Raw milk and shares in our local cows
My tummy was playing up again this week very painful cramping. None of the doctors seem able to really diagnose it but at least a day in bed sleeping deeply drinking a lot of water and having very little or no food isthe most effective way to deal with it I’ve found so far in a long hunt.
The other thing I’ve found on my search to understand tummy problems is that a very big proportion of us are having real problems with our tummies. Call them by some other names: guts bellies bowels. Something going on inside that hurts. Lots.
People go on weird diets. They contort themselves through the eye of a needle about what they can and cannot eat. Does it help at all? I really wonder but it certainly makes for a lot of socially challening situations when guests won’t eat anything that might have anything in it.
Which was only one of the reasons why the high praise for raw milk caught my eye. The statement: “Our guts have been off forever. It’s the first time we’ve been able to be normal.”
It makes a lot of sense that if a lot of us are having a similar problem let’s have a look at what a lot of us are doing and see if we can find any link between the two.
Drinking highly pasteurised milk is something most of us do. The milk in our shops has been separated put back together minus some of its cream in a specified fat/protein/calorie ration sieved to shrink the fat molecules to a size that is hard for our bodies to manage and then cooked to kill bacteria but also many of the vitamins and good bacteria and enzymes. For a while I was using quite a lot of powdered milk until I read about how it was produced. Now I avoid it almost completely.
People who have found a way to get access to a supply of raw milk get so they will almost move heaven and earth to ensure the sustained supply. I once lived in a little country town and was good friends with a local dairy farmer. Buying raw milk from him was an unbelievable treat. It is stuff that is nothing like what we get in the shops.
In fact I did a cheese-making workshop here run by a woman from Maleny. It was all very well for her. She owns and milks her own cows. So the cheese-making workshop sort of started off with: Go out and milk a pail of fresh milk… At which point all us city-folk could only go green with envy and give up any hope of cheese-making. It was like being a hungry pauper gazing in at the window of a pastry shop in a Dickens’ novel.
So what are some of the claims made for raw milk? Firstly there was the suggestion that long-standing gut problems went away. It is talked about as stopping teeth decay in its tracks. Pain with sore hips and back after childbirth disappearing. Numerous studies show a link between raw milk consumption and lower rates of asthma eczema and various allergies. The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology had a study showing a 41% reduction in asthma and a 50% reduction in allergies for children who drank raw milk.
Not sure where you can get it but Cleopatra’s Milk is raw milk sold for bathing in!
You can drink milk raw from a cow you own although legally you are not allowed to sell it for human or even animal consumption.
A business model for having a share in a milking cow is for a local dairy farmer to sell shares in his cows. For example 3000 shares in 30 cows at a cost of $27.50 a share with an additional boarding fee of $7.50 a month entitling shareholders to 1.5 litres of milk a week per share. This enables the farmer to make more money for less cows taking the stress of the farmer the farm and the cows. It enables hygiene to be kept high. Much better to get raw milk from a dairy milking 30 cows than 2000.
I could see this model working very well locally in this area. We have a long dairy-farming history and dairy farms are under pressure. We could be part of the solution and have access to a highly valued food product.