On land just west of Madison, Wisconsin, Kristina Amelong and her husband, Tim Cordon, graze 30 goats and have a pair of Jersey cows on the way. Their milk is fresh, creamy, and silken with fat, but it’s sought after for what it isn’t: pasteurized.
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Because the legality of cow sharing is often unclear and more explicitly commercial programs are clearly illegal, it’s difficult to get an accurate picture of how many shareholders there are. As Dennise Wright of Liberty Family Farm in Hart, Michigan–which promotes its goat- and cow-share programs at the Green City Market–says, “I know a lot of people probably do it under the table.” But it’s clear that raw milk is coming in from the fringe: there are now at least four farms that openly deliver to the Chicago area. (Amelong and Cordon’s isn’t one of them; they declined to discuss how their shareholders get their milk.)
Evanston resident Leslie Kosar gets raw milk twice a month from separate farms in Wisconsin and Michigan; she picks it up from local health food stores that have quietly agreed to serve as distributors. “I was against milk completely when my two children were born,” she says. But after reading about raw milk on the Web site of the Weston A. Price Foundation, a Washington nonprofit that advocates against pasteurization, she changed her mind.
Sally Fallon, president of the Weston A. Price Foundation, says that milk protects itself against disease: “If you put [bad] bacteria in raw milk, the next day it’ll be gone.” Scott Rankin, professor of food science at the University of Wisconsin, disputes this: “If I put bad bacteria into raw milk, is it capable of killing bad bacteria? Yes. Does it always happen? No. A preponderance of evidence shows that, in general, raw milk is routinely a source of pathogens.”
Cress Spring Whole Milk Dairy
Liberty Family Farm
