Dairyman wants super-quality raw milk in retail stores

Jerry Snyder has spent two years asking milk experts what standards it takes to produce the highest-quality fluid milk around. His 50-cow, grass-based herd is showing what’s possible when cow health and meticulous care come together.

By Greg Bowman

Jerry Snyder and his well-tended organic cows.

There are many fronts in the raw-milk wars being waged across the United States. Here in Pennsylvania, we had an on-farm arrest for defiant non-compliance with a raw milk permit. There’s a legislative effort in California to eliminate limits on total bacteria, testing instead for specific pathogens (disease-causing bacteria).

Then there’s New York organic dairyman Jerry Snyder, who has chosen the path of most resistance. His quest is to carve out a super-high-quality niche that few producers will be able to achieve—but that consumers will flock to support, and detractors of raw milk will have to recognize as producing a dairy product of superlative quality.

Sunnycove Farm (www.sunnycovefarm.com) is on the outskirts of the tiny two-college town of Alfred in eastern Allegany County, situated southwest of the Finger Lakes. When Jerry graduated from Alfred State College’s agricultural program in 1978, he started a grass-based dairy—land use well-suited to the area’s heavy clay soil. He’s not planted corn or grain for his herd in all those years.

His focus on cow health, low inputs and wise use of forages made his conversion to organic farming in 2002 a relatively easy one. His zealous focus on milk quality allowed the farm to be ranked at the top of the state for its low bacteria counts, and led to his choice to add state-permitted raw milk sales in late 2006.

Real, pure milk

“This is pure milk. It is totally fresh, unprocessed and contains no pathogens,” he explains with a smile and a passion that shows he really means: “This is milk like God intended you to drink it.”

Strong, sometimes militant, consumer interest in high-quality raw milk is a beacon of hope for the future of well-run family-scale, grass-based organic farms in his region of New York, where many farms are standing idle. A new generation of young families is moving in, ready to carve out their futures with small herds on grass, a mixture of enterprises and an interest in building up a supportive customer base.

Snyder sees a raw-milk revolution on the horizon that can revitalize the region if more farmers can increase their cow-management skills and therefore their milk quality—and if raw-milk market opportunities can be expanded beyond the on-farm option currently demanded by state law.

His goal is to open the door to tightly restricted in-store distribution with conditions that continue important aspects of the on-farm sale relationship.

His local state senator and representative have each introduced legislation in their respective chambers proposing the option for retail sale of raw milk in New York. The state’s department of Agriculture and Marketing—the entity which oversees current raw milk permits—would write the details. Snyder has tried for two years to meet formally with the people who would promulgate these rules, but has had only been able to press his points on a “system that would work for everybody” in personal conversations to this point.

Farm visit, store purchase

He’s talked often with Will Francis, director of the Division of Milk Control and Dairy Services. Possible provisions mentioned by Francis would allow a permitted raw-milk farm to deliver raw milk to cooperating stores, provided:

• The milk is pre-ordered by individual consumers and paid for before it arrives at the store. There is to be no raw milk displayed in the dairy case for the public.
• Each potential retail customer must first visit the farm where the milk comes from, and then sign an affidavit affirming their willingness to purchase raw milk from that farm.
• The milk is bottled on the originating farm and delivered directly to the store to fill its order.

The proposals continue the current raw-milk testing protocol, which exceed the bulk milk testing standards. The raw milk bacterial limit is less than one third of Grade A pasteurized milk while honoring the same 10 colony per ml. coliform count. Raw milk is tested for specific pathogens on a monthly basis, while Grade A milk is not, on the assumption that the pasteurization process neutralizes disease-causing microorganisms.

No illusions: The Snyders want buyers to know what they are buying.

To push the bar even higher on milk quality, Snyder is championing a voluntary standard that few dairymen can attain without advanced understanding of cow health, herd genetics and nutrition, sanitation in their milking process and on-farm processing. He feels confident he can continue to produce milk with a somatic cell count of less than 200,000/ml— just over a quarter of the Grade A allowance of 750,000/ml of these disease-fighting cells that are released in response to bacterial challenges. (For comparison, 400,000/ml is the effective maximum allowed in Europe, Canada and New Zealand. A great percentage of U.S. producers also meet this limit in most months of the year.)

Pasturized Grade A standards		Current raw milk standards		Snyder voluntary standards
somatic cell 750,000/ml		somatic cell 750,000/ml		somatic cell 200,000/ml
bacteria 100,000/ml		bacteria 30,000/ml		bacteria 5,000/ml
pathogens no testing		pathogen-free monthly testing		pathogen-free weekly testing

Snyder is targeting four levels of milk to give farmers incentive for achieving the highest possible quality, rather than to settle for the lowest threshold. Each higher level would have additional levels of testing (through frequency, specific pathogen testing or lower permissible limits). Ranked by increasing quality, these levels would be: conventional Grade-A pasteurized, organic pasteurized, raw permitted for on-farm sale, and raw through retail.

“These distinctions allow for greater rewards for better milk,” beyond the component (solids, butterfat) testing and general somatic-cell levels on which current fluid milk headed for pasteurization is tested.

Learning, but disagreeing, about raw milk safety

One of the people Jerry Snyder has consulted closely with is Robert Ralyea, Senior Extension Associate at Cornell University’s Food Science Department. He oversees operation of the laboratories administering the state’s Milk Quality Improvement Program (MQIP).

“Jerry is the only farmer that has approached me on this,” Ralyea wrote in an email when asked about Snyder’s quest to produce super-pure milk. “He’s very interested in learning and understanding environmental and food microbiology.”

Ralyea went on to say, “Weekly pathogen testing is a step, but that doesn’t necessarily guarantee that a pathogen isn’t in the tank on any given day…Contrary to some peoples’ belief, raw milk does support pathogen growth and is capable of causing foodborne illness. This is especially true of small children, the elderly and those who have compromised immune systems. My biggest concern is for small children who are not making the choice for themselves, nor are they capable of understanding the concept of risk.”

For all the official warnings such as Ralyea’s about the risks of raw milk, Snyder and other adherents believe that it is an important part of a healthy lifestyle that maximizes vitality while it minimizes antibiotics and immuno-suppressant treatments. “Pure milk” has natural components (lactoferrins, for instance, Snyder says) that serve to fight infection, and that are compromised somewhat by standard pasteurization and crippled by UHT treatment used to greatly extend shelf-life.

Snyder sees an unexamined institutional bias in the dairy industry against raw milk. He notes there was no change in the dependence on pasteurization when three men died last year after drinking pasteurized but contaminated milk. Had that been raw milk, he feels sure the deaths would have been cited to “prove” raw milk is dangerous.

“The Untold Story of Milk” (NewTrends Publishing, Inc., 2003) by Rob Schmid is an important book in this discussion, Snyder says. From his ongoing interaction with people across the full spectrum of the milk sector, this farmer believes the book does a good job of showing that the U.S. dairy regulatory system stacks the deck toward the use of conventional practices for production and processing milk, while tilting it against farmers using other approaches.

Herd health differences

The three keystones of cow health on the Snyder farm are nutrition, clean water and a clean environment. Keeping cattle mobile during the grazing season, and providing a year-round high-fiber diet keeps rumen function high and cows in top condition.

Farm-raised forage, low stress and fresh air are important elements of cow health at Sunnycove Farm.

This means he doesn’t do a lot of the things that are standard in conventional herds. He’s never trimmed his cows’ feet. “I don’t dip teats” after milking, as is usually done with a disinfectant to prevent infection that can lead to mastitis. “Hot water and organic soap keeps the udder soft and supple, and that’s the best protection,” says Snyder.

““I don’t know much [about fixing sick cows], but I don’t have to know much because my cows are healthy – and I just want to keep it that way,” he says.

The innovative organic dairyman from Alfred believes the top level will be an extremely small niche because only a few farmers will want to, or be able to, produce milk consistently under these standards. But some can, and more will, as they see what’s possible and learn new approaches to herd health, nutrition and management.

Real milk, real relationships

Jerry Snyder, with his wife, Dorothy, say seeing milk leave the farm in jars and cars rather than a tanker truck has added more than dollars per hundredweight to the farm’s income.

It’s put the family in relationship with customers who value them as providers of high-quality food. Most came to him on the recommendation of his friends and fellow Alfred State College alumni Elliott and Jessen Case, who run the local health-food store that features many locally grown and farmer-processed foods, baked goods and fresh produce.

On-farm products from pasture, woodlot and fruit trees.

“They send me the best customers,” Jerry Snyder beams. “These people happily pay for their milk, tell me how much they appreciate its taste and value—then they want to know how I’m doing. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

This is the kind of consumer demand on a small farm in a relatively unpopulated zone of the state that points to a brighter future for farmers raising food for direct sale in their area.

“Once this works,” Snyder says, “We can look at expanding the window for distribution that maintains the farmer-consumer relationship.”

Greg Bowman is communications manager for the Rodale Institute. His family drank raw milk for many years while his grandparents milked about 12 cows near North Lima, Ohio.