Scott Trautman has a problem that affects all of us. State authorities are forcing him out of the dairy business because he wants to sell raw milk products.
Early in the summer the Trautman’s had an open house. I stopped by to see their operation and to visit my brush mower which Scott is holding hostage. The Trautman farm is like a storybook: big old farm house with a wrap around porch, red barns, a machine shed, happy kids chasing chickens, chickens squawking and retreating to their roosts in the hay loft where the kids gather eggs every day, pigs and piglets pastured well out of the way and down wind, jersey cows and calves on the near pasture, hay fields, tractors, wagons, trucks, a big wood lot. The Trautman family has the whole family farm thing going for them, even a little store open Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings where you can pick up eggs or grass fed beef and pork. The store is a cozy gathering place with books and chairs and a table in a building set away from the house adjoining a barn. They have popcorn and honey and what not, local food all of it, though the honey is on consignment from neighbors down the road. The Trautmans don’t keep bees. I’m trying to remember if there’s a pot bellied stove. If there’s not there should be. It’s that kind of space.
There’s a glass fronted cooler in the store, the kind of cooler where you’d expect to see milk and cream, butter and cheese displayed for sale. Cluelessly I asked about getting some fresh milk and cream. As it happened, the farm was even then engaged in a struggle to save their dairying operation and they’d been enjoined against selling raw milk to the public.
Raw milk is risky. It’s not pasteurized. Pasteurization protects the public against tuberculosis, brucellosis, listeriosis, and several other diseases. We learned this in grade school. In fact, we learned the lesson so well that today few of us have ever tasted raw milk or cream skimmed from raw milk, or butter churned from the cream that was skimmed from the cows that Scott milks–thirty cows, milked every day, and their milk dumped on the ground because the wholesaler won’t pick up the milk and the State’s Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) has rescinded Scott’s dairying license because Foremost won’t pick up the milk, and Foremost won’t pick up the milk because DATCP is “cracking down” on raw milk producers… there’s a horrible circularity here, a sort of Kafka-esque encounter with a heartless, mindless bureaucracy.
Scott’s cows are healthy, his operation is clean, there ought to be a way he could bring his raw milk to market. Raw milk dairies are conscious of the potential public health risks, and with few exceptions they provide food that is superior to anything you can find in the supermarket. But earlier this year thirty people came down with campylobactereriosis here in Wisconsin and the cause of their gastrointestinal upset was raw milk. State bureaucrats, concerned for their jobs and under pressure from the big dairy interests have cracked down on family farms. If you want dairy products in Wisconsin, you can have the pasteurized, homogenized processed products, but you can’t get whole raw milk. You might get sick. (Issues related to ground beef and other food borne illnesses notwithstanding, the State DATCP seems intent on driving small dairy operations out of business, while supporting the huge 1000 cow and more milking parlors, factory farms that treat cows about like chickens in an egg factory). As an aside, if you get food poisoning at the local Taco John’s will DATCP drive the restaurant out of business? Short answer: NOT!
There is a story unfolding here, and you can follow it and support the Trautman family by becoming a Trautman farm “fan” on facebook. The facebook page is here.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
