility provides doesn't protect anybody from the plane any of the diseases that they claim children used to work in u s d a facility we had to go get our inspector up stairs the couple times a day because he spent most of the day in his office and i've worked in other facilities where the inspectors pretty much didn't do anything that they're suppose to do in the course of the day we would point out things in the carcass they may want to look at us has a big food safety problem it just doesn't come from a small backyard operations that comes from these huge slaughterhouses that you know pass cows you know to have grass fed meets we know that they're a lot healthier and they don't have all the antibiotics and talks in them but the the big challenge for the farmers getting these to market part of the problem is the preventing small independent producers from providing the kind of food the bit that people actually want to have and what we have found in the past is that in general regulations serve the large industrial corporations they do not serve small farmers and in fact they do not serve the public eggs chicken meat milk different cheeses this is the room where the members come and they pick up what products they come for we put it all together for one or two days for them to all come and pick up in those one or two days when you're on a busy it's this whole room is packed and some of us in the back wing and boxing things up and then some of them from talking to people to keep them you know keep all of us talking  health department about i'm just hours contention the contention of many others operating similar type cooperatives is that this is a private contractual arrangement these are not sales to member members of the public and there should not be state regulation we had just got done probably with most busiest time of the year for us the week before was thanksgiving from where i was upstairs i only heard the dog barking but there was a knock on her door and katie went to answer and she was handed warrant and then you know moved to the side and they came  i came around the corner i was at the top of the stairs and what i saw from at the top of the stairs was a man right here around the corner with his arm like this in a gun pointing up at me all they could see was a black hat and a black jacket and that's all i could see in the gun and i stood there thinking that this was the serial killer and he's yelling at me come down now me i'm going to come down right now when i got about halfway down someone handed me papers and i looked down and i saw i was very difficult to read because i had a man with a gun in front of me like you focus on is this man with a gun and my children it was the only thing in my mind our son david was in another room and the other side of the house and he had a cell phone in his hand and someone one of the sheriff's deputies tried to take the you know put his hand up and david kind of like this and they shoved him brought him down the steps and put him up against the wall this is the room where we were held for six hours we had ten children in here two adults mostly children are sitting on that couch and over here in this country and we had  deputies here and over here just watching us so that we could we couldn't leave this room without permission my husband pulled up and they frisked him and then they allowed him to come in the back room  during this time our second son chad was in iraq and he calls every day eleven thirty between eleven i mean thirty he would always call him when the phone rang at eleven thirty we had asked the deputies if we couldn't please answer the phone that that was probably him they wouldn't let us and it is it's ironic that he's over there while we're over here and anything anywhere that he would suffer any kind of post traumatic distress during syndrome from being there we've been here incurred the same thing upon us department of agriculture convinced the court of common police here and lorain county to issue a search warrant the sheriff's department and a swat team came into the home of the stars and basically just held the family at gunpoint for about six or seven hours while over the day and the local county health department conducted a search of the house the co op computers were seized records basically what that what they took was i would say little bit more than a whole column that had just been processed for our family i think around seventy something whole chickens  a whole i think twenty to twenty two lambs all of those slaughtered the whole starwars dispute was over their failure to have a food establishment permit which is required by the food had no one you know blows my mind that the government steps in to like manna storehouse and regulate you know frozen meat where you may know products and cans when you have firearms out there and you have to bac and alcohol out there and even have foods that people are allergic to which causes death there jaclyn stars i had heard what had happened to you and your family on december first i'm so sorry this happened to you and i still can't figure out why someone would do this to you please know there are folks even in idaho here who are outraged and angry over what you all went through i'm sending this small amount to help you and your family through this difficult time this one's from actually from ireland it says dear all i just read about the raid on your co op as a co op member of the best part of thirty years interspersed with eight years of organic shop ownership and i am absolutely appalled as to what has happened to you being on the on the other side of the great pond i don't really think there's anything i can do to help but i just wanted to let you know that you have my sympathies and i hope justice will prevail and that you can continue your important work  originally started in a garage it's been in business for about twelve years and we are a private membership club that doesn't serve the public on june thirtieth there was a knock at the back gate i wasn't here at that moment and it was a swat type team raid which included the f b i the f d a the c and then they drew their guns and went down the property and of course you can see on the video surveillance system that they were very serious about the guns being drawn on the search warrant it basically is alluding to a felony in progress here and i'd like to know first of all what felony and second of all in order to authorize a search warrant you need somebody that's complained or  somebody that was irreparably harmed and those pages of the search warrant are missing and they came in and they were here for over five and a half hours and on one of the things that we find interesting is that their search warrant authorizes the taking of vials of samples which of course would fit in the soft sided cooler that you would carry under your arm and they came armed with seventeen of their own large coolers and basically took thousands and thousands of dollars worth of products that weren't even named on the search warrant the search warrant named sharon palmer unhealthy family farms and rossum foods and james stewart that's on the search warrant and sharon was raided twenty minutes before we were on the same morning june thirtieth we were just recently raided again for the third time six thirty in the morning knock on the door and my kids again ousted from their bed only milk that has ever left our farm was milk that was provided to a co op in santa monica california and that's a cult called some foods and they own forty goats and i had made an arrangement with them it would help paying the bills and whatnot that if they bought the goats that we would milk and they would come up every week and pick up their milk and they gave us they paid us to make their cheese or their yogurt and they would come up every tuesday and pick up their cheese and yogurt we've been processing food and eggs and cheese for now nine years and very very very happy customers and no one has ever been sick or we've never had a problem nor complain and we have a lot of really happy people who depend on the farm for fresh locally grown and organic food the feelings that come over you first or disbelief you you grow up you know in a world where police and sheriffs and law enforcement are good and you watch the news every day and you read these stories and you say oh that person has to be an awful person to be raided or arrested and then you're in the shoes and you sit back and you see yourself and you say you work twelve to fourteen hours a day you take care of animals you take care of kids you raise food you do everything as best you can and law enforcement has the right to come in and publicly humiliate you ruin your business take away all of your livelihood for a fact finding mission in order to get a certified organic dairy all of your animals have to be raised from the second day of life on your property and everybody here myself and my kids have raised it reanimate here and bottle fed them and so i was afraid  why all of this happens and why they spend millions and millions of dollars raiding a small farmer in ventura county for for the fear of me maybe at one point selling raw milk i say come here for the first week or two and have a chat with the mothers and the children and everybody else who's bidding these suits for decades and not and see that you're you've been misinformed about what you think is harmful it's not only not harmful it's beneficial cautionary tale for consumers our freedom to choose the healthy food we want to eat is endangered our government needs to stop harassing small farmers small process and food bank plants we need to encourage farmers to produce safe meat vegetables fruits and dairy products and the public out there stablished should support farmers efforts to get these would is it about freedom whether it's a consumer freedom to choose the food that they want to drink whether it's me as a farmer choosing the customer who wants to buy my product or how i want to make my product what is it about freedom that you that is so horrendous to you that you are willing to to take my property take my life take my customers take my animals take my land that you're willing to do this in order for me to not have the freedom to even sell a pork chop tomato it needs to be our choice what we eat and how to take care of ourselves we get enough media blitz we get enough bombardment with advertising ten billion dollars a year for our kids to eat junk food we have to listen to all of that why shouldn't our voice be heard and if we choose to not go with the flow if we choose to go against the grain and less that sprouted that is we should be able to and so it's not as much i want to say that the or the health organizations food and drug administration u s d a need to go fly a kite what i what i believe is we need to have the rights we've been given as americans and we need to be able to have the right to choose healthy foods food is the underlying way we're supposed to stay healthy it's not visiting the doctor more often to get  and look for that long extended shelf life get food in our can our food paradigm which is is horrible for what we are as bacterial sapiens we need the bacteria we need the enzymes we need the wholeness of our foods to be healthy consumers have a fundamental in alienable right to produce a consumer food of their own choice and a consumer has a fundamental right