Richard, this is a Permaculture discussion forum. No one here, at least on this thread is advocating any "extremism", and I think the word "absurdity" is actually insulting. As for industrial agriculture producing "a lot of calories", this may be true, but it has been observed by many others that we overfed, yet undernourished. There is more to food than its calorific value; food affects health, and healthy food, in this case milk, is derived from a healthy environment. Unhealthy pasture cannot produce healthy milk, and no amount of industrial processing, which is essentially one of destruction and extraction, can restore it to health. It appears, from the information that is being shared on this thread, that pasturisation merely reduces health risks that can either be eliminated before the point of production, or by better handling and distribution. I routinely pass through countryside that is in a state of collapse; over-cleared, with eroding, degraded soil, destroyed by decades of over-use of fertilizers and excessive grazing. This land is also underpopulated. If given over to Permaculture it could support quite a large human population while producing both "a lot of calories" and lot of healthy nutrition, with the added bonus of a high-value lifestyle. Again Richard, this is a Permaculture discussion forum, where we are free to discuss a better way of doing things. Criticism of industrial agriculture is intrinsic to Permaculture.
Re: lysteria Facts eh? Women who milk cows are also at risk from this. Should we therefore prevent fertile women from being dairy farmers or workers? The point isn't that raw milk is totally safe and that pasteurised milk is totally evil, it's that for many people the risks associated with raw milk are far less than the risks associated with past. And, the health benefits are far more for raw than past. As an aside, most conceptions end in miscarriage. We have millions of years of co-evolution with microbes, especially in relation to our food and digestion. Miscarriage is probably a way of humans not reproducing when it's not optimal to do so (for whatever reason). This isn't to discount the pain and loss that many women feel when they miscarry. Just that modern cultures seem to have lost track of the fact that death is a normal part of life. We also have lost a lot of our cultural wisdom about how to maximise safety in our environment eg why don't pregnant women know to avoid raw milk cheese? I'm not sure who said that originall about the cocktail so I'm not sure what they were referring to, but commercial milk does contain alot of harmful chemicals. These come from non-organic production (pesticides used on pasture, drenches, antibiotics etc). In NZ, they used to mix milk from DDT areas with milk from non-DDT areas in order to get the DDT levels low enough to be able to sell the milk. I don't know if they still do this. Chemicals also come from the products that big dairies use to clean their milking gear. Of course, that is a different issue than pasteurisation, but the mindset that supports chemical farming also supports pasteurisation. Both are based on very limited understandings of human health, or on greed. The theory about the problem with homogenisation is that because it changes the molecular size, some people's digestive tracts absorb the molecules into the blood stream before the milk has been properly digested. This causes an immune response (the body sees the molecules as alien) and makes the person sick. I don't know how science based that theory is (it makes sense as an hypothesis, I don't know if it's been studied). I do know that many people get ill when they drink homogenised milk and don't when they drink whole milk. This is true also for past. vs raw, although for different reasons. Raw milk is easier to digest for many people because it contains the microbes necessary for digestion. Also, the heat involved in past. means that the nature of the proteins has changed and this makes it difficult for some people to digest. Many people with dairy 'allergies' find that if they drink raw milk, especially if it is organic, then they have no problems (a smaller number of people have a true allergy to milk and can't drink it at all). People that do still have a problem find that cultured dairy is ok (because it is predigested). Not only that, many people with health problems, especially respiratory ones like asthma, notice an improvement in their health, or even complete remission, when they drink raw milk. Raw milk is a medicine in traditional cultures. I can't drink past. milk, it makes me sick. I can get away with eating organic past. dairy a few times a week, especially if it's cultured. I can drink raw milk and raw dairy products most days and not get ill. That experience is not unusual. If people want to drink past. milk, fine. It's just ridiculous that those that want to drink raw have such a difficult time accessing it.
Pebble, You have clearly stated what I was clearly thinking and didnt get round to stating, [or, I wished I'd have thought of that!!]. Raw milk [products] should be available and it should be labelled with a disclaimer. If we can sell tobacco with a label then we can label milk too but we will have to fight governments hard to get them to change. Imagine if it were legal to sell raw milk? We would see the advent of prosperous 10-12 cow dairy herds again and a lot more people owning a house cow. Imagine the thought of owning your own cow and selling the surplus? Even the thought is seditious... :shock: The dairy industry would be screaming off the roof tops. Maybe we could insert this as a 'plank' in our Permie Party's platform. The point I missed earlier with pasteurisation was that whilst I knew we did it and have even pasteurised milk. Collectively, we have forgotten why we did it. Just on the issue of labelling. Why isnt the Old Testament distributed with a health warning sticker??..... floot
Hi floot, In NZ it is actually legal to sell raw milk. You can sell up to 5 litres per person per day, but only from the gate. It is also perfectly legal to grow raw milk for yourself (and presumably for anyone else that lives with you). I'm not so clear about Australian law, but I think that what's happening there is the herd-share idea (that someone mentioned earlier). You buy a share in a herd and that gives you legal access to the milk even though you don't live on the property. I'm not sure about the law in either country in terms of if you can give raw milk away. So there are ways around it. I'm reasonably happy about the law in NZ in the meantime because I think it will fuel exactly what you are talking about - small local herds and a return to house cows. The problem is that because raw milk is not very mainstream local authorities and such can still make life very hard for the farmer if they want to, so most farmers are being discreet about having milk available. In the US with the raw milk and with other dairy and meat products, there is more commercialisation going on, and such foods are often being shipped long distances. I don't think this is a good idea, as the bigger the gap between producer and eater the more likely there will be problems. Except from my POV, it's the past. milk that should be compared to tobacco I don't think we have to fight the govt so much as just work locally to support local growers and be willing to stand up for them if they do get harrassed. I guess I can't really see how you could sell raw milk in a supermarket for instance. I'm sure someone could figure out how to do it, but wouldn't it be better to place raw milk in the context of sustainability and local eating, local economies etc.
Hello all, as a long time reader of the forum i thought it high time i registered and contributed, especially on a topic that i am so passionate about. Having been born and bred on a small dairy farm and having it in my blood so to speak my partner and i jumped at the chance to lease a friends dairy farm in april last year.. It's been tough.. no doubt... but what has struck me more than drought is the turnaround in the industry that i had been absent from for over a decade. Once upon a time there were service companies that relied on the farming sector to tick along making a steady profit most years. Now it seems farms are only an adjunct of the companies, existing only to keep these big corporate monsters going. What we have quickly realized is that there must be better avenues to making a living ( a humble one would suffice) To cut an already long story short we are transforming our 65 acre frost free hill farm that we were lucky enough to buy back a few years ago (ten years in other hands after 50 years of family stewardship) with the intention of supplying raw dairy goods in a direct marketing situation(have had rave, albeit private, reviews of the products already) It's not rocket science to see that by by passing the so called co op's and not having the costs of setting up pastuerising equipment etc that it could be sustainable/profitable. Yes ok it is illegal but they will be labelled body/skin products as is the case of milk currently coming in to vic from qld. If this were to be further adopted there would be great outcomes for all. Framer: Pride of product and incentive to keep quality above quantity on list of priorities. Less stress due to low or no debt. More time to treat cattle with TLC and be happy with optimal rather than maximum production. Self esteem, not looked upon as bottom feeders by interacting with end users. Environment: For us a 20 cow herd maximum, we are able to do more erosion control work, use minimal water(manure composted rather than washed to dams)Encourage native species of grass and trees due to lower need for excess ryegrass. minimizing inputs of feed and fertilizer. Consumer: Connect with origin of food know where how and why made and why it may vary through the season. Opportunity to set up loyalty rewards to have visitors stay on farm and see procedures and have greater understanding of it.Similar price for a much superior product, it's not imagination you can taste and feel the difference. Anyhow better wind this up, you'll all be sick of me before i have two posts.. Should the dairy police try to nip this in the bud you may see me on the tv.. i'd actually welcome the publicity to highlight the point.
Alex, I am sorry if I caused offence. At the same time, if I think an opinion or a statement is absurd I am going to say so. I am not interested in a Permaculture that doesn't have room for a diversity of opinion. :wink: I don't disagree with you that industrial farming is bad for the environment or that it produces food that is of poorer quality than what can be grown in well designed and managed gardens. I do disagree with the statement that industrial farming isn't about food production. It does after all produce an awful lot of food. More food than we have ever had in the history of our species. To claim otherwise is patently absurd. Of course I think we agree that the long term costs to our environment and culture are greater than the short term benefits derived from the enormous quanities of food (of sometimes questionable quality) produced by the industrial complex.
I don't think anybody has claimed that industrialised agriculture doesn't produce a lot of food. The disagreement is that that it's primary aim. The end is money, the means is producing, processing and selling food. Whether that food happens to be nutritious, tasty, or looks nice is irrelevant to the companies except insofar as it affects their profits. They follow the demands of the market, while trying to affect the demands of the market by advertising, and making the most of people's ignorance about how food is produced. The food is a means to the end of money. They're not working for charities, they're businesses. They didn't pump up the amount produced out of kindness and concern, but for cash. Understanding the difference between the ends and the means is very important to understanding the whole process of industrialised agriculture. It explains things like vCJD, the bacterial outbreaks in spinach in the USA, unemployed people in Mexico going hungry while land is untilled, and so on and so forth.
muzzduck, your plan sounds fantastic. Good luck! I have to agree with the others, that the purpose of alot of industrial farming isn't to produce food to feed people, that that is just a side effect. For instance, the corportate dairy industry here has just given farmers a high payout (this will most likely increase inflation, raise interest rates etc too, but that's another complaint ). They've also announced a 20c per 2 litre rise in the retail cost of milk. This, apparently, is because they have to, apparently, keep the price of milk in NZ connected to the international diary industry economy. It's got nothing to do with how much it actually costs to produce milk for the local market. So, no, milk isn't being grown here to feed NZers. It's being grown to make profits for shareholders. Richard, maybe the point you are making is not to make such extreme absolutist statements (industrial farming isn't for producing food), and I am inclined to agree that it's unhelpful to take such an extreme stance. But with the corportate dairy industry it's really hard to see that it is about producing food. At the moment the most easily exploitable resources in NZ are land and water. There is very little regulation on those, and it just looks to me like that is why so much international money is being poured into the industry here. It's not because they think we need more milk, it's because they can sell more milk and make more money. Next decade the market will collapse, and they'll move on to something else that makes easier money for them.
Richard, I might have put it better if I'd written "agriculture is no longer so much about food, as it is about shareholder value", but I never implied it didn't produce food. Agriculture yields a lot of profit for the Petrochemical industry. There's plenty of food in production, I just believe there are better ways to go about it, while producing not only calories, but nutrition. What we do need is more people like Muzzduck, who are prepared to go ahead and find a way around the obstacles posed by the "Authorities", and go ahead producing nutritious food. They deserve our support. In fact, directing our money towards such people and away from the monopolist supermarkets, is a powerful way to influence the way food is produced in future. And of course, we can produce more of our own.
Well... I guess we have to agree to differ. I do actually think you are going overboard in saying that industrial farming, be it dairying or growing wheat or whatever, is only secondarily about food production. Yes, it is a very stupid way of going about, but it (feeding people) is actually the reason that people do it at all... the fact that a petrochemical industry has grown up with it is the secondary phenomenon. People mostly aren't evil, just stupid... :lol: I do agree that buying local is the answer.
Muzzduck, Welcome and congratulation on your endeavour. Asking for some info here. If you sold into a commercial milk/co-op operation - Would your 20 cow herd be a able to gross over 50k per annum? I dont know what wholesale milk is worth? Would a commercial dairy company pick up at a 20 cow dairy? Recently on a trip to NZ's South Island I met a number of cow cockies who were all sharefarming. This seemed common over a number of rural enterprises, much more so than here. floot
Hello again, Thanks all for words of encouragement and best wishes We really feel strongly that dairy farming on this smaller scale can invigorate communities and involve integrated farm modelling, not be at odds with permaculture as with most big mono operations. Floot, Firstly a twenty cow herd on upcoming prices would probably gross around 35 000 in milk sales. (based on 35c a litre ave price and 5000 l per cow). Currently the milk companies would prob pick you up should you be on a main route due to a looming shortage of milk supply post drought (whenever anyones game enough to call that), however they told my parents nearly 30 years ago that they would stop picking them up eventually due to larger and larger trucks hitting the road. We are in a dairying stronghold yet our milk gets trucked near 100 ks since they shut a local factory 20 years ago.(Hasn't stopped log trucks using our gravel road and terrorizing the residents) Already we are sending shipments of milk and cream under the radar to melbourne as the grapevine weaves. Our unfinalised prices for unpast milk is $1.80 pl and cream $4.50 per 300ml in a refridgerated van that is going down empty. Bit more leeway for costs there you'd have to say. But hey we are realists and know that we now have other issues with testing marketing etc although this will feel less chained to the wheel more empowering to know the product is going to a good home.
Welcome Muzzduck and thanks for your story. I think direct marketing and the smaller scale farming that you are adopting is the way to go - best of luck with your endeavours.
Hi, I live in Melbourne and am looking for someone who sells raw milk. I am lactose intolerant but recently discovered that raw milk doesn't affect me (it's got something to do with the enzymes my body doesn't have but which are present in raw milk). Heinz
There are several Melbourne sources listed in this conversation (see comments section further down): https://editor.nourishedmagazine.com.au/ ... mment-6529
That is true. You can get sick from bad milk! Raw milk, however, contains good bacteria that inhibits the growth of bad bacteria. These good bacteria are not present in pasturised milk, which means that if your pasturised milk contains any bad bacteria, it will flourish! I've kept raw milk in the fridge for 3+ weeks and it's still been fine to drink. You cannot get a lifespan like that from pasturised milk! You may be interested in reading this newly released 16 page fact sheet on raw milk safety. https://www.newfarm.org/features/2007/06 ... wman.shtml Cheers.
