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Got raw milk?

‘Cow sharers’ find the legal loopholes

By Amanda Pennelly

The Portland Tribune, Jul 8, 2005, Updated Oct 30, 2009

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As health-conscious Portlanders gravitate toward more organically grown foods, some also are putting stock in raw cow milk.

Literally.

Growing numbers of local residents are buying shares of cows’ milk production and hauling raw, or unpasteurized, milk to their neighborhoods Ñ something the state said wouldn’t happen until É well, the cows came home.

But despite warnings from health officials, and Oregon dairy laws that prohibit the retail sale of unpasteurized milk to humans, many people are doing everything they can to get a hold of the raw stuff.

Because raw milk drinkers can’t legally buy it, they’re investing in the cow that produces it. Through “cow sharing,” people can buy a percentage of a cow’s milk production for a one-time fee Ñ any-where between $60 and $80, along with small monthly bottling and maintenance fees. By signing a contract with a dairy farmer, the cow shareholder then commits to consuming about a gallon a week per share. And much like Wall Street, shareholders who don’t want their percentage of cow’s milk can transfer back their shares to the farmers.

“We’ve only been doing it for a couple of months and we’ve already sold 40 shares,” said Woodland, Wash., dairy farmer Anita Puckett. About a third of her shareholders are from Portland. She said that one share equals one gallon of milk a week; she says her Jersey cows produce about 30 gallons a week. Other types of cows produce different amounts.

“I think one cow share averages out to $6.50 a gallon, but some farms charge a little more,” she said. “About 75 percent of our new customers are from our raw milk program. We thought our free-range poultry would be the big draw, but it’s the milk.”

The initial share fee usually can be sold back to the farmer, Puckett said, if a customer decides not to participate any longer.

But, she said, every farmer prices shares differently.

Cow-share programs, a growing national trend over the past decade, have only recently made their debut in Oregon. And the state Legislature hasn’t decided how it’s going to deal with the phenomenon.

“There are no specific guidelines for it at this point,” said Eric Paulson, supervisor of the food safety division at the Oregon Department of Agriculture. “There’s nothing against drinking milk from your own cow. It just comes down to determining what makes you an owner of a cow. We’re waiting to hear back from the attorney general on this one.”

Scotts Mills dairy farmer Barbara Spinola joked about her own cow-share program: “I’d like to see some of those shareholders come and haul away some of this manure once in a while, but that’s just my take. Cow sharing is probably a Pandora’s box, but for now it makes raw milk legal and available to the public, which is important.”

The retail sale of raw milk for human consumption has been illegal in Oregon since the state Legislature rewrote its dairy law four years ago. By law, only farmers with three cows or fewer can sell raw milk to Oregonians who physically go and pick up the milk themselves. Raw milk farmers are not allowed to deliver or advertise their product to consumers either in or out of state.

“The idea is to keep raw milk localized so it’s just for neighbors within a small farming community,” Paulson said. “This encourages people to see the farm and really educate themselves about how the milk is produced on a regular basis. It’s kind of a buyer-beware system.”

But these regulations leave most city dwellers, who are either unwilling or unable to drive a few hours a week to dairy farms, out of the raw milk loop.

Enter the loophole of cow sharing.

It’s not the usual milkman

“The cow-share program really saves us,” said Skamakaway, Wash., dairy farmer Lonnie Praski, who serves more than 100 shareholders Ñ 80 of whom reside in the Portland area. “We’re not technically selling the milk to customers, so legally that falls in our favor.”

Praski actually delivers his raw milk to drop-off points around the metro Portland area Ñ usually to shareholders who offer to chill the milk until neighboring shareholders can pick up their own gallons of milk.

Other local cow shareholders work it out differently, running carpools between families so that people take turns picking up the milk for one another, explained Claire Darling, a local chapter head for the Weston A. Price Foundation Ñ a national nonprofit behind a raw milk resource Web site and other raw milk-advocacy endeavors.

“Cow shares have made it abundantly more convenient for families. There are about five to eight families in any given carpool, and about four drop-off sites. The middlemen are just families who agree to have a bunch of coolers on their porch once a week. They’re not getting paid or handling the milk themselves.”

Darling estimated that she knows of at least 150 families involved with the cow-share program, and that most do some kind of carpooling pickup and drop-off scenario.

But it’s these middlemen practices that start to make people like the Oregon Department of Agriculture’s Paulson a little wary. Not to mention the fact that these deliveries and drop-offs start to sound a whole lot like small-scale retail sales to consumers. In some cases the trade crosses state lines, which would not be legal in Oregon save for the cow-share loophole, Paulson said. The theory is that cow sharing eliminates the consumer, which means everyone involved is technically a cow owner.

Cow shares definitely make the legality of raw milk a little fuzzy, agreed Jim Pressley, Washington Department of Agriculture’s food safety program assistant manager. Washington, like Oregon, has no specific laws against cow sharing. “I can’t say that there are specific laws yet that address cow shareholders getting milk across state lines. It gets confusing to navigate because of the ‘owners’ and where they actually live.”

“The idea in Oregon is to make it so the consumer can’t help but see the cows and the product they’re buying,” Paulson said. “When other people start getting involved in that dynamic it can be dangerous.”

Milk temperatures, for example, should stay below 45 degrees. If milk is sitting out in a cooler in someone’s backyard or being transported in the backseat of well-intentioned carpoolers, there is an added risk of bacteria growing in milk that hasn’t been properly chilled, Paulson said.