Deborah Jantzi of Treasured Sunrise Acres with raw cow milk

Idaho, however, recently changed it’s laws to allow the selling of raw milk.  In this installment of the Market & Garden Report, correspondent Guy Hand  goes to the farmers’ market to talk to Idaho’s first licensed raw milk dairywoman

(Woman at Market) So can you tell me about this? (Jantzi) It’s raw milk.  I have raw cow and goat milk.

(Hand) You know we’ve been living in a processed, pasteurized world a long time when people ask “what’s raw milk.”  In the few weeks that Deborah Jantzi has been selling raw goat and cows milk at the Capital City Public Market, she’s been asked that question many times.

(Jantzi) Raw milk comes straight from the cow or the goat.  We don’t do anything to it except filter it and flash cool it and bottle it.  We don’t do anything else, no processing to it.

(Hand) We humans drank raw milk for millenia.  Only after Louis Pasteur discovered that pasteurization killed pathogens, did raw milk fall out of favor.  But Jantzi says there’s a downside to pasteurization.

(Jantzi) When you pasteurize something you heat it up and it kills all the bacteria in it, good and bad, there’s bacteria on everything and if the milk comes from a healthy animal and handled clean you have no bad bacteria in it.  So you’re killing all the good bacteria that’s beneficial to your gut to help digest your food.  It also has a lot of enzymes in it and when you pasteurize it you kill them.

(Hand)  Not everyone in the raw milk debate would agree with Jantzi, but the State of Idaho says raw milk is safe if it’s produced in impeccably clean conditions.

Raw goat milk

(Jantzi)  To be licensed to sell raw milk, I had to have a grade A dairy to start with.  But then I have to go beyond that. I have to test every batch of my milk before I can bottle it.  The dairy inspector comes to my farm on average of once a month, takes that milk back to the state lab and they run all kinds of tests to make sure that it is healthy and that there is nothing in there that’s going to cause any problems for any body.

Cooler full of raw milk

(Hand) Jantzi sells her raw milk at her own dairy, at several farmers’ markets and the Boise Coop.  She’s got other plans as well.

(Jantzi) I am working on a licensed kitchen in my dairy.  I will then be able to do like chocolate milk, raw milk ice cream, we’re working on putting a cheese plant in and then we’ll be doing soft and possibly hard cheeses.  We will also be doing yogurt.

(Hand) But does raw milk taste different?

(Jantzi) Yeah, there’s a difference in taste.  It tastes a lot fuller, a lot creamier, I think a lot better (laughing).

(Hand) If you’re interested in raw milk, Deborah Jantzi will be at the Capital City Public Market every Saturday.  For the Market & Garden Report and Boise State Public Radio, I’m Guy Hand.

Here are several articles on the raw milk issue:

Some Like It Raw
The Truth About Raw Milk Part 1
The Truth About Raw Milk Part 2
Want raw milk? Lease a farm—and hire a lawyer
Is raw milk becoming too popular for its own good?

Dairy owner Darryl Vander Haak. By Tom Banse

(GH: Tom Banse of The Northwest News Network reports on converting cow manure to electricity on Northwest Public Radio)

BELLINGHAM, WA – When you think of what federal economic stimulus money has paid for, the first things that come to mind might be highway paving, energy retrofits or high-speed trains. Now here’s one of the most unconventional stimulus projects we’ve heard of. An institute at Western Washington University is getting half a million dollars to examine how to convert cow manure into horsepower. From Bellingham, correspondent Tom Banse explains.

Five years ago, dairy farmer Darryl Vander Haak flipped the switch on the first poop-to-power generator in Washington State. Officially, the facility near Lynden, Washington is known as a methane digester. Manure from around a 1000 cows goes in one end. Then controlled decomposition yields methane gas. It’s burned like natural gas in an electric generator.

The rub is, electricity sales haven’t been very profitable, or profitable at all says dairyman Vander Haak.

Darryl Vander Haak: “We’re looking for alternative ways. The Northwest has too much hydropower to compete with. It would be easier to compete with the gas companies, I guess.”

That’s why Vander Haak was open minded when the director of the Vehicle Research Institute at Western Washington University came calling from down the road in Bellingham. Eric Leonhardt says he’s long had his eye on the dairy herd as a source of transportation fuel.

Eric Leonhardt: “The problem is when the gas comes off the digester, it has not only methane in it – sixty percent — it also has carbon dioxide — forty percent, roughly. And it has a trace of hydrogen sulfide.”

Leonhardt says the challenge is to remove those engine-wrecking impurities cost-effectively. Other than that, powering vehicles with natural gas is not new. Generating the fuel from renewable sources has been done before too, for example at landfills. The U.S. Department of Energy gave the $500,000 grant to improve the fuel refining process and then demonstrate whether biogas could be cost-competitive. At lot depends on the price of fossil fuels.

Eric Leonhardt: “At six dollars a gallon, the payoff period isn’t very long.”

Reporter: “Six dollars a gallon for petroleum fuel?”

Eric Leonhardt: Yes. If you start at three dollars a gallon, it’s a push. It is right on the edge of being possible.”

This spring, the vehicle research institute plans to retrofit a donated airporter shuttle bus. It will take a few months of road testing to confirm Leonhardt’s cost estimates. The researcher has already calculated that the cows from just two large dairies could fuel all the public buses in his home of Whatcom County.

Copyright 2010 Northwest News Network

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Photo by Guy Hand

The dairy industry in Idaho has seen explosive growth over the last decade or so.  According to United Dairymen of Idaho, the state is now the 2nd largest milk producer in the West and the 3rd largest cheese maker in America.

That output comes, in large part, from confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, that have set up shop in several southern Idaho counties.  Along with milk, those factory dairies have produced environmental and social consequences that the small, often underfunded counties that host them have been struggling to address.

In 2007, after Gooding County passed an ordinance tightening regulations on dairy CAFOs, the Idaho Dairymen’s Association and Idaho Cattle Association sued saying the county had no legal basis for the restrictive ordinance.  That case is now before the Idaho Supreme Court.

In 2009, Edible Idaho looked into the issue of county regulation of the Idaho dairy industry.

Now, the organization Milk Producers of Idaho is pushing for legislation that, if passed, would prevent counties from regulating the dairy industry altogether. Milk Producers says the industry is already sufficiently regulated through the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act.

Opponents of the legislation argue its just another attempt by a high-impact, often dirty industry to remove already weak factory farm regulations in Idaho.

What my self-guided apprenticeship taught me was a deep, worshipful respect for artisan cheese makers.  They combine science and art in a way that now seems miraculous.  And what better time to pay homage to miracles than the Holidays.

For a thorough guide to Northwest artisan cheeses and the story behind them, check out Tami Parr’s website The Pacific Northwest Cheese Project.  A self describes cheese nerd, Parr offers last minute cheese gift suggestions from producers in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and British Columbia, a book on the region’s cheeses, Artisan Cheese of the Pacific Northwest, and a lot more.

Here’s a list of some of the cheeses Parr suggest for mail ordering (perfect for the New Year):

Oregon

Rogue Creamery

Tumalo Farms

Juniper Grove Farm (call farm for direct shipping)

Goldin Artisan Goat Cheese (call farm for direct shipping)

Washington

Beecher’s

Golden Glen Creamery

Mt. Townsend Creamery

Rosecrest Farm

Washington State University Creamery

Willapa Hills Farmstead Cheese

Idaho

Ballard Family Dairy and Cheese

British Columbia

Gort’s Gouda

Moonstruck Organic Cheeses

The Farm House Natural Cheeses

The Village Cheese Co.

Dr. Stephanie Clark / NWPR

Recently, Northwest Public Radio aired a profile about a family dairy [reprinted in Northwest Food News] as part of a series on the Northwest economy.  It resulted in a flurry of comments from representatives of the dairy industry, and it spurred questions about the practices of pasteurization and homogenization. Mary Hawkins took the opportunity to speak with leading dairy expert, Stephanie Clark.  Formerly with Washington State University, Dr. Clark is now an associate professor at Iowa State University, specializing in food science with a focus on dairy foods. She shared her views on common perceptions and misperceptions about the dairy industry and the processing of milk.

Listen here

Mary Hawkins: The dairy industry is the second most regulated food industry after seafood, and one of the most prolific.  Milk and milk products are consumed by millions of people in the US – from the very young to the very old.  People get nine essential nutrients from milk: calcium, potassium, phosphorous, protein, vitamins, A, D and B12, riboflavin and niacin.

According to Dr. Stephanie Clark, the processes of pasteurization and homogenization do not significantly diminish these nutrients. She says in the case of protein, conventional pasteurization (heating milk to 161 degrees for 15 seconds) may actually improve the digestibility of milk. During this process, proteins are partly “denatured” or “unraveled” when they are heated…

Dr. Stephanie Clark: So, pasteurization can actually enhance the digestibility of protein, whereas some people have feared, wrongly, that it reduces the digestibility.

Hawkins: Clark says minerals in milk are stable when heated, so they aren’t affected by pasteurization. Vitamin C is heat-sensitive so it’s degraded, but milk is not considered a source of C anyway.

I asked Dr. Clark about a conjecture that pasteurized milk is sterile or dead.

Clark: I’ve heard that terminology before as well … that the milk is dead….well, it’s not completely dead. There are some enzymes that are still functioning to make that milk go bad. Some of them are naturally a part of the milk. Some of them are bacteria that have not been killed by the pasteurization process.

Hawkins: One of the reasons milk is so highly regulated and tested is that there are many opportunities for bacteria to be introduced: in the cow’s teat canal, in the dairy environment, in dairy equipment. Some bacteria are thermal-tolerant. Some are very dangerous; for example listeria can be fatal. Other bacteria are harmless.

Ultra-pasteurization heats milk to a higher temperature, 280 degrees Fahrenheit for at least 2 seconds, and is used to kill the kind of bacteria that spoil milk. That’s why it increases shelf life. [Note: ultrapasteurization, unlike conventional pasteurization can decrease the digestibility of milk.]

Homogenization is a process whereby milk is forced through a tiny aperture, which makes the fat globules smaller so that they are suspended in the milk.   One argument against homogenization is that it contributes to atherosclerosis. The argument is that the smaller fat globules are absorbed into the cardiovascular system, instead of digested.

It was theorized as early as the 1970s in the American Journal of Clinical Research that homogenized milk contributed to unhealthy levels of a substance called xanthine oxidase in humans. Xanthine oxidase is linked to cardiovascular disease. That theory was dispelled in an extensive review by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in the mid seventies…

Clark: Now since then, more research has also been done to follow up on that, including some research in the 1980s in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition which concluded that absorption of dietary xanthine oxidase was not demonstrated in the research they conducted and a relationship between homogenized dairy foods and levels of xanthine oxidase activity in the blood could not be established. So, there really was found to be no direct role for xanthine oxidase in atherosclerosis.

Hawkins: Clark says we metabolize homogenized milk just as we metabolize non-homogenized milk. If we want a low fat diet, than skim milk is probably a viable option for us. If we drink whole milk, we will metabolize that milk fat similarly, no matter what size those milk globules are. Homogenized milk, milk with smaller globules that are suspended in the liquid, exists in nature.

Clark: Goat milk and sheep milk are “naturally homogenized”…that’s the term we use for those products…because they have a higher proportion of the smaller milk fat globules. And so it’s funny that people are trying to claim that homogenization is a bad thing because it makes smaller fat globules but at the same time, they want to promote goat milk and sheep milk because they are naturally-homogenized – they have smaller milk fat globules.

Hawkins: In recent years there have been many reports that link cow’s milk and increased hormone levels in people. Clark calls this another myth that needs to be dispelled. Growth hormones are sometimes injected into dairy cows to make them more efficient at converting feed into milk, and cows naturally produce hormones. She says all of the animal foods we eat also contain hormones naturally formed by those animals. But they do not impact hormone levels in people for a very simple reason:

Clark: Because the growth hormones that are naturally present in all milk are not targeting human tissues.

Hawkins: Clark says we simply pass those hormones through our systems.

The use and presence of antibiotics is another area she wants to clarify:

Clark: Antibiotics are strictly forbidden. If there are antibiotics found in the milk, and every single tank or truck is evaluated for the presence of antibiotics – If there are antibiotics found in the milk, that tank is dumped, at the expense of the farm.

Hawkins: Dr. Stephanie Clark.  All dairy processors without exception must meet the standards set out by the Pasteurized Milk Ordinance. A link to that document and more information can be found online now at Our Northwest at NWPR dot org. I’m Mary Hawkins.

2007 Pasteurized Milk Ordinance

The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition review:

Homogenized bovine milk xanthine oxidase: a critique of the hypothesis relating to plasmalogen depletion and cardiovascular disease

Dairy Farmers of Washington

Several of those notions involve food and beverage.  Though they aren’t Northwest specific, they’re certainly noteworthy.

ILLUSTRATION BY JAN KALLWEJT, NEW YORK TIMES

Cows With Names Make More Milk

“A study of several hundred British dairies published in the journal Anthrozoös in March . . .  found that cows that have names make, in a given year, about 258 liters more milk per farm than anonymous ones — a bump of about 6 percent . . . ‘The naming,’ says Catherine Douglas, the Newcastle University animal behaviorist behind the research, ‘reflects the humans’ attitudes toward the cows, and therefore how they behave around them.’ Named cows are more often treated nicely, and well-treated, calm and happy cows make more milk. The point, Douglas says, is that it definitely can’t hurt to name your cows.”

Gourmet Dirt

Laura Parker, an artist and agricultural activist based in Northern California, is offering what could be described as wine tastings, only with dirt.  As the Times says “‘Grassy’ and ‘creamy’ are common terms for wine tasting, but now they’re being used to describe flavors of soil. Parker has held many similar tastings — primarily in art galleries, free to the public — with fresh dirt from local farms. ‘Soil is the basis of everything we eat,’ she says.

After the soil smelling, she pairs the dirt with food from the same farm — collard greens, squash, radishes, even eggs and goat cheese. The tasters are quizzed to see if they can isolate the same flavors they savored in the dirt — earthy, peppery, citrusy — to demonstrate the connection between what people eat and where it’s grown.”

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY REINHARD HUNGER SET DESIGN BY SARAH ILLENBERGER, NEW YORK TIMES

Empty Beer Bottles Make Better Weapons

“[Stephan] Bolliger, who is head of forensic pathology at the University of Bern, went to the store and picked up 10 half-liter bottles of Feldschlösschen Original — his nation’s most popular brew. He emptied six of them, left four full and, using a precisely calibrated energy-measuring device, started dropping a steel ball on the bottles from various heights. Bolliger’s conclusion: Full bottles shatter at 30 joules, empties at 40, meaning both are capable of cracking open your skull. But empties are a third sturdier.”

Kitchen Sink That Puts Out Fires

House fires most commonly start in the kitchen.  That’s why Yusuf Muhammad and Paul Thomas, industrial-design students at London’s Royal College of Art decided to build water misting, a firefighting technology used on oil rigs and cruise ships, into the kitchen sink.

Photo by Guy Hand

GH: Another story concerning the alleged environmental impacts of feedlots and factory farms in Southern Idaho.  In this case the judge has ruled in favor of the accused feedlot manager.

There has been a tremendous growth in feedlots and large-scale dairies in Southern Idaho over the past decade or so.

With them has come concerns over environmental and cultural impacts.

Northwest Food News has looked into the issue before:

How Many Cows Now?

Here’s the recent story from the Associated Press:

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Federal prosecutors failed to prove allegations that a southern Idaho feedlot manager discharged water tainted by manure and bacteria into the groundwater in 2005, a judge has ruled.

Cory King, a manager at Double C Farms near Burley, is scheduled to be sentenced next month on four counts of violating the federal Safe Drinking Water Act and corresponding state laws and one count of lying to a state investigator.

King was convicted in April by a jury in Pocatello of illegally discharging fluids into the aquifer through a series of pipes and irrigation wells without a permit. During the trial, U.S. District Judge B. Linn Winmill prohibited prosecutors from presenting any evidence or testimony related to the exact contents of the fluids.

But in an effort to determine an appropriate sentence, the judge held a hearing this month and allowed prosecutors to make their case that the fluids were tainted with manure and other contaminants and that King knowingly polluted the aquifer between May and June 2, 2005.

Prosecutors relied on testimony from former feedlot employees and a water sample taken in late June that showed a presence of E. coli and fecal coliform.

Defense attorneys discredited the testimony of the former employee, who was fired from the operation. The defense also attacked the sample testing method and claimed the sample was irrelevant, simply taken too late to get an accurate picture of the water injected into the aquifer during the period of illegal activity identified by prosecutors.

Winmill agreed Monday, saying the government failed to make a clear and convincing case that King polluted the environment.

The ruling will also likely make King eligible for a lesser punishment under federal sentencing guidelines, Winmill said.

“The conduct here, injecting what the court must assume was innocuous fluids without a permit, is obviously less harmful than injecting a hazardous or toxic substance without a permit,” the judge wrote.

King is scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 15 and intends to appeal his conviction. Defense lawyers say they intend to argue at the appellate level that the federal government lacks the authority to regulate groundwater in Idaho and has no jurisdiction to prosecute alleged violations.

Winmill in September rejected King’s motion for a new trial.