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Iowa joins dozens of other US states in legalizing sales of raw milk
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- Title
- 'Public health has lost the war': States legalize raw milk, despite public health warnings
- Word count
- 1774 words
It's disappointing to see how many people are skeptical of science (especially anti- public health initiatives, like vaccines, pasteurization, fluoridation, seatbelts), and how many people want to make a buck off that crowd, consequences be damned.
What legal recourse will her pregnant neighbor have when they drink that milk and it contains listeria?
It’s funny because most (responsible) people in the industry do not like the idea of mass produced raw milk. I’m from a dairy, majored in agriculture and spent a lot of time on farms small and large before changing careers after grad school. Yes I’ve had plenty of raw milk because we just filled up a container from the bulk tank and kept it. But we would never have just started bottling it raw to sell to the masses without any processing - sure most of the time the milk is fine, but if any contaminants do get in do YOU want to be the person responsible for making other families sick? Most dairy farmers would say no, hence only a fringe movement is pushing the idea around.
All that said, modern dairy farming in the US is incredibly safe. Antibiotics are illegal in milk and you’ll pay a steep price if you mess that up, steroidal hormones in dairy animals is not legal, there are very standard cleaning procedures in every parlor to keep things going smoothly. But pasteurization is the absolutely necessary final step needed to transport milk safely to millions of people every single day.
Drinking straight from the cow like that is generally safe because even if there's an infection, the bug count is low. Customers aren't drinking today's milk, they're drinking last weeks. That gives plenty of time for the bacteria to multiply, and when they drink it, their immune system is overwhelmed. Those micro doses that farmers get give them a bit of inoculation from the bacteria as well, further reducing their risk.
While raw milk and dairy products have well-known and potentially deadly risks, there's not enough attention paid to the breakdown of our commercial food system. Large companies don't an adequate job in the U.S., as multiple Listeria, E. coli, and Salmonella outbreaks illustrate. Our food inspection systems are direly underfunded and understaffed. An increasing amount of food travels hundreds or thousands of miles; is produced by inadequately paid, untrained, sometimes unhealthy farm workers; and prepared, processed, and packaged in underinspected facilities.
Self-sufficiency and veganism aren't generalizable solutions. We know that other nations produce milk you can safely drink from the cow, eggs that don't have to be hard-boiled, and produce that doesn't have to be triple-washed. But that would require resurrecting the "bureaucratic" administrative state which is dying from malign neglect.
Footnote: raw milk cheeses have been permissible in the U.S. for a long time, as long as they're cold-aged sufficiently (>60 days) for the pathogenic organisms to die off. There's evidence this period of time isn't sufficient.
How do all those outbreaks affect vegetables? Oh right because we let factory farms full of diseased animals run their cows poop off into the food we eat. And guess what? You then consume those diseased animals, because inspection requirements have continued to be removed in order to increase profits. Yummy
I don't know where you are getting your info from but our farms are some of the best run in the world and our food is some of the safest to eat as well. Drinking directly from the cow has risks period. There is no nation out there that magically has cows that do not carry diseases. Our eggs are completely fine to eat anyway as well. I eat a lot of eggs and prefer mine sunny side up. Produce needs to be washed no matter who you get it from as it's going to usually have dirt on it.... because it grows in dirt..what other countries grow produce with no dirt?
This is the first time I actually read anything about "raw" milk... This is a bit eye opening. I don't really see how it would even work without any preservation steps, given the distances in the US.
I grew up having fresh milk all the time - sometimes even got to help milk the cow! The actual milk we drank that fresh wasn't that much, usually just a taste. We would boil it right away in those double-walled, fill-the-outer-bit-with-water milk pots. Then it cooled and went in the fridge, and two days later we got more milk, sometimes still warm from the cow!
Some of the stuff mentioned here seems obvious now (of course, dirt and germs can get at the milk in the process, duh), it just never occurred to me as a possibility... also never heard/knew anyone that had any problem with milk, aside from what's now obviously a lactose intolerance symptom.
It’s interesting how many people, even here on tildes, seem to be scared of raw milk.
Not too long ago there was no such thing as pasteurization, and even now in the EU a lot of products are made with raw milk - as it makes them better. Even if they are pasteurized before serving to end customers.
In Finland, milk wasn’t required to be pasteurized until 1958. My dad drank unpasteurized milk.
Is there a risk with raw milk? Of course, and most milk should be pasteurized as it’s s no brainer. But raw milk is not some bacteria cocktail that will guarantee make you sick. Fresh fish is also very dangerous, especially for sushi, but no one bats an eye.
I am reminded of Seinfeld isn't funny (bear with me)
the idea is, if you took a hypothetical 18 year old (born in 2005), and sat them down to watch Seinfeld, there's a good chance they wouldn't find it funny. not just that, but painfully unfunny and unoriginal.
the reason being that Seinfeld, for its time, was incredibly original and broke a lot of ground in comedy. so this hypothetical 18 year old has grown up in a world shaped by Seinfeld. every bit of comedy they've ever watched has been influenced, directly or indirectly, by Seinfeld.
this is one of those things you start to recognize all over the place once you're aware of it. something changes society in such a profound way that it's easy for people born after it to take those changes for granted.
a few years ago, I was bitten by one of my cats. I was in the process of moving apartments, and he got spooked by the movers walking into my apartment while I was carrying him to the cat carrier. he's normally very mild-mannered but his fight-or-flight response kicked in, and he bit my hand and scratched at my face while trying to escape. because of the hectic process of the move, I just bandaged the bite, and didn't go to urgent care until the next day when it started to swell. they gave me oral antibiotics, but warned me that they might not be effective enough, and if I developed a fever I should go to the ER. sure enough, the next day I was in the ER, and ended up spending 4 days in the hospital getting an IV drip of antibiotics.
those modern antibiotics probably saved my life. 100 years ago, pre-penicillin, that same scenario of a minor cat bite might have been fatal, or might have resulted in amputation of my hand or arm. I live in a world created by those antibiotics, and it's easy to take it for granted because I have no historical frame of reference for what life was like before them.
the anti-vaccine movement is another example of this. a parent in 2023 might not see any benefit in vaccinating their infant against whooping cough. they probably have no direct experience of whooping cough, and don't know anyone who does. and the same with measles, polio, and other vaccine-preventable diseases. the vaccines have been so effective that those diseases have been nearly eradicated (at least here in the US).
so that parent doesn't perceive any real upside in vaccinating their kids, and meanwhile they hear misinformation about the downsides of vaccination. that shifts their cost-benefit analysis enough to decide not to vaccinate their kids.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in one of her more famous dissents (2013's Shelby County v Holder) referred to this as "like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet".
I'm not "scared" of raw milk, as you put it. I just recognize the historical pattern that's playing out here. I don't know anyone who's gotten seriously sick from drinking milk. certainly I don't know any parents whose children had to be hospitalized because of drinking milk. so it seems like milk is totally safe. but that's because of food safety regulations like pasteurization. that's the umbrella keeping us dry in the rainstorm.
some people (and probably a significant overlap with the anti-vax crowd) are going to drink raw milk because it's supposedly "healthier". some of them will give it to their kids. some of those kids, especially ones with weaker immune systems, may end up hospitalized or dead as a result.
will it be everyone who drinks raw milk? no, of course not. no one is claiming that raw milk is a "bacteria cocktail", as you put it, that automatically infects everyone who drinks it. there will be plenty of anecdotes of people who drink raw milk and are totally fine, like your father pre-1958.
but some people will experience serious infections from raw milk. the requirement for pasteurization was there for a reason. rolling back the requirement is an example of Chesterton's fence.
Just to add on to the cost-benefit analysis portion of your argument, I want to tell a brief story about what happened to me at a hospital when I got pneumonia.
So basically every doctor uses an x-ray to determine if you might have pneumonia, even though the false-negative rate is pretty significant, so after 4 different hospitals fail to identify my pneumonia I end up coughing up blood and getting rushed to a nearby hospital that was out of network (yay bs American healthcare). They found the pneumonia and put me on antibiotics, but once I stabilized I was told by my insurance company that I had to transfer to an in network hospital or they wouldn't pay a single penny of my costs. I'm almost to the relevant tie-in, stick with me.
At the new hospital, they know which medication I was on. But they give me something else. And I go into anaphylactic shock and they have to get a cocktail of medication in me that felt like every individual nerve ending in my body had been stuck by lightning simultaneously. After that, they tell me that the medication I was given at the other hospital is really expensive and hard to get, so they gave me something that I only had a 10% chance of negatively reacting to because it was cheaper and they had a lot of it.
I nearly died, at a hospital, because someone else made a cost-benefit decision about my life without my consent. They did not educate me about the risk. They did not give me an option. I could have died.
Pasteurization has a practically imperceptible effect on taste, nutrition, and how it interacts we other ingredients during cooking. And yet it effectively removes any chance of serious health risk from its consumption in any form. If you're going to allow people to sell raw milk, the risk should be obviously and clearly labeled on the product. But in 2023 I can't believe we are even fighting to keep a product that carries an increased health risk no matter how small it might be, but I guess that's America these days...
My dad was another who grew up on unpasteurized milk - because he grew up on a farm with cows and they had total control over the process. He still talks about it to this day and how amazing it tastes compared to today's milk - but there's no way in hell he'd risk drinking it again. I'm very curious based on his descriptions, but like him, forget it! I don't want to play russian roulette with my morning cereal.
But we're all adults and if we try it and get sick, well, we either made an informed decision or had the opportunity and autonomy to do so. We have the freedom to go to a doctor or hospital, and the knowledge to tell the doctor "I feel bad and I have been drinking this milk". We can stop drinking it any time we choose. As you and others have underlined, it's the increased amount of kids and infants that will be at risk of harm from this that really bothers me. Hell, even if the parents don't drink unpasteurized milk, their kids might still end up drinking it at a friend's or a relative's home on an overnight visit. Stories of caregivers who think they know better than the parent are not uncommon - here is yet another potential hazard of trusting your children to someone else's care.
It's almost as if people forget regulations are written in blood.
You're right that once you see the pattern it's easy to recognize. People willingly ignoring why things that were once bad simply didn't exist much anymore. Now that the WW2 vets are mostly passed we're seeing a rise in fascism and self-proclaimed nazis. States are lowering the minimum working age to 13 while completely ignoring the safety concerns that led us to raising them. Vaccines had wiped out quite a few diseases but the rise of antivax campaigns have seen some diseases surge.
“ Not too long ago there was no such thing as pasteurization” yes, and hundreds of children died every year from milk-borne diseases. Children are still dying from drinking raw milk. There’s nothing better about drinking raw milk than pasteurised, why take that risk? I’m not scared of raw milk, but I wouldn’t drink it for the same reasons I wear a seatbelt in a car and a helmet on a bike: risk-reduction
There are very strict regulations about how the fish that goes on to become sushi is kept. It’s flash frozen immediately after capture to kill any parasites and prevent bacteria growing and must be consumed within a few hours of defrosting.
The issue isn’t with raw milk as a concept but how that raw milk will be stored, transferred and stored until consumption, not the mention the unsanitary conditions the animals producing said milk will likely be in.
The law is being sold as allowing a mom and pop farm selling bottles of milk to their neighbours, but in reality it will be industrial dairy companies doing it, which is where the problem lies.
Scared?
No, not really. I already thought humans drinking pastuerized cow / goat / whatever milk was stupid. Humans drinking raw cow / goat / whatever milk is even more stupid. If stupid people want to increase the chances that they off themselves along with their offspring and they have lobbied to make such things legal, at some point I just shrug my shoulders, walk away and let fate take the wheel.
That is where I am at.
The irony is a lot of the nutritional advocacy for raw milk is because of nutrient degradation during homogenisation, not pasteurisation, and at least in the UK it’s possible to buy non-homogenised but pasteurised milk, which retains the proteins and nutrients giving it the health benefits while preventing the risk of diseases.
I don't see the issue with this, I'll still buy my milk pasteurized and probably in a store and so will the mass majority of the rest of us who consume dairy. This is no different than the war on drugs, if someone wants to eat or take something that might be harmful to them, that's their choice and shouldn't have someone to tell them that they cannot. It's how you create black markets. So long as I'm not being forced to do the drugs or drink the milk and it doesn't harm me, then go for it.
Children could basically be forced to consume it and they are most at risk in a lot of cases.
That is exactly what happened in Australia. Raw milk cannot be sold for human consumption but it can be sold as a beauty product, or bath milk.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/nov/11/childs-death-most-likely-linked-to-consumption-of-unpasteurised-milk-says-coroner
People who are forcing their kids to drink unpasteurized milk, are doing so with or without the gov. Saying people can sell it or not.
Food safety regulations, like many safety regulations, are written in blood. Raw milk is an inherently risky product, hence why companies were banned from selling it. Now the ban is lifted, these products will become more widely available and we have to trust these companies handle the product correctly as it moves along the supply chain. I'm not entirely convinced. Many people assume if it's being sold, it's safe - most consumers don't or won't do their research. I expect to see some lawsuits related to this in the near future.
While laws vary from state to state, the article is mainly talking about Iowa. Their new law limits sales to operations with "less than 10 milk producing animals". So while it's nice to carve out an exception for the small farmers, that also means you have to find a farmer you trust.
Frankly in this case I'd rather trust a large company or grocery store too stick to the FDA regulations, then trust an individual. The individual in this case is not necessarily going to be an experienced farmer, but someone who is keeping a few animals and is a "raw milk advocate".
You make a good point, can I distrust both? I'm also concerned with the smaller companies and coop style sellers (i.e. anything that involves moving the product from the farm to a different point of sale). I don't think the larger companies would touch this with a 1000ft pole, the risk is too high.
Then let people sue, again, the mass majority will not go hunting for raw milk, nor will they end up buying it. On top of that, stores like Kroger or Walmart probably won't carry it.
If people sue it's because someone is getting seriously ill or dying. That could include kids or vulnerable people having their choices made for them. If you're an adult and you want to go to town on a gallon of raw milk, be my guest. But increasingly exposing people who never had the chance to know better is a just inviting tragedy to happen for no good reason.
You know how many kids die from drowning in swimming pools each year in the US? It's about 900, and about the same for food born illness as well. This is from tainted foods that were once safe to eat but left out or undercooked, etc. The point I'm making is that allowing a small farm to sell raw milk, is not going to tick that mark up at all, it'll be a rounding error. And as previously stated, if someone wants raw milk, they're going to get it.
The difference is whether it's reportable, though. If a neighbour, friend, parents of a kid at school etc was feeding their child raw milk it can't really be reported to child services if it's legal.
This doesn't make much sense, if the child is getting sick and the parents continue to do so, then it's neglect which is reportable. No one reports parents who stuff McDonald's down the kids throat and then they get diabetes from being morbidly obese, so why would this be different?
They most certainly are not if it's not accessible because it's illegal to sell.
Yes...because no one can get meth...because it's illegal. Making something illegal doesn't make it not accessible.
Of course, but do you not think more people would buy meth if you could grab some while you're out getting groceries?
No, because people aren't as dumb as everyone is making them out to be. Look at the states that legalized weed, everyone who was anti-weed was stating that kids would be doing meth and heroin as weed is a gateway drug, and that it would become an epidemic of children smoking pot...none of that happened because the taboo was tossed out the window the second it became legal. Hell a lot of states now have vendors loosing money solely because they can't sell enough of it anymore.
I'm not at all sure how any of that is relevant. You have switched to talking about gateway drugs and you're saying that marijuana sales have dropped as if the illicit raw milk market is in any way remotely similar to the illicit weed black market.
I was comparing the anti-weed people to the anti don't sell raw milk people. You and everyone else against this is blowing this out of proportion.
As a child who was given raw goat milk to drink for years starting at a young age, and only learned how horrifying that was later on in life, I strongly disagree. Kids in these situations need all the help they can get from the government, even if it can't help in 100% of cases. The government making it easier, not harder, to obtain and justify the obtainment of raw milk ("it's legal now for a reason!") is disappointing to me.
Exactly how was that experience horrifying?
I completely disagree with this on so many levels: Things like child labor laws, food safety regulations, vehicle safety laws, vaccine requirements, etc all were created for a reason.
Usually as a result of thousands, tens of thousands or more of recorded deaths or maimings with an attributed cause. Those deaths and injuries all have a cost on society. As the saying goes, "regulations are often written in blood."
The thing is that doing a "bare minimum" like putting on a seat belt can make drastic improvements in outcomes. Sure, seatbelts don't save everyone, but they certainly save >0. Same thing with food safety. There is a reason restaurants are supposed to cook pork until a minimum of 145 degrees.
You're also making an erroneous assumption, IMO, that all people are educated enough to understand the risks they are placing on themselves or to others. No doubt that are/will be people who believe in raw milk that will use it to cook for family and friends without telling them. That is removing someone's choice over what they ingest. There are already quite a few people who don't believe that food allergies couldn't be "that bad" and will knowingly give peanuts or other known allergens to people with allergies to "test" them.
BTW, time is listed as one of the significant factors (temperature being another) of foodborn illnesses. Drinking raw milk straight from the animal will have a significant amount of contaminents such as bacteria and viruses. However, if such contamination exists it can increase (and will given the right conditions) significantly to the point of actual harm if ingested. Bacteria, for example, can double in number every 20 minutes between the temperatures of 40-140 degrees. Some studies claim that the time can be as little as 4-10 minutes under near perfect conditions.
As a result there have been laws and regulations passed because people have died over this.
I find the thought of a black market for raw milk amusing.
"Hey, I got some new malk jus' came in. S'called Roll Whole. You wanna pint? We still got some Chalk Malk if you'd rather stick with that..."
We source our meat in bulk from local farmers, making a purchase roughly once a year. One time we visited a small farm and stumbled onto exactly such an operation. Apparently the demand for raw milk from local crunchy granola types is high enough to keep a few cows and sell milk under the table. However, when offered a glass of raw milk, we declined, made our meat purchase and moved on.
It reminds me of the demand for Mexico sourced bottles of coca-cola, because of the cane sugar ingrediant.
It's pretty well-recognized that different materials can affect the taste of things, so no need to even bring in microplastics. Aluminum cans and plastic bottles and glass bottles are definitely going to affect the taste just by merit of them touching your mouth if nothing else, and I'm sure there may be affects from storage there too. I remember as a little kid reading that professional ice cream tasters use solid gold spoons to avoid the effects of other materials on the tasting experience.
https://www.seriouseats.com/coke-vs-mexican-coke
You're going to continue preferring what you prefer and I'm going to continue preferring what I do. There is nothing objective about the difference in taste. From the conclusion:
This opens you up to one of my favorite desserts, called “raw milks pudding” directly translated from Norwegian, but raw here actually meaning first milk.
The dessert is made from colostrum, the first milk a cow produces after calving, which is high in protein and helps the pudding set. The colostrum is most nutritious and concentrated right after calving, and it's often differentiated into first, second, and third milkings. The type of milk used significantly affects the final result of the pudding.
It’s just an even better version of home made caramel pudding and you’d eat it the same way, with caramel sauce and cream.
We used to have it whenever it was calving season so we could get this kind of first, raw milk from the local farmers.
Sorry if this is a lot of questions, and if they ask stuff you have no way of knowing - I'm curious! The colostrum is what gives the calves a solid dose of immunity outside the womb until their own immune system can handle things, is it not? Do cows produce that much excess colostrum, or is it a very limited product you have to be lucky to get when it's sold, or do the farmers have alternative methods to protect the new calves? What is the minimum dose needed for a calf? And when you say it affects the pudding, do you mean in flavour? Texture? Something else? Am I correct that you're saying that the first milking would make a better pudding than third milking, which makes a better pudding that pasteurized? What does colostrum taste like by itself, and is its flavour recognizably different between the milkings?
Yes, colostrum is the very first milk for the first three days, and is extremely important for the calves.
It gradually and rapidly gets thinner. Even the first 6 hours are important compared to the rest, and calves stomach will have an extra ability these very first hours to ingest the added nutrients.
It’s roughly divided into 1st, 2nd and 3rd day milk, and will affect both thickness and taste. I’ve never tasted any of them raw myself.
One natural cause of extra milk is simply that the calves died, while it’s still important to milk the cow.
Second, it was more common previously to not let the calves drink as much as they wanted. In Norway, it was common to give the calves 6l per day, while it could drink 20l on its own. However, studies have shown is much healthier for calves to drink as much as they want the first days, and that this is economically sane for the farmers.
Calves that are allowed to drink as much milk as they want can consume up to 20 liters a day and gain 1.5 kg per day, compared to those restricted to 6 liters a day who gain only 350 grams per day.
This might have been the main reason there used to be an excess of colostrum and it was popular in recipes.
In general also, milk farm cows produce more milk than they need.
I don’t think we usually got 1st day milk, but we could get 2nd and 3rd day milk, and I think a common recipe used half and half from these. And we were lucky / cherished the times we were able to get some.
There are many various recipes based on colostrum and they usually use a mix of first days milk, or a mix of colostrum and regular milk.
Another recipe my dad liked to make, from the 3rd day milk but I think also just from high fat milk (3.5g fat I think), was “Melkeringe”, where you simply left the milk in a small dessert bowl on the counter for 3 days during summer, protected with a baking sheet. It makes sort of a light yoghurt/sour cream that we used to have sugar on and eat.
Wow! Thank you so much for taking the time to write this out - very interesting!
It also isn't just about health of the animal but safety and promptness of transport. Drinking it fresh from an unhealthy cow is still gonna be a lot better than having it transported a long way, sit around, etc.
And as somebody who has drank milk fresh from a cow as a lad, I don't care how healthy a cow is, I wouldn't drink milk every day like that or from a supermarket. No offense to you and to each their own but that makes me feel gross just reading it.
So you're saying that I don't need to wear my seatbelt because I've driven my whole life and never needed it before?
It seems a lot more like they're saying "I've been fine driving a 20 tonne bus without a seatbelt, but I wouldn't recommend you doing the same in a 1 tonne hatchback". I'm not going to suggest I know how good or bad an idea drinking raw milk actually is in either of the hypothetical scenarios, but I do think the analogy itself deserves a more charitable interpretation.
People have drank directly from cows for thousands of years before antibiotics or even pasteurization existed.
It's more like choosing driving manual over automatic imo. It worked just fine before the modern alternative even existed.
And many of those people died from drinking raw milk.
The benefits of raw milk are basically nil, but it can and does kill. The benefits of not wearing a seatbelt are basically nil, but it can and does save lives.
This is the exact same calculus. Raw milk is stupid
But people no longer do this because given modern supply chains unpasteurized milk is dangerous.
I'm not sure that the supply chain has much to do with it. These were always naturally occurring bacteria (cf. Salmonella that only recently evolved to be in eggs).
Modern cleanliness and refrigeration also helps reduce problems.
There's also the economic fact that dairy cows, unlike chickens and pigs, require much better conditions than I think you are imagining in order to produce at maximal profitability.
My ducks will continue to lay an egg that is ~8% of their body weight every day even when the last one had a serious bone infection that she did not survive from. Dairy cows require much better conditions and do not operate that same way.
Where did you get this idea from? Most of our milk comes from smaller operations and is very strictly controlled. More over a dairy cow isn't cheap, so farmers have veterinarians basically on call 24/7/365. The large crazy corpo operations aren't what produces the majority of our milk or our beef. Almost all of it is done with thousands of smaller operations. I think a lot of the time people who don't live in the USA don't understand how large the country is, the majority of us live in rural areas and that's where our food comes from as well.
To add some quick sources, per the 2016 census 19.3% of the U.S. population is rural.
The dairy state of Wisconsin over a decade "lost 5,637 dairy farms, a decrease of 44%", went from an average of 100 to 170 cows per herd, and increased total milk production by 20%.
On my phone but I'll get sources when I get to my PC. The issue with using the US census bureau stats is that they consider city/urban a county with 50k or more people in it. I live in a county with around 65k people, but anyone from the nearest city(the capital of our state is 1h away) will look at you like you have 2 heads if you tell them you live in the city. We are rural, and the majority of Americans are classified as urban because of that one clause. It's really a terrible way to categorize the US population. I own a few hundred acres, yet I'm classified as urban.... when's the last time you heard of someone owning a farm and being classified as such?
Also have sources for this, the majority of our farms are 1k or less cattle the last time I looked. They're family owned and operated. They might sell their cattle to larger feed lots for finishing, which is usually just 2ish weeks and then the cattle are brought to slaughter, but the majority of the meat you and I eat is not some massive corp running a feed lot. It's way to expensive to raise cattle from just feed alone.
I'm pretty sure you're wrong about that 50% claim. These counties make up 50% of the US population:
https://i.insider.com/5227a78e6bb3f70f68316148
I don't believe you can remotely reasonably say that the majority of the country is rural.
You have sources for that map?
My point is that the US census bureau states that a county with 50k or more people is considered urban. I live in a county with 65k and own a farm....yet the US census bureau states that I live in the city...if I told someone that I lived in the city from the capital that's an hour drive away, they would look at me like I said the moon was made from cheese.
this page on census.gov links to a 14mb PDF, detailed enough to be printed out at 55x36 inches and hung on a wall, showing urban areas in the US. at a glance, it looks pretty similar to the county granularity in that image.
you still haven't provided a source for that claim.
as far as I can tell, it's completely inaccurate. directly from the Federal Register:
there are several other criteria that I don't fully understand...but their criteria for what makes up an "urban area" doesn't mention county at all. they are operating at the granularity of census blocks.
that page also goes into the history of how the exact definition of "urban area" has changed over time in the 2000 and 2010 censuses. there are experts at the Census Bureau whose job it is to figure out this definition. they published draft criteria in the Federal Register, it was subject to a comment period, and the final criteria were published a year later:
they don't just go "hurr durr, county larger than 50k means the whole county is urban". give them a little more credit than that.
I would say your comment is nowhere near the complete picture and has some wrong claims. I'll start with the low hanging fruit:
That is just wrong by an incredible amount. About 80% of Americans live in urban/suburban areas with less than 20% living in rural areas. This is according to the census bureau and multiple other agencies and research centers.
Next, regarding your comment
This statement has a lot of nuance. The number of dairy farms in America has been shrinking while the size of those individual farms has been growing. We've gone from almost 150,000 dairy farms in 1990 to about 40,000 dairy farms now. Though majority of dairy farms are still family owned (over 95% are family-owned operations), they are increasingly becoming what can be considered large operations (choose your definition, I'm going with operations consisting of 1000 cows or more from the data I found). More than half of the all the milk in the U.S comes from these large scale operations that make up roughly 5% of current farms. This notion that most of our milk comes from smaller operations is hardly true anymore for most Americans.
So I'll get you a source but here is my reply from the other poster asking as well:
On my phone but I'll get sources when I get to my PC. The issue with using the US census bureau stats is that they consider city/urban a county with 50k or more people in it. I live in a county with around 65k people, but anyone from the nearest city(the capital of our state is 1h away) will look at you like you have 2 heads if you tell them you live in the city. We are rural, and the majority of Americans are classified as urban because of that one clause. It's really a terrible way to categorize the US population. I own a few hundred acres, yet I'm classified as urban.... when's the last time you heard of someone owning a farm and being classified as such?
TL;DR: census bureau data classification is terrible. It groups people into urban or not urban based on county sizes. The USA is massive, and counties can span hundreds of thousands of acres, and have 50k+ people in them and be the most BFE place ever, but because of the urban classification of 50k or more, they are considered urban and not rural to the US census bureau.
It's been shrinking because the younger generation no longer wants to run a farm. That and our cows have been selectively bred for milk production. Most farms are not 50k cows, they're around 1-2k max and they are family owned. I would know, I'm literally in the business.
While I agree that rural vs. urban classification is not cut and dry, I did a lot of reading thanks to your initial post. The census bureau does not use a county-level system. Their system looks at communities individually and uses a population/housing density system. The NCHS and USDA use a county level system since they feel it more easily captures some of the nuances of being rural (no large city nearby, smaller level of economic exchange, etc). I don't have a good answer on what's the best way to classify rural vs. urban, but I can say that multiple different approaches all have the rural population of American roughly around 20%.
About your dairy farm comments, I don't have much to add and agree with your comments from what I've read. What you said doesn't conflict with my post; I never said most farms have 50k cows, I noted that 1k cows was my benchmark for a "larger" farm based on the data I was looking at along with the fact that most farms are still family owned, literally over 95% of dairy farms are.
I use the USDA version as it's easier to explain, the US census bureau one is even worse for classification, 5k(it used to be 2.5k, which was even worse) people in an area makes it Urban now, I'm still labeled as urban because of it...I am not urban at all.
No idea where you live, but I'm curious if the NCHS system (which is county based, but different than the USDA) would have you as rural or urban. You can find the list here starting on pg 26 if you are curious. Anything labelled micropolitan or non-core is basically considered rural.
Our county is considered a large fringe metro. I am most definitely not in anything considered a metro...we don't even have Uber or cable out here. Most people get no wired internet and rely on starlink or cell based service. I have to travel 20mins to get to a grocery store and be in what is considered the city limits. We just had 80 acres logged...when was the last time you heard of a neighbor having their property logged.
Even if you look at the map, it's very clear that the majority of the USA is rural and not urbanized, like the CDC or census bureau or USDA claims. I understand they have to go off some metric but it's a terrible one to use.
It looks like as of 2017 (pdf):
I would be interested in seeing the total population % of cows in these tranches, as then you could infer what % of milk is coming from smaller operations.Never mind, this data is the percentage of milk cow inventory, not the number of farms.I'm not so sure about that. When the Texas dairy from explosion and fire happened a fe months ago they claimed they didn't even know how many cows were paret of the operation/farm.
I have no doubt of your experiences but nothing in the USA (or anywhere really) is homogenized (pun only slightly intended).
And, that in particular, is why this is such a bad idea. People often forget that rgulations are written in blood. There's a reason it wasn't allowed before and that reason was usually identified after countless deaths.
Drinking raw milk from a neighbor or your own animal isn't without risk but you'll have a much better idea of how safe it is compared to drinking raw milk from a dairy operation so big they don't even know how many cows exploded and burned up.
Are you saying officials didn't know the head count or the farms didn't? I can assure you that every farmer I know, knows his head count. This stuff is heavily tracked, and in dairy farms they track milk production per cow, they even track how long each cow takes to milk so they can sort them based on that alone.
I thought it was really odd at the time since I thought major farms use technology for almost everything like pounds of food used per day, average time in a milking stall, etc.
I guess I conflated articles when it first happened and never really followed up. I admit I must have made assumptions and filled in the blanks. Upon looking at articles now it says that roughly 18000 cows were killed but those numbers starting appearing days after the explosion--long after my attention span had moved on.
Ah, that might have been just because in the chaos it's hard to account for cattle. It's kinda like earth quakes, they never know the death toll until it's basically over and cleanup had nearly finished. Even then there are always missing people who don't get counted because they couldn't find a body.
What actions/steps/time occured between the cow being milked and you drinking it? Was it stored, transported, etc? It can become infected rather quickly if all equipment used to extract and contain it are if not properly sanitized and it is not sealed.
I brew beer and a major component of brewing is making sure everything that touches the beer is completely sanitized and clean. Milk and wort (beer before fermentation) are similar in terms of them basically just being sugar water, which is an incredibly inviting environment for bacteria and yeast.
The extremely small scale is unlikely to be very clean. When there's only a few cows to milk by hand, they aren't investing in anything. Just a bucket and stool with a feed bag to occupy the cow. Now they aren't really a problem since they're so low scale, they only sell to neighbors and friends. Generally, a small business is more likely to do better health and safety wise than a part timer.
Given how they stated the milk was "warm and fresh from a happy cow", I'd guess the time between milking and drinking was however long it takes to transfer it from a bucket to a glass/mug. Might even been directly squirted from the udder into their mouth.
That last method isn't something I'd recommend you'd do daily, but certainly doable if the cow is agreeable enough and the udder's clean.
I don't think this is a good idea, but as long as I can still buy pasteurized milk and if the raw milk has the proper health warnings on the carton then I guess it's ok. I do worry for those who will have no choice but to drink raw milk, though. That's not cool.
The cow had enough for you and her calf?
Well we've literally been breeding them for thousands of years to have just that ability, so yes.
About 95% of dairy farms are family owned. There isn't this large corporate farms that people think there is. The mass majority of all of our food comes from smaller farms. It's just sold to corps who process it and sell it.