Welcome to Grounded Wellness, your go to podcast for
simplified and trusted information on how to live a
more non-toxic and holistic life.
We're your hosts. I'm Bethany McDaniel, founder of
Primarily Pure biohacking enthusiast and mom of three.
And I'm Courtney O'Connor, holistic esthetician with over
15 years experience in the healing power of touch and
holistic skin care rituals. In today's episode, I had the
pleasure of sitting down with Mark McAfee, founder of Raw
Farm, the world's largest raw dairy farm.
When it comes to raw milk, you might have some questions.
Some people passionately believe that raw milk is dangerous and
that it should be illegal, while others think that it's a
superfood everyone should be drinking.
So where does the truth lie? This conversation is a
fascinating dive into the world of raw milk, the legal
controversy surrounding it, and why I wholeheartedly believe
that raw milk, done the right way, is a perfectly healthy
whole food. Let's dig in.
Mark, welcome to Grounded Wellness.
Thank you for being here. So excited to chat with you
about raw milk today. I'm glad to be here and you're
beautiful pastor. I know.
Great venue. In our third podcast you've done
on a farm, I know you do them all the time.
And the first one, barefooted, yeah, which is all good.
We've got, we've got a first in there.
I love it. So you are under a personal
injunction with the FDA not to talk about raw milk or the
benefits of raw milk, I should say on your company's channels.
But since we are on the Grounded Wellness podcast, you're able to
talk about raw milk. Tell us the benefits of raw
milk. The FDA thinks I'm really
special. They singled me out to make sure
I didn't. They love you.
Raw milk is the first food of life.
A baby is born, does not have an immune system.
The gastrointestinal tract is basically a devoid of bacteria.
There's no diversity of bacteria.
There's no food to feed the bacteria.
The umbilical cord is cut and the baby's on its own.
What's it do? It goes to nurses from mom.
That's raw milk. And it is qualitatively, in
other words, the kind of cream, the kind of protein, the kind of
enzymes are practically identical between cows and
humans. And mankind's been consuming raw
milk for about 15,000 years. And so it's only been about the
last 80 years where it's been treated in such such a way to
lose all of those really important blueprints of life,
those bio actives that are so powerful and health giving.
And they've just been not talked about in the pasteurized
community. Well, the dollar voting is
talking about it now because people are buying less and less
and it's going a decline of about two to 10% per per year
depending on what market you're looking at.
Pasteurized milk. Is pasteurized milk.
However, our raw milk is growing at 1% a week.
Unbelievable because of the interest in this first food of
life and the fact that what's its job to build an immune
system that did not exist before.
Remember, that immune system is 80% made-up of the gut
microbiome, the bacteria and the food that feeds it.
And the structure is the mucosal lining.
And so when your gut is well, you're well, inflammation's in
check. And post COVID, people are
looking for that food because they never no longer want to be
caught with their immune systems down right.
They want to be ready and adaptive and resilient to the
next threat coming through health, not through some shot or
something. Yeah.
And so and. I'm so glad that people are now
thinking that way because when COVID was happening, everyone
was just had the mindset of I don't want to get it, I just
want to avoid it. Like avoiding it rather than
building up the body, building up the immune system in order to
be strong, to fight, something like that.
That's exactly right. But now people are are trying to
do that. Yeah.
Well, if you really look at what the immune system is, 80% of it
is the gut microbiome. And what is the gut microbiome?
It is the diversity of bacteria and the food that feeds it.
That's what the gut microbiome is and the structures around,
like the mucosal lining and stuff.
And when you think about it, I mean, hundreds of thousands of
people with Crohn's disease and irritable bowel syndrome and
ulcerative colitis in the United States that defines gut
inflammation, which means you've got those three things missing.
No good food, no good bacteria and gut structures are shot and
inflamed. So there's a movement back
towards taking control of your life through whole food
nutrition. And raw milk is the first food
of life and probably the queen of the whole food.
You know, wonderful choice. Talk to us about the process of
pasteurization and how that came into play in America.
Well, think about it all through the ages.
What would Jesus eat? Land of milk and honey.
It was raw, right? Thousands of years, 15,000 years
ago, mankind was able to stop fishing, stop hunting and stop
farming and have a domesticated animal nearby that you're able
to catch your milk from and eat today and take that animal with
you. As long as you had rain and
sunshine and grass, you could eat today.
And so it served a very, very important domesticated
partnership with mankind for the ages, for forever come. 18
fifties, 1850 ish, you start having people take their cows
with them into bigger cities where they no longer had green
grass and water that was flowing down the streams.
It was clean and you had the cows being confined and being
fed Brewers, distillers, grains and other trash and there's no
clean water, no flushing toilets.
It was filthy. Typhoid fever, brucellosis,
tuberculosis was really cold in the morning.
Your milk of the cow by hand, you put your feet in the milk to
keep it warm. That's the kind of milk we're
talking about. It's disgusting and it became
something called the milk problem.
Well, two pathways began in 1893.
Doctor Henry Coit said let's clean up the milk.
Let's certify the milk, the milk to to have it continue to flow
to the Mayo Clinic to heal people.
But it has to come from farms with green pastures and it has
to come from farms with clean water.
And we're going to test to make sure that milk is clean.
We. They were using raw milk in the
Mayo Clinic. Yes to treat people, yes for for
what exactly? All kinds of things, You name
it, they were treating. They had a whole milk diet there
and that that that went through the 1920s and 30s.
They they were using raw milk from the certified, the AAMMC
with Doctor Henry Coit, the American Association of Medical
Milk Commissions for years at the Mayo Clinic.
This book's written about it at the same year.
In 1893, Mr. Strauss brought in the par boiler.
This came from France. It was used to make wines and
beers and alcohols and stuff to kill bacteria so that the yeast
would grow and it was part of the fermentation process for
alcohol. It was never used for milk in
France. He brought this system in and
poured all this filthy milk that they were getting from these
downtown distillery dairies into this par boiler.
He cooked the living heck out of it.
And what do you know, overnight 40% of the people less died
still had problems because water quality was so terrible.
So they, Oh my gosh, a fantastic revolution.
We have cheap milk in downtown to feed people and you just cook
the heck out of it. So they just figured out a way
to sanitize the milk? Yeah.
But it to to quote off. A lot of the the good.
Stuff. All of the good stuff.
All of it. Doctor Bruce German, bless his
heart, he's the the founder of the International Milk Genomics
Consortium, said pasteurization is an 18th century solution to
an 18th century problem. We can do a hell of a lot better
and that's exactly what we're doing.
And so if the farmers have good standards, are training those
standards, feed their cows well, do testing, you have a
completely different kind of product.
But if you don't care because all you're doing is chasing the
weight of the milk, it's going to go off to pasteurized and all
your neighbors dump the milk in the same truck and who cares
what goes there? And the bacteria can standards
are through the rough, including pathogenic bacteria in that milk
because it's all going to get cooked with A5 log kill.
You have two different kinds of milk, Ramma for people and ramma
for the pasteurizer. And we do Ramma for people.
Entirely different proposition than RAMMA for pasteurization.
So what are the health implications of pasteurization?
What? How does that change the final
product and what it does in the body of the person who's
drinking it? We all have Google look up the
most allergenic food in America, pasteurized milk.
When you kill all the bioactives, you inactivate all
the extracellular vesicles that are there.
They're so important to the vital nature of this first food
of life. When you've destroyed the fat
cell, which is now be considered an immune cell by some
scientists because it's all the traits of being an immune cell,
which is phenomenal, right? When you destroy all of that
through pasteurization, homogenization, supplementation,
back to fugation, Every other Asian you can make up, you have
a very allergenic food that does not have bio actives that help
you with your health. What you got is basically
cereal, cereal lubricant. That's what it is.
And yeah, there's fat, yeah, there's protein, but the bio
lactis that help you like the lipids, there's no lipase to
help digest the lipids. The fats, the proteases are
missing The the the peptidases are missing to help digest the
the, the proteins, the. Lactose.
Is missing the lactose. Is missing the lactase.
There's no lactase in milk though, but the bacteria that
makes lactase is in milk. So remember, lactose is the milk
sugar. It is a fantastic prebiotic.
Prebiotics are food that feed probiotics.
So if we ingest lactose, if we also have the accompanying
probiotic bacteria like Lactobacillus bacteria,
bifidobacteria, other colorful bacteria, they digest it and
make lactase for you. You don't have lactose
intolerance. And that's what people take as a
supplement who are lactose intolerant when they choose to
consume dairy. But it's all there already in
the raw form. In our community, we call it
pasteurization intolerance. Yeah.
The Maasai, black as coal from from Kenya, they win all the
Olympic stuff because they're such good athletes.
They drink raw milk from cows. Yeah.
They have no problem with lactose intolerance.
They don't have the lactase persistence gene either.
Those black people come to America.
They have a hell of a problem with the fact that we have
pasteurized milk. I know a guy, Maasai warrior.
His name is Camelli. I gave him 8 gallons of milk a
week and he got rid of Crohn's disease 8 years ago, but he
lived in Kenya. Go the go to the Mongolians and
out of Manchuria. They're all Asian Chinese
people. They drink mare's milk, raw
mare's milk. They're athletes, they're
warriors. No problem at all with lactose
intolerance. They do not have the lactase
persistence gene. Interesting, I've never thought
about that with ancestral cultures that rely on milk as a
huge part of their diet. Like lactose intolerance is not
a thing, no in those cultures. It's a it's a current world
problem with highly processed milk, Yeah.
OK. And then something I actually
don't really have a good understanding on is
homogenization. Can you talk about what that
process entails? The fat globule is a three layer
lipid structure that's considered to be literally an
immune cell because it has micro RNA.
It's got all kinds of things in. It's got bacteria, it's got
enzymes, it's got alkaline phosphatase, it's got the
butyrates that make butyric acid for your lower gut.
It has dietary fibre in a fat cell.
My God, right. It's incredible.
How they send that through a screen at extremely high
pressure, thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch.
It's called a homogenizer that destroys that butter fat and
makes it into shreds. Wow.
So homogenization is a choice. It's not a requirement to
destroy the best part of milk. Why would anyone choose to do
that? Because the fat doesn't rise to
the top anymore. Oh, so it's just a?
Back in the 1920s. Check this out, Bethenny.
It's like, Oh my God, pinch me. Back in the 20s, remember that
they would deliver raw milk to your doorstep and pasteurized
milk to your doorstep, and people would always say, I don't
want that one. It doesn't have enough cream on
the top. They'd buy the milk by the cream
layer because that was the good stuff.
It was the delicious, wonderful life bringing one of the things.
Makes it taste so good. So they, the, the marketing
people said don't worry about the cream, it's all mixed
together. Does it float to the top anymore
because we homogenize it? And by the way, they were able
to buy a longer shelf life as a result too, because the fat
wouldn't ferment as fast. So it was a marketing choice to
extend shelf life and not have competition in the marketplace.
And the other thing is you could mix in other things and
homogenize too, like dried powdered milk, other things to
make it have better mouthfeel and you can keep the butter fat
to make butter and make money. OK, so you hide the cream and do
something else and say, oh, it's homogenized and you can take the
butter which made the butter fat, which made money.
So all about the money. The more you look at this, it's
not conspiracy, it's all about the money.
The conspiracy comes from them trying to protect themselves to
keep the money because they don't want people don't want the
product anymore and all the shenanigans they do to try to
protect themselves from losing market share.
So now as we were talking about earlier, the FDA, you're their
favorite person. I am, I feel so honored, so I
really AM. What is the motivation behind
that? Is there?
Is it just to protect the dairy industry as a whole in these
processes that they've come to rely on so heavily?
Remember, under the FDA's mind, the only raw milk that they know
or that they acknowledge is filthy.
It has to be pasteurized. I actually agree with that.
I have no contention with that. The conventional milk should.
Be pasteurized because of the way they've set their standards
up in multiple 8 generations of dairymen have been trained that
milk's dirty. It's got to go.
The pasteurizer. The pasteurizer people love it
because it's cheap milk and they can make a brand out of it and
do their thing. That's the only FDA acknowledged
milk that they have. They will not sit with me.
They will not meet with me. I've begged for 1520 years to
sit down with to talk to them. They do not want to acknowledge
their own pub bed literature. It's archived at NIH or CDC.
They do not want to talk about clean milk that's tested.
They don't want to talk about that because if they do, that
means they have to acknowledge that theirs is filthy and it's
dead and the most allergenic food in America and mine's not.
And they'd have to acknowledge the European studies that show
the same thing to be true. So the FDA is literally burying
their heads of the sand to not acknowledge something that's
true in science, which is another kind of raw milk, which
is clean raw milk. Why is the FDA so beholden to
these dairy companies that are producing pasteurized milk?
If you look at the FDA, the people that work there came from
those dairies, came not those dairies, those processing
plants. And so they they're sharing back
and forth between the FDA and industry and they get golden
parachutes back and forth conveniently to protect
themselves. I've been at their conferences.
I was asked said if you want to change things, go to the NCIMS
conference. I went there in 2007.
I went there, went to Florida, I presented to the science
committee and I tried to go up to an FDA person to talk to
them. They ran away from me.
Like literally they ran, Oh my. Gosh, as fast as possible and
went to the hotel room and closed the door and I didn't run
after. It was like, OK, I'm not going
to run. That's that's ridiculous.
I went and tried to find another one and they turned their back
to me. So it is a absolute essential
part of their paycheck. And when it's a part of your
paycheck not to do that, you're not going to do it.
And so I don't blame them. That's their reality.
That's the way it is. What we're going to do instead
is build a market and we'll wake up 1 morning and we will have 1.
And that's what's happening right now.
And you've talked to me a little bit already about the different
processes that you've put in place to ensure that your milk
is super clean, super sanitary. Can you talk a little bit about
some of those things that you do?
Milk that comes out of a healthy cow with an udder that's
prepared nicely. It's very clean and very safe.
There's not pathogens without a cow.
The milk is super clean. Coliforms of 1.
Do you know how many coliforms are allowed in the milk that
goes off to be pasteurized before it gets commingled with
other dairies? Can you explain what a coliform?
Is a coliform, is a sanitary bacteria.
It's a bacteria indicating how clean things are.
OK, 750, wow, that's a whole different world and uncounted
when you combine it with other dairies that go out to be
pasteurized. So we're talking about really
clean milk. It still has a biodiversity of
beneficial bacteria, but it's clean and it's delicious and it
lasts 21 days. We do milk differently.
I have AT shirt that says we milk different but.
I was going to say, that's a good phrase.
We do dairy different. Yeah, my daughter gets credit
for that, Kaylee, But super clean cows, pastures, sunshine,
clean water, super clean utters, super clean equipment that goes
on the Otter that takes that milk instantly to a chiller that
within two minutes, it goes from 99° body temperature to the cow
down to 35° and holds it there, puts it into a silo tank where
we take a sample of that milk and test it for pathogens in our
own on farm lab, Thermo Fisher lab, and we get the data back in
19 to 20 hours. We have two microbiologists that
work for us to make sure that that data is there before we put
it in the bottle. We know it's in the milk.
And this is that's not what the FDA talks.
Like, right, right. And you were saying that I think
you're the only farm that does it this way, the only raw raw
farm or dairy farm in general? That we have.
We have a community of farms under the Raw Milk Institute,
which is a nonprofit that I helped establish many years ago.
And many of those farms have on farm labs as well, but they're
not pathogen labs, They're sanitation labs.
They test to make sure that their color forms are really
low, which is indicating that things are clean.
Great. That's the standard we promote.
We went one step beyond because in California, it's a litigious
state that makes somebody sick. We're going to have a lawyer
wanting $1,000,000. So we absolutely wanted to go to
that extra level testing for the pathogens.
Pathogens. Yeah.
So even with all of these processes in place, then like
why? Why is there still so much
opposition to what you're doing? We're losing 5 1/2 dairies a day
in America. Conventional dairies.
Conventional dairies, because they're overslap ply milk for
the available available demand. So the big dairies are hoping
the little dairies go out of business so they can be the
biggest dairy and be king of the mountain.
And that works only a little bit of the time because most of the
time they get consumed by the bigger guy that wants to eat
them. And that's been going on for 60
years. We used to have a bunch of 20
cow dairies, and then there were 80 cow dairies and there were
200 cow dairies. Now they're 1700 cow dairies,
becoming 20,000 cow dairies. They're building a 100,000 cow
dairy in Kansas. Shocking, right?
So we aren't losing cows, we're losing farmers.
They're just fewer dairies with bigger.
But that's not the local food system that does raw milk for
people. So we are very supportive of
training farmers all over the world.
We trained 155 farmers in Great Britain five years ago.
We train farmers of Canada where it's illegal.
We don't care if it's legal or not, we just want to make it
safe. We train farmers all over the
United States, Australia, New Zealand, everywhere.
We're helping a project in Scotland right now, which is
pretty cool. So we believe that you do three
things. And the NIH studies show this.
You use super high standards, you train the farmers in those
standards and they have a plan around how they're going to
execute those standards. And then you test and you have a
different milk. That milk is very safe.
That milk is delicious and it lasts 20 to 25 days and it
doesn't have the allergy. It it's not the allergy it it's
fantastic for the raw whey protein, stabilizes mast cells
and keeps histamines in check. And all these wonderful butter
fat globules are there and they act like immune cells, which are
fantastic for your immune system.
People love it and they're buying it wherever they can get
it. And whether it's legal or
illegal, people are going to get their milk.
We want it to be want it to be safe so everybody can enjoy it.
The farmers will thrive, consumers will thrive, and we'll
have a better country, a better world as a result.
Well, growing 1% per week is pretty wild.
I mean, I think that alone just speaks to the massive demand for
raw milk right now and the benefits that a lot of people
are experiencing from it. Talk to us about some of the
skin benefits of raw milk. Because we're a skin care
company, we get a lot of questions about eczema.
And I think the common line of thinking is to avoid dairy for
eczema, which I I would agree with in terms of conventional
dairy, but talk to me about why raw milk is different in that
sense. Let's talk.
Let's talk about the body as a whole.
Let's do it. Your skin is your largest organ
in your body. I was a paramedic.
I taught paramedic medicine for 17 years, 15,000 paramedic
calls, premed trained. So enough, I know enough about
medicine to get myself in a lot of trouble.
Let's put it that way. OK, But your body is covered
with this organ of the skin, the epithelial skin in your body.
Well, when your gut microbiome is doing well and you have these
wonderful fats and other Whole Foods, all these things, the
things down in raw milk, these immune system regulating
components, you start having a balanced microbiome.
Your skin is part of that microbiome and you don't have
the inflammation going on. You're not being driven by
allergies or the whole histamine response.
One thing that we know from acne, acne is it really is
associated with a dysbiotic environment with bacteria have
gone crazy. And so one of the things we find
is a common thread through people that consume raw milk and
Ramak kefir is that their skin clears up and really nice
because their microbiome is functioning properly.
And when you think about the microbiome, don't think about
it. It's just something in your
lower intestine. It's permeating through your
entire being. There's not a lot of bacteria in
your brain, but I mean most of the rest of your body shares
bacteria all over the place. Yeah, especially the surface of
your skin. Certainly bacteria, absolutely.
And so you don't separate the systems of your body into
subparts, you think of the whole microbiome.
Dr. Bonnie Basler, a brilliant MIT scientist, many years ago
had a Ted talk about how bacteria talk.
And that 15 minutes Ted Talk changed my life because it talks
about 23,000 genes from mom and dad.
Yep, 23andMe. Yep, got that from dad.
And that's the hardware that makes us look the way we are.
But there's uncounted millions of genes that come from the
bacteria in you and on you that actually regulate how you
operate. That's the software.
So it's like a cell phone without, without any, without
any apps or soft, it doesn't work.
So you need to have that bandwidth of, of genetic
information at the cellular level.
And she explains that on this Ted talk.
And the whole human genome project was based on that.
What makes us human? We are literally bacterial
sapiens. When you think about this
mountain of bacteria that in it on us at all the times that we
need to make sure there are friendly bacteria, not friendly
bacteria. The way you do that is feed them
properly because the good food attracts good bacteria.
So if you eat a lot of sugar, expect the yeast to come, you're
going to have problems. If you have preservatives and
antibiotics and all those kinds of things, you're going to have
sorted, you're not going to diversity of beneficial
bacteria. You're going to have some
pathogenic bacteria and some problems in your skin from
infection. So lower infection, lower
inflammation, less chronic diseases, all those things come
from the gut, Hippocrates said 23150 years ago.
Hippocrates, ancient Greek doctor, all disease begins in
the gut. That food be your medicine,
medicine be your food. I do no harm.
So it all begins in the gut. He had it right.
He had it right a long time ago. Yeah.
And then we've kind of lost our way but a little bit.
I think things are kind of coming full circle.
Now they have to. Yeah.
We can't continue on the path we're on.
No, we can't. And we say the same thing as a
skin care company. Like we obviously want everyone
to use our products, but we also talk about how you can't
separate your skin health from the health of your body as a
whole. And so education has always been
a big core component of the brand.
And that's why we're doing this podcast and having people like.
You with that? I need a swig of milk.
Yeah, we've got raw farm milk care.
That is so important what you just said.
Don't separate your skin from the rest of your body.
I feel like we would be doing people such a disservice as a
skin care company to only sell product and not pair that with
education on how to be healthy in general.
Correct, Because that's going to reflect in the health of your
skin. And you know, I'm not a big fat
guy. I just say whole food nutrition,
whole food, whatever you're eating, make sure it's whole.
Yeah, don't forget the good fats.
Yeah, because they're so anti-inflammatory and so power
and they're, they, they're like little.
They carry packages of information to various parts of
our body that need it. This package includes A genetic
coding and, and what to do. Robbuck does three things,
nourishes completely, protects and directs 3 things.
All the things that a newborn baby would want you get as an
adult because you're smart enough to be able to domesticate
an animal, whether it was a cow, goat, a sheep, a horse, a camel,
a reindeer. I mean that's the diversity of
animals we've had domesticated for the last 15,000 years.
I had like a light bulb moment earlier when you were talking
about how, you know, raw milk is the first food and it's what
builds the bacteria in your gut. And then I was thinking like,
after, after taking antibiotics, do you ever have to take
antibiotics for whatever reason? Like people will say like eat
the rainbow and and these different things to rebuild the
bacteria in the gut, But I feel like probably the best thing you
could do would be to drink. Raw milk or peeper, I would say
it is raw milk, but it's been fermented and it's had twelve
additional bacteria added, which are very intentional.
But you got the biodiversity of the milk and then you add in 12
more and it's been fermented to 10 to 15,000,000 per milliliter.
So biodiversity and massive amounts.
Make a smoothie out of that. With all the rainbow you're
talking about, make yourself a rainbow smoothie.
But this is the base and makes everything more bioavailable
too, because all those wonderful functional enzymes are there.
OK, and you brought some. I feel like we should try it
right now. I've never tried kefir, this
will be my first. Time.
Oh my word, I know word. Here we go.
First time ever the regular. One and a new lemon.
Medicine plain, and that's just the plain.
This is lemon essence, which is basically just lemon essence.
It's a organic lemon flavoring without sugar, and so there's no
preservatives. Look at the ingredients, it's
pretty short. Cultured whole raw milk and
lemon extract. Done.
Easy. Not going on for three
paragraphs of all the stuff your body doesn't understand.
Right. It's kind of thickened raw milk
because it's kind of on its way to become yogurt.
Kind of. OK, so this is lemon.
Lemon. Oh.
That's good. I could do that.
Yeah, I could do that. Every day.
It's good stuff. Yeah, I love the lemon.
It's almost like. One of my favorite.
It's delicious. Like, I could have this after
dinner and feel like like I just had a treat.
So you touched on your background as a paramedic.
I feel like you've done a lot, lot of different things in life.
You're a pilot. You flew here for this interview
like so many. You have such a such a cool.
Background I am living my absolute passion in my life
everything I've wanted to do, everything I'm doing is with
purpose and I feel really good about it and.
How did you get into the Rock Dairy business?
How did it begin? Cute story about that.
My grandparents passed away in 1996 and gave my brothers and I
basically 1000 acres of ground, agricultural ground and my
brothers were doing well and doing things in Cupertino and
working with Steve Jobs at Apple Computer and my brother and
doing all kinds of stuff. I said Nope, you do it, we
aren't going to do it and I was kind of done with dead bodies in
24 hour shifts. I was done with that whole
thing. I was like I want to get some
sleep. He.
Did that for. What, 716 years?
Yeah, 1980 to 1996. So took back the farm, but it
was very intentional that I wanted to serve people, not the
commodity markets, because I saw all my neighbors going through
this roller coaster of up and down prices and as soon as
something was good, everybody plant and kill it and it was
just bad. So I wanted to differentiate.
And so we threw a long story made short, we actually got a
call. I started a dairy, organic
dairy, and we're serving Organic Valley, but I was going to Los
Angeles a lot. We got a call from a guy named
James Stewart and he operated a little place called the Garage.
This is in the back streets of Venice.
He said, Mark Altadena just went out of business.
We need your ROM up. There's no ROM up down here.
Everybody's screaming buddy murder for it.
I said, what do you mean ROM up? And they explained it to me.
I said I'm I'm on it. So I got a bunch of half gallons
of milk, half gallons of plastic containers, no label or
anything. Bottled it up out of our our
bowl cake, put it on ice, put in an ice chest.
And my wife and I drove to LA and drove into this alley.
And this is where my raw milk world began.
Go over to this alley. In this alley, there are movie
stars. There are moms, dads, every walk
of life you can imagine cheering.
Say, Oh my God, thank you for coming.
We couldn't even open our suburban doors.
They open the back. Started taking milk out, started
throwing 10 and $20 bills in the car.
And I'm going, what's going on here?
Right? They open the doors, get out.
They're just cheering. Say, come back tomorrow.
You're out of Rama up. We ran out of Rama up.
We need more and this gal comes up to my wife who's a labour and
delivery nurse and she said they're out of raw milk and my
daughter has a a condition, I'm sure what it was.
She has to have raw milk. She's been having all kinds of
problems since Altadena left the market a few months ago.
My wife went to this gal who had taken 10 gallons.
She gave gave her back some of her money, took three or four
and gave to this woman for free. Had a long, tearful conversation
with his mom who had this child that needed this milk badly.
So the appeal to my economics, they appealed to my humanity,
they appealed to my medical background and deep deeply into
my wife's emotion of this woman needing it for a child.
How long ago did that? That was 1999, OK, 25 years ago.
And that's when it all began. That's when it began.
I drove home 70 miles an hour. I said we got to build a
Creamery now and we did. We got a big old 50 foot reefer
van that had a cold chiller on one end.
We tilted it up a little bit so water flew out the back, put a
wall in the middle bottle on one end and we shipped out of the
other end. And we built $1,000,000 market
the first year with James Stewart.
That's how we started when we called Whole Foods, I didn't
James called because he was our distributor at that time.
He goes how fast can you drive that product down here.
That was their invitation for us in in 2001 because they knew
they they knew there was a demand.
They wanted it. Whole Foods changed.
Their changed their whole tune in 2010 when they kicked me out.
Two kids got sick in Connecticut, had nothing to do
with us, and they had to write a check.
Milk wasn't even in Connecticut. No, this is somebody else doing
local raw milk in Connecticut. Bless their heart.
They had 12 cow dairy selling milk.
They didn't know what they're doing.
They got two kids sick, kids live, they're fine.
But the checks for writing the check, the liability came out of
Austin, TX and Austin, TX did not have any raw milk there and
they didn't care about California.
So I was like you're out of here.
So that's where Sprouts and Jimbo's and all these mother's
Marks and they picked us up and we grew like crazy since then
are. You back in Whole Foods now?
No, we want to be, love to be. But they're still, they're still
not letting you guys back in. Unfortunately not.
The marketing data shows us going like this.
Sprouts stock is at $120.00 a share right now.
Last year it was 35 at this time of the year.
Wow. Whole Foods was 35 now at 5060,
so they doubled. They did pretty well, but
Sprouts went triple, quadruple and they carry our products
nationally and in California. I'm not claiming it's all us,
but we're part of that story. I call it my stock price.
Raw milk is legal in California and only 12.
Speaking in California, Arizona, Washington State, Pennsylvania,
Idaho, Connecticut, Maine, those are where you can buy raw milk
in the store. OK, Now there's a bunch of like
20 state, 25 states. We can actually buy milk on the
farm as part of a herd share or some other negotiated deal.
And there's only a handful of states that made raw milk
illegal like Hawaii. And they're about to change.
I'm very proud to say that Delaware just a few weeks ago
changed their law to allow raw milk.
It was illegal before and it was one of our farmers that we
trained in Delaware, Stephanie, who actually approached her
Congress and actually got complete support, including
their secretary of agriculture, because we defined what raw milk
was that we wanted to produce. It wasn't raw milk for
pastorization. It was raw milk for people.
And all those farms in Delaware are going to have an on farm lab
now. Wow.
They went from 43 dairies 2 years ago down to 13 dairies
because the loss of dairies and now they're they're going to
grow back because they're going to be doing raw milk for the
local communities. The loss of dairies, OK, we
touched on this earlier, but is this happening because of all of
these plant based milk alternatives and the rise of
that or are conventional dairies losing business because raw milk
is on the rise or is it a combination?
Of I would say if pasteurized milk was so great, they would
have kept their customers. Yeah, when you're highly
allergenic, doesn't taste very good, and you got lactose
intolerance or pasteurization intolerance as we call it, you
actually destroy your own market.
And so the milk alternatives came up, some of them done
better than others, but they're kind of flattened off and some
have died off. It's kind of done its thing, but
people are searching for the real deal, the one that's been
around for 15,000 years. It's not a fad, it's not an
alternative, it's the real thing.
Why is it still illegal in so many states?
Money. If you go to the Kearing where
they're talking about legalization of raw milk, who
shows up, tells you the story. The FDA shows up, says no way,
no way, no way. Or they have their local
veterinarian go do it for them. And the pasteurizer, the, the
processors will show up and they'll say, oh, they're going
to kill people. They're going to do this.
They can do that. And we have the mothers show up
with the farmers that want to do raw milk and they tell their
side of the story and say, we agree that kind of not raw milk
you're producing needs to be pasteurized.
We're talking about a kind of raw milk you can't produce that
we can produce on a farm meticulously that results in
very safe, low risk raw milk. And that's not a raw milk we're
talking about that you're talking about.
We're talking about a different kind of raw milk.
And people go, what do you mean? Well, it's about standards.
This kind of standards over here, this kind of bacteria
counts, all that kind of stuff. And this kind of treatment of
the milk that's your standard or this kind of raw milk. 1 farmer,
high standards testing, very clean, connected to consumers,
an entirely different proposition.
And that that works really really well.
I feel like pasteurization as a process, it really allows the
farmer to cut a lot of corners and how they treat the cows, how
the cows are raised in just all of their processes.
They're able to turn a blind eye to doing things in the best way
possible because they're kind of just relying on pasteurization
as the safety blanket. That's totally true, Bethany.
And it even goes deeper than that because the farmer has no
connection to consumer. Their connection is to the
processor. They have nothing to show
anybody from the public and they consider the public kind of the
pita freaks, the the people that are going to cause a problem
that they're going to fly drones over the farm, tell bad stories
about them and they like no trespassing kind of stay away
from me. A lot of farmers feel that way,
Not all farmers. Some farmers really want to do
better and they work really hard, but many are very, very
adverse to people because they're so private.
It's like, no, I sell to the processor, processor deal with
people. They don't want to deal with
people I love. I love people come to our farm
because I want to teach. I want to hear their story.
I want to hear why they're drinking raw milk, how they
found out about us. I want to embrace myself with
people. And the these gentlemen are not,
they don't have any money because they're on the edge
financially because they're being paid so little.
So they have nothing really to show off on their farm.
Most of the time it's kind of a mess and they're just trying to
scrape together any kind of milk they can to put in that tank to
send it off. It's a different world.
Why is raw milk so villainized when other raw foods like
spinach is equally able or even more so to cause like sickness?
If you look at the dynamics of somebody who's selling
vegetables at a farmer's market, the vegetables are being sold
directly to people. You don't pasteurize vegetables,
Vegetables, you sell them directly to people.
And the person come back the next week and gets more.
You have a relationship. Pasteurized milk.
Sold to a processor. You don't talk talk to people,
ever. Pasteurized milk.
So it's a commercialized system where the processors do not want
me talking to people because if I go to people, it bypasses the
processor. So it's all about the money.
It's all about the fact that they had built a battleship, 100
years of building this big thing that all it does is cook milk
and my product can't go through that process.
So they are like, what do we do? What do we do?
Oh, we're scrambling. What are we going to do?
What are we going to? Oh my God.
It displaces the big processed industry consolidation, and
they're extremely threatened by that.
Yeah, that's why it's villainized.
Exactly why it's villainized because.
At the expense of of a lot of people's health, right?
At the expense of all the bioactives that should go into
human beings to make them better.
Yeah, 100%. What are some of the the
craziest transformations or stories that you've seen from
customers or family members that have experienced I'll?
Tell you, one of my favourites goes with all the things I like
to do in my life. The gal's name is Susan Johnson.
She runs the whole. I love Susan, she's my sister.
Is he great? Susan's one of my heroes, by the
way. Yeah, she's the best.
Kicker and the whole story. She was working in a
pediatrician's office up in Mammoth many years ago and she
needed some raw milk and she didn't have any up there.
She had a kid with head to toe eczema, skin eruption, just a
mess, only two or three years old, real young kid.
And she knew raw milk was going to help the child.
So she called me up and I flew my airplane up there with raw
milk. It's a 25 minute flight.
It's like 8 hour drives like so I flew it up there.
I gave it to her and we started a little raw milk market up
there and she started giving this child free.
I gave the child free. She tried taking picture this
child. Within about a month, the child
was completely free of all the skin problems.
Wow, I love that. And that was that was a
compassionate knowledge based scientific move.
Pediatrician, pediatrician's office to just show what what we
can do here. There are things found in raw
milk that are they direct the cell function of what we're
supposed to do. They align things, the mRNA back
mRNA, genetic coding, the information that DNA, the RNA,
ribonucleic acid actually direct cell function.
It tells the body what to do when it's confused.
And so when there are things going wrong, many of those
things can be corrected. And I'm not going to claim
everything, but I'm telling you a lot of things go straight when
when they need to because of how scrambled things are.
We, we've implemented a new policy in our household where we
have kind of eliminated like snacking between meals for, for
my husband and I and for our kids.
We're just kind of trying to like move away from that.
But we say if you're hungry between meals, you can have raw
milk. And so it's kind of like
essentially like an unlimited raw milk policy in our
household. And we're just kind of relying
on our intuition and our kids intuition of like how much they
need. But we've noticed that in the
last several months, like we've been, we're around other kids
all the time, other kids with sicknesses, like my kids are
exposed to a lot of different things.
And like they've been so healthy, especially like since
we've been doing this, there's we've been dealing with a few
sicknesses already at this point hasn't happened this year.
Well, the studies coming out of Europe, the particle study, the
Gabriel study and other follow on studies, they're all NIH
website talk about 55,000 kids across Europe studied over a
period of several years. This is like 15 years ago and
how they had lesser rates of fever, flu, flu is virus, flu is
virus, ear infections, nasal drainage, cough, those kinds of
things dramatically low and asthma was dramatically lower.
So the raw whey protein is a very big part of this.
And I'm going to say the whole thing, it's all the things.
There was a study done by the National Dairy Council 2021
published by Cornell University NIH about all of the bio actors
they want to take out of unprocessed milk to make medical
claims on to patent. Wow.
I saw that home run ring the ring the wind because they're
acknowledging that in fact there is a difference between
pasteurizing and raw and the FDA says there's no difference.
That's a lie. Straight up bold faced lie.
The processors themselves recognize post COVID that people
are looking for adaptive resilient immune systems.
These bio actors give them that. Well, you are really selling me
on real. I mean, I know you're not trying
to sell me. You're.
Educating me educated. And I've already.
Been We do not sell raw milk, we teach it.
You teach it, you teach it, but I feel like I've been passionate
about raw milk for the last couple of years and now I'm even
more excited about it. And I'm excited to even like I'm
excited for our customers to hear this episode in our
community because we do have so many people in our community
that ask about different things. Like, I mean, eczema is a big
one for for kids. And I'm just, I'm excited for
people to hear this information and I'm excited to implement it
into some of like our recommendations.
Because in the past, even as a raw milk fan, our recommendation
has been to kind of like avoid dairy if you're, if you or your
child is struggling with eczema. And now my perspective is really
shifting on that. And because everything that
you're saying makes so much sense.
Pasteurized dairy and raw dairy are worlds apart.
Don't even think about them in the same world.
And you add in your pasture bird, you add in, you add in
good poultry, you get a good meat, pastured meat.
You add in eggs, you add in the vegetables, you add in fermented
stuff. Sauerkraut, a cornucopia of
life. These whole food and raw milk
together. That's what we're supposed to be
eating, unprocessed, whole natural foods.
And if we do, when we do, those that do will transfer their
lives, it'll change their lives and it'll be a multi
generational thing if they get the kids going fertility, think
about the fertility and fertility is going crazy.
Huge epidemic it. I mean, it's just the tentacles
go deep. We need to start changing
immediately. We should have changed many
years ago, but let's do it now. It will help the farmers, it
will help the consumers or will be better.
That leads into my next question.
Where do you see the future of raw milk headed in America?
Dollar voting is showing us right now consumers would rather
pay $18.00 a gallon for this product and I apologize for the
price. It's too high.
But you're doing a lot, a lot. There's so many processes behind
the scenes. That you've talked about, we
don't get the $18.00. Let me tell you, we get, we get
a lot less than that. The stores get a big piece of
that. But my point is, somebody's
choosing, they're choosing that milk at $18.00 a gallon versus
something far cheaper for a reason.
People do not spend money twice. They may once, but they don't
spend money twice unless it's serving a purpose in their life.
So I think that's really showing the true direction of where
we're going, where food is medicine, true medicine,
preventative medicine. And it's scary living and
hearing, oh, that person just came down with cancer.
Oh, that person's going to have an ileostomy.
Well, that person just broke her bones.
That person's got a bunch of problems with her teeth all
around us. It's like you're walking in the
minefield. When are you going to step on
the mine? It's a wake up tall for all of
us to think prevention through nutrition, it really matters and
it's personal. It's your choice.
And sometimes that's hard to do. Addictive foods are hard to
break those addictions. Sometimes it's a cost thing.
But I think the most valuable thing we have in our life is, is
is nutrition and love. I honestly think like as you
were talking about the food like addictions that we can have to
to food. That's absolutely true.
And I have found that like if I'm craving a dessert or
something like something sweet, I used to have a major sweet
tooth. I feel like it's dissipated a
lot in the recent years. But if I do have those cravings
like I will now just pour myself a cup of raw milk and it
nourishes me and satiates. It satiates you.
The fat actually makes you feel. Full and I feel good.
I don't. I don't feel gross.
Well, I feel like. It's a great way.
Serotonin, dopamine that's made in your gut, that travels to
your brain. It makes you feel good.
It makes you behave better. The gut brain axis is way
underrated, way under appreciated.
I mean, this reaches into the crime levels and all kinds of
stuff and and and people that are in prisons, what did they
grow up and what the food that they had what opportunity they
have. I think every prison should have
a raw milk carry. I really do not only for the the
contact with the animal, but the raw milk that it gives them.
I mean, there's so much we can do.
Yeah, be huge, be wonderful. Anyway, I I think this is great
steps in the right direction for better humanity.
Yeah, I have a few a few kind of random questions to close us
out. Love those.
Well, first, I haven't asked you about colostrum yet.
Talk to us about colostrum because I have always thought of
colostrum as the first, just the first milk.
I thought of it as a like a type of milk that may be more
nutrient dense, but it's not. That's not quite the case,
right? No.
Colostrum is not milk. It comes.
It does not come from the lacteal gland.
Lacteal glands lactate. They create milk, which is a
lactation colostrum comes from another source inside the other,
which is actually a serum complements blood system stuff.
It's it's the the immunoglobulins, antibodies and
all those things that come from the blood system.
And that only makes sense because you wouldn't want those
to go into leak together the baby immediately to go into its
blood system as the first nursing in life.
So that's why mammals have a colostrum that's given the baby
before the milk comes in, which is a day or two after the
colostrum has been sucked out or suckled.
Out prepare the gut. It prepares the gut, it gives
the antibodies into the bloodstream to give that baby a
boost of what the mother's life experiences in for her blood
system in the baby's blood system.
And remember, babies and moms don't share the same blood
system because of the umbilical cord.
The personal barrier doesn't allow the baby can have a
different blood system than mom. Different.
Blood type potentially. Right.
So these are the way to cross that personal barrier after
birth, which is suckling from the breast.
So colostrum is high in HGH, the human growth hormone.
It's high in fat, it's high in all kinds of interesting
immunoglobulins, antibodies. So it's not really milk, it's
more of an immune transfer. Remember this, it's a kind of a
warning, but if you have cancer, the HGH could stimulate the
growth of that cancer with Colosseum.
So be cautious. It could also cure, but at the
same time, it could actually stimulate the growth because
it's got those, those those hormones that drive growth.
And it's got human growth hormone, which is obviously very
good for weight lifting and things like that.
So there's a mixed bag there. It's very, very health
supporting, but just be aware. Yeah.
There's some things there. Raw milk comes on as the lacteal
to me, as the colostrum is dissipated, the lacteal let down
the follicle cement and hormone and all that stuff.
Prolactin starts to make the milk come in and then you start
producing milk and the mother they gorgeous with milk and the
baby, they think it's milk that actually supports the growth of
all the bacteria that was in the colostrum and actually then
starts to colonize the gut and you start off your first steps
of the immune system and the baby.
It's fascinating. How it all works?
Together, it all works. Together.
Yeah, Mother Nature's got going on.
Yeah. Loop Prince of Life.
Talk to me about the raw cheese loophole that I'm doing going to
do air quotes raw cheese loophole.
In the United States, the word raw is not defined.
Pasteurization is defined as 149° for 30 minutes.
That's a VAT pasteurization. And then there's protocols for
shorter time but higher temperatures all the way up to
282°. That's all the cook this stuff.
But if you've got 148°, that's raw, but it's not.
So if you think about a big processing plant that wants to
make money on raw cheeses, they got all this garbage milk that
comes in high bacteria counts, pathogens, all kinds of stuff.
The cultures that you would add into the cheese to make it
become cheddar or whatever it's going to be won't work very well
because the background bacteria levels are so high.
So why not cook it a little bit, but not quite pasteurized?
Or if we don't have a pasteurizer license, take it as
high as you want because nobody's going to care.
Because we don't, we don't pasteurize because we don't have
a license to pasteurize, because it's a license thing.
So you're going to cook it a little bit.
And then because it's not truly pasteurized, because you don't
have a pasteurizer's license, then when you cool it back down,
your cultures will work because the background floor has been
killed off. Because these these cultures you
put in don't want competition because the background cultures
are kind of directed to do what it's going to do because you're
fermenting. So Long story short is there are
a few producers of truly raw cheese.
That's where you take really clean milk and you take it up to
about 100° of temperature with body temperature and you're
adding cultures and you become a truly raw cheese, which
preserves all these bio act as we're talking about all these
other proteins and peptidases and enzymes and things that are
really important. So we make a truly raw cheese.
There are a few other people that do too, but the big guys
don't. OK, so how would consumers know
if the cheese that they're getting is truly raw?
You call the company up and you say, what's your VAT
temperature? And if they hang up, you know
the answer, you just pissed them off.
And that's generally the answer is it's none of your business
and buy. If they have a VAT temperature
that's below let's say 100 and 510°, it's truly raw.
They're going to brag about it. They're going to say, oh, let me
tell you, it's really exciting. But that's kind of hard because
when you disconnect the farmer to the consumer, you can't call
the farmer the consumer. The, the processors don't
represent the farmers. And they've got a 100 line that
rarely you get a real person. So it's part of that, like you
said, that loophole that well, we're not going to tell you if
you don't ask and you can't ask us because you can't get a hold
of us. So the raw cheeses that are
presented by some of these large producers are not truly raw.
They've been aged 60 days. That's true, but they've not.
They've been cooked a little bit and all your bio actors are
gone. What would you say to someone
who thinks that consuming another mammal's milk is strange
or unnatural? That would only happen in a
first world country with all kinds of Walmart food.
You take away all the Walmart food and all the food around
you, put you in the middle of nowhere naked and afraid you'd
beg for a domesticated animal because you'd starve without it.
Interesting thing about that is mankind's last 15,000 years have
made domesticated animals a best friend because you can eat their
meat. Cow has a couple calves you can
kill the full calve and keep the temper to grow up and be another
milk cow. Goats, sheep, horses, all these
were edible as well as producing edible milk which was food for
today. So I appreciate their comment,
but look at the history and look at the fact that there's
they're, they're neglecting the nutritional bio active component
which is missing in our gut as math dusting as a crisis in
America with their autoimmune problems and our inflammation in
our gut. Yeah, makes sense.
OK. There are parents in jail right
now for vegan diets in children because of brain damage.
Where? Where is this happening?
Florida, really. There was a mom and dad put in
jail. I mean, he spent six months
because they deprived their children of any kind of animal
fat and the child got brain damage as a result.
The First Food of Life gives us some details about the
blueprints of what we're supposed to eat.
Breast milk has raw fats in it. That's an animal fat.
Would you ever think that the the child should not have animal
fat in their diet? If breast milk is the blueprints
of life, that's very telling. It tells you everything right
there in my opinion. Makes sense.
OK, we're going to close out with some rapid.
Fire. This has been awesome.
Rapid fire. Here we go.
Mark, if you had to choose between drinking conventional
almond milk or conventional pasteurized cow's milk for the
rest of your life, which one would you pick?
Oh boy. Conventional pasteurized milk or
almond milk. With gums and fillers.
I just came out of the International Milk Genomics
Consortium and heard a professor talk or PhD talk about when fats
are cooked they aren't good for you and they cause heart
disease. So I'm not in love with that
concept at all. On that side.
What I would do is probably the almond milk and cheat and throw
it over my shoulder and go find myself a cow and get Rama.
OK, you found a loophole. Found a loophole.
I don't know, but I know that cooked fat in the raw milk
scenario has not been shown to be beneficial for heart disease.
Raw fats are fantastic and anti-inflammatory and very good
to your heart. So I'm not against almond milk,
but it just doesn't give you the bio actives.
It's just not there. Yeah.
But maybe a more benign option than small cow's milk?
I think so. Yeah, yeah, I know.
I always think about that because I hate all of the the
added fillers in the the plant based milks.
Like I wish more coffee shops use raw milk and that leads to
another question. So there is a.
Coffee Air 1. Air One, yeah, but I mean that's
like 2 hours. I know, I know.
But they're great. There is a coffee shop about 20
minutes from my house around here that uses raw farm milk and
so sometimes I will make the extra trip over there to get a
coffee. But I wonder with with raw milk
when it's added to hot coffee or used to make a hot cappuccino or
hot latte. Does that pasteurize the milk?
If your if your coffee is so hot that you can't put your finger
in it, you're cooking it. But what's interesting is if you
have cold cream and you're pouring it in there, it's let's
say 140 degrees, 135°, the 1st amount you pour in there, it's
going to get cooked. You lose your bio actives.
But the last part, when it's cooled down, 110 or less, it'll
be fine. So you're actually doing some
pasteurization, some raw, because you're using that to
cool the the coffee. So you have a threshold, maybe
100 and 15120° where you're going to start losing the really
good stuff. So if you could put your finger
in it, you're probably OK. Yeah.
And if I'm not putting my finger in it, I'm not drinking it, you
know, like if it's scalding my finger, I'm not going to, no.
Sip on that. No, you wouldn't want to.
OK. I can.
I can deal with that because then you're still getting some
of the preserved nutrients that are going to help you digest the
milk properly. I'll make that concession every
once in a while, but best case scenario I usually get iced
coffee and pour it in that well. Here's the thing, if you want to
have coffee, great. You want to put cream in your
coffee, great. You want pasteurized cream,
great. Just make sure you drink raw
milk separately or in a smoothie because that will nourish your
microbiome to whatever's coming through you can deal with on the
other side. Yeah.
I mean, we're not going to live sin free lives here, guys.
We live in reality. So you want to have perfection?
No. Yeah.
It's about trying to hit 8590%. And when you do, then you're
going to start reflecting the tremendous value of that
underlying base foundation. What is your favorite raw farm
product? My favorite raw farm product,
Lemon raw milk Kiefer. That's why you brought it.
I do. It has a special place in my
heart. I love it.
I love lemons. Lemons are really good for you.
Yeah, but it's my favorite. Although all of them are
wonderful. That's my favorite.
Would you guys ever do a chocolate 1?
I feel like that would be really good.
Chocolate, Chocolate, you know, there's a standard evidentity
for every product we make. And we can't make raw chocolate
milk in California. And the Amish do because they
don't have standard of identity in their state there.
What does that mean? Standard of identity is a legal
description under your federal, I mean, excuse me, and your
state agricultural code, your food and agricultural code that
says thou shalt not do anything except for this.
If you're going to do this product, they call it something.
So all of our raw milk things we make actually have a standard of
of identity for them in California, and raw chocolate
milk is not one of them, unfortunately.
Weird, but you can make your own.
Yeah, exactly. Just add a little.
Cocoa to do. Just shake it out.
Yeah, how can our listeners get involved in the movement to make
raw milk legal in their own state, or to find a safe raw
dairy farmer? It's happening all over the
place. Doctor Joe Joseph Heckman is
working on Virginia right now. Be the action.
Go to your farmer, get them trained so you have a source of
raw milk. The farmer can start thriving
and feel the passion of the consumer.
The consumers feel the passion because they're changing their
lives. Consumers tell other consumers.
Then you go find a sponsor at the bill at the at your
legislature, find a bill sponsor and get them drinking raw milk.
Then you have to go seduce your state AG people and other
university people and try to get them to go neutral and talk
about we agree pasteurization should go for this kind of milk
over here. But that's not what we're
talking about. We're talking about this clean
kind of raw milk over here. And it might upset them to say
it's clean versus others it's dirty.
So you try to use not inflammatory language, try to
speak their language and try to appeal to their heart and their
emotion and talk about this clean, raw milk here that is so
important for my children. And you just have to go through
the process. And sometimes it takes a while.
But I know Delaware's changed the law, Montana's changed the
law. Iowa just changed the law.
Tennessee's in the middle of it. Virginia's in the middle of it.
It's happening. It's a domino effect.
It's driven by consumers and farmers working together.
I think a lot of people's concern with raw milk is the
risk of contracting foodborne illness.
Do you think that that concern is substantiated and can you
talk about the recall that you have?
It was salmonella from one cow and 1000 cows and she had one of
her quarters had some salmonella and it was below threshold of
detection. So if you tested the milk, it
came back negative. As for salmonella.
So we actually changed our protocol so we test sets of 20
cows. So we don't have the dilution
effect of having so much milk in the tank and not finding the
pathogen. And so now we've changed our
protocols with our on farm lab to be able to test 20 cows at a
time and actually see that in fact, none of those cows have a
pathogen coming from them. We learned from it.
And that's the pioneering spirit, I think of taking
something and not taking it, taking it as an inspiration to
do better instead of falling down and giving up.
I, I have a take on food safety, by the way.
It's kind of an interesting way of looking at this.
Is it better for your entire culture of people to live in a
bubble of trouble and be sterilized and not live in
nature because you can't be exposed to normal bacteria
because you're going to get sick?
That's kind of where we're heading right now, which is
everything has to be super sterilized and clean, clean,
clean, clean, clean and dead, dead, dead because we are weaker
and weaker and weaker. Is that the course for better or
should we be exposed to a biodiversity bacteria and build
immunity, build a strong, resilient adaptive immune system
to be able to deal with whatever threats come to you from
wherever and have a few illnesses once in a while
because of those people that don't have ability to build the
immune system. So it's an interesting thing how
our policies generally go towards the weakest of us and
all the rest of the society literally is compromised as a
result and get sick because they don't have the exposure to this
ability to get better. Or the other way around, where,
yeah, we'll have illness once in a while on rare occasions
because everybody's healthy. So the word safety is really an
interesting thing. Are we safer as a country
because we kill everything and don't have strong immune
systems? Or are we safer because we
expose ourselves to some immune system exercise?
Yeah, like, there's so much research about how kids who grow
up on farms have stronger, more robust immune systems.
Eat some dirt, right? Drink some milk.
Play with animals. At the same time, the humanity
of producing food for people has to come through and say I don't
want anybody to get sick, I don't care who it is.
That's why we test our pathogens on our farm to make sure we
don't have pathogens in them Up as you receive the gift of
biodiversity, it doesn't include the pathogenic part as well as
adversity. So it's wild, but not too wild.
We want to rewild our gut, as Doctor Bruce Durman says, to get
that diversity of bacteria, which gives us that antibody
effect of protecting ourselves from so many more broad threats
versus just a little bit. So we have to rethink our
policies in our country to protect all of us and also the
weakest of us at the same time. It's not easy.
So how? How common are food recalls in
the food industry in general? Well, right now they're
happening every day. I mean, onion recalls,
cantaloupe recalls, pasteurized milk recalls, Boar's Head deli
meat recall, ice cream recalls, I mean, onions and McDonald's
hamburger recalls. I mean, it's happening.
My take on that is that's also an indication of how compromised
our immune systems are as well, because they the FDA is trying
to make our foods sterile or lack of bacteria and then they
do that. It's considered safer.
In doing that you actually get in more trouble because then the
people become more compromised because they don't have the
experience of dealing with bacteria in their environments.
The European Union has a completely different take on
this. They allow listeria in their
food. You don't see the Listeria
illnesses. You see a little bit here and
there, but you've got an immunity for listeria here.
You don't. So people die from listeria
here. So we have to think as a country
policy wise about biodiversity and whole food nutrition as.
Is our way forward. If we don't get that, then we're
going to always be food rebels. We're going to be always against
the grain. We need support from those in
charge and we need to tell them what to do by dollar voting,
saying your choices don't work anymore because we're not going
to buy it that we want to whole food nutrition.
We're not going to be nourished by sugars and fake foods and
everything else that's out there that's terrible.
Well, Mark, we are in such an exciting time right now and I,
I'm really so optimistic about the future of health in America
and where things are headed and just how things are changing so
much at a consumer grassroots level.
And I think that you and everything that you're doing is
playing a huge role in that, in the education that you're
providing about raw milk and just Whole Foods and health in
general. So I'm really excited for our
community to hear this episode and just to learn from you, how
can people buy your products and follow along with everything
that you're doing? Well, I believe this is a we
project, not a me project. This is a team of people
building a community that's going in the right direction.
How can people help here? Keep on buying raw milk and keep
on buying chicken and buying all the wonderful things from their
their local farms or their farms that are connected to stores
that they know their source that don't have antibiotics, they
don't have hormones, they're unprocessed in whole continue to
do that. Dollar voting is the most
powerful thing we can do in our country to direct where our
country goes. So I think that's the most
powerful thing we can do. You get to know your farmer if
you can. They are depraved of social and
economic support and they need to have that relationship.
It's it's very important for farmers to know people, not
processors. Yeah.
Well, thank you. Thanks for being here.
It's my pleasure.