At the Little Acres Farm in Lovell, Wyoming, each cow and calf have a name and a story as their soft moos fill the pasture.
It’s milking time, and Rebecca Bates is grateful to have the help of her five children, ages 20 to 11, as they go about the evening chores.
They have 17 cows who must each wait their turn since only one cow at a time can be milked using their single milking machine.
“The Jerseys produce the best cream, although we prefer the milk from the Normande cows,” Bates said.
The raw milk from each cow is immediately put into a 60-gallon milk tank. Within 15 minutes, the milk temperature drops below 40 degrees. This is just one of many safety precautions the family takes to ensure that the milk remains safe to drink without being pasteurized and losing valuable minerals, Bates said.
Customers can then buy the fresh, raw milk directly from Little Acres Farm thanks to the Wyoming Food Freedom Act.
“Little Farms is a dairy farm first,” Bates said. “We've been milking cows for about 18 years, and we've always been a raw milk dairy. We started when we could do cow shares as the only way to legally sell raw milk.”
At the time, it was illegal to sell raw milk, so rather than sell the milk itself, the Bates sold shares of their cows. Customers would then receive their own milk as part owners of the cow.
The farm can now legally sell raw milk, butter, cheese and cream cheese at their dairy farm store, from their website and directly to customers.
“I call it the ‘Agriculture Amazon of the Bighorn Basin,’” Bates said. “You can go online and buy different food products and stuff, and we deliver it to them.”
Their customers are considered an “informed end consumer” who do not resell the product, and who know that the product is not licensed, regulated or inspected. The raw milk product must be clearly labeled with "this food was made in a home kitchen, is not regulated or inspected and may contain allergens."
National Raw Milk Movement
In all states, milk must still be pasteurized to sell commercially in a store.
In Wyoming, you can only buy raw milk directly from producers or through their agents. Raw milk is still illegal in many states, though this may change under the incoming presidential administration.
With President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, raw milk may soon become legal to sell nationwide. One of Kennedy’s agenda items to “Make America Healthy Again” is to allow for the sale of the controversial agricultural product.
“They're understanding that when you're buying milk from the grocery store, it's been stripped of all the nutrients,” Bates said. “A lot of lactose intolerant people can't handle store bought milk, but they can deal with what's in raw milk because they have the nutrients to actually digest the milk. There's just a lot of benefits of drinking raw milk versus storebought milk.”
Some in the raw milk community recommend caution on selling raw milk commercially, such as Jack Schmidt of the Fremont Local Market in Riverton.
“It really worked for us on a local level because we were able to police it and know that the person producing the milk was actually the one that sold it to the consumer,” Schmidt said. “Now you try to do that on a federal level, it'll be very, very hard to police. I worry about that part of it.”
History Of Raw Milk
“It’s important to know how the way pasteurization came to be,” Schmidt said. “It was during the Industrial Revolution when everybody was moving to the cities. They didn't have refrigeration, so they brought the cows with them.
“These cows were milked inside the city but there was no feed there. The major source of food was brewer's grains because every city had several breweries, and they called them spent grains.
“The spent grains, which had very low nutritional value, were fed to the cows. The cows still gave milk, but it was a very blue milk because it didn't have any nutrients in it.”
Today, a glass of skim milk would be a good example of this phenomena because it, too, can have a bluish tint. This is because the fat globules have been removed and there are now fewer particles in suspension to scatter light. During the Industrial Revolution, the blue tint was unacceptable, and ways were found to “fix” the milk.
“People being people, they'd throw a little lime in there to turn it white again,” Schmidt said. “So they wound up having sick babies. And that's how it started. There was a huge movement by people to save our babies. Louis Pasteur had figured out how pasteurization will kill bacteria. It doesn't kill just the bad ones. It kills the good ones, too.
“Every state in the union signed up to have that made a law where all milk had to be pasteurized. That's how it happened. Even if you owned the cow, you couldn't drink the milk out of that cow without pasteurization. That's how you can take a good idea way too far.”
As proposed members of the future Trump administration consider making it legal to sell raw milk, it is already legal in several states, including Wyoming. Raw milk can be sold directly from the producer, like Little Acres Farm in Lovell, to the consumer who assumes the risk. (Courtesy Little Acres Farm) 
As proposed members of the future Trump administration consider making it legal to sell raw milk, it is already legal in several states, including Wyoming. Raw milk can be sold directly from the producer, like Little Acres Farm in Lovell, to the consumer who assumes the risk. (Courtesy Little Acres Farm)
Concerns
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), contamination of raw milk can occur when the cow itself is sick, fecal matter gets into raw milk or equipment used in production, or improper handling during transportation, processing, packaging, and storage.
In October 2023, the Wyoming Department of Health had confirmed that five people -- one adult, and four children -- became ill after drinking raw, unpasteurized milk purchased through the Slow Food in the Tetons online market. The patients were infected with campylobacter and E. Coli bacteria.
These types of outbreaks have occurred throughout Wyoming and are why health officials advise caution when consuming raw, unpasteurized milk. Bates countered that precautions against this contamination can be made, and she has never had an outbreak at her dairy.
“You can send your milk samples in,” Bates said. “Most commercial dairies are required to do this anyway and individual farms can do it as well. You can send it in to the laboratories and then they'll test the milk and make sure it doesn't have any pathogens that could be harmful.”
“It’s a good idea to get some regulations gone,” Schmidt agreed. “but safety is of the utmost importance when it comes to food. We can't just turn people loose because there's bad players everywhere.”
Bates takes this danger of contamination seriously.
“We are very tight in our process of cleaning and filtering,” she said. “We keep our animals very healthy. They're fed a very healthy diet and so we don't worry about other pathogens. If we did get a cow that got sick, it would be separated from the other cows. Their milk is not put in with other milk or anything like that. So we have high standards in keeping our milk high quality.”
Ultimately, it is up to the consumer to decide if the risks outweigh the benefits.
“When you see on the label that the pasteurized milk has vitamin B and things like that, it’s been added back in,” Bates said. “They shouldn't be adding that back into milk because it comes naturally in milk. The problem is when you take milk to that heated stage of pasteurization, it takes out all those healthy nutrients that they are now having to add back in.
“Another reason for pasteurizing is, it just lasts longer. You know, obviously raw milk doesn't last as long in your fridge as pasteurized milk. It's a matter of convenience, right? You buy your milk and it's going to last longer. Well, I think studies are proving more and more just that something lasts longer doesn't make it better for you.”
Jackie Dorothy can be reached at jackie@cowboystatedaily.com.
