Raw Milk Activist Gives PASA Keynote Address

Tracy Sutton
Northern Editor

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Raw milk dairyman Mark MacAfee rallied the sustainable ag community last Saturday, giving the keynote address to end the five-day Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA) conference. MacAfee is co-owner of Organic Pastures, near Fresno, California and an outspoken raw milk activist.

PASA president, Brian Snyder, described MacAfee’s personal narrative as one of “perseverance to do what is right.”

For 15 years MacAfee served as a paramedic and assisted thousands of people, sadly watching many of them die. It struck him that many folks died despite “all these pills” he’d notice in their homes.

This experience galvanized him to take a deeper interest in preventative medicine and in 1999 he converted his organic dairy to a raw milk dairy, convinced by customers who approached him for raw milk sales, that there was a both a health benefit to and a market for raw milk.

At first, he said, out of ignorance, he sold raw milk on the black market.

“People didn’t care how much they paid” such was the demand. Later he acquired a California permit to sell raw milk and is now one of only seven raw milk permits in the state. In order to sell raw milk, he was required to build his own creamery. Eight years later, he has twelve buildings, up from his first “bootstrap” creamery.

Although permitted by the state to sell raw milk, he was not, he discovered, permitted to make health claims on his company Web site advertising the benefits of raw milk consumption. The Web site contained testimonials from customers, MacAfee explained, who claimed drinking raw milk did everything from improve their immune systems, to prevent ear infections in their children, to eliminate their asthma.

The California Department of Health fined him $20,000 for misleading the public in “commercial speech,” erroneously making a correlation between food and medical cures.

In court, MacAfee was able to lower the fine to $4,000, which he paid. He then created a blog, advertising exactly the same claims, yet legally this time. Blogs are protected as speech under the First Amendment.

MacAfee likened his struggle to a civil rights campaign he described as “the freedom to eat.” This sentiment received a deafening round of applause from PASA members.

As MacAfee shared a slide show of his customers, an assortment of ruddy-faced children, young mothers, Jewish religious leaders (who keep kosher with raw milk), and uber healthy-looking Californians, he exhorted the audience to embrace raw milk drinking as healthy, bold, and ultimately normal. “Mothers milk is raw milk!”

The perversion, according to MacAfee is the overuse of antibiotics, which are “killing us.” A fear of bacteria, leading to too many antibiotics has created a situation in which “it is culturally accepted to die by doctor.”

“Humankind has been drinking raw milk for 3,000 years.” As activists for raw milk consumption, MacAfee told his audience, “you have to think long term.”

The state of Pennsylvania is progressive on this front, having “hundreds” of raw milk permits. “Pennsylvania has a lot to share with others and you are a leader in this country.”

“Our government is not steering us to greener pastures. It is easy to talk change, but harder to do” concluded MacAfee. Change costs money and who gets what funding “deprives someone of a comfortable place.”