Are you a farmer selling raw milk in Minnesota? In the wake of four people getting sick from allegedly drinking raw milk, a crack down on selling raw milk is underway by the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. If you sell raw milk in Minnesota, and you’ve been meaning to cover your bases legally, ASAP would be a very good time to do so.
From the AP via The Crookston Times:
‘With raw milk becoming a higher visibility product, the department is looking at taking a more proactive role in the investigation process,’’ Agriculture Department spokesman Michael Schommer told The Associated Press.
What does “covering your bases legally” mean in regards to selling raw milk? Based on Minnesota dairy statutes (see below), it means:
* Only sell raw milk occasionally. Selling regularly to customers on a routine basis is not “occasional.”
* Do not sell raw milk anywhere but on your farm.
* Ask customers to bring their own bottles. Farmers may not bottle their own raw milk.
* Do no advertise that you sell raw milk.
Raw milk sales help many small farmers make ends meet, but, Minnesota raw milk drinkers, you need to drive out to the farm to purchase that milk. While the State puts tight restrictions on selling raw milk, it’s actually legal to buy raw milk in Minnesota. That means, the hammer is going to come down on your farmer, not you. Customers, you put your farmer at legal risk when you buy raw milk anywhere but on the farm.
Just to be crystal clear, here’s the law itself. From the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, 2009 Minnesota Statutes (32.393 “Limitations on Sales [of Milk]“):
No milk, fluid milk products, goat milk, or sheep milk shall be sold, advertised, offered or exposed for sale or held in possession for sale for the purpose of human consumption in fluid form in this state unless the same has been pasteurized and cooled, as defined in section 32.391; provided, that this section shall not apply to milk, cream, skim milk, goat milk, or sheep milk occasionally secured or purchased for personal use by any consumer at the place or farm where the milk is produced.
Below is an interpretation of Minnesota raw milk statutes and recent court hearings by the Campaign for Real Milk, a site created by the Weston A. Price Foundation. (Despite the group’s professed bias for legalizing raw milk, the information regarding State statutes looks clear and correct to me.)
The Department of Agriculture prohibits the sale of raw dairy with the exception of “milk, cream, skim milk, goat milk, or sheep milk occasionally secured or purchased for personal use by any consumer at the place or farm where the milk is produced.” The farmer cannot advertise and customers must bring their own containers. [Link provided by Fair Food Fight] The state interprets “occasionally secured or purchased for personal use” to mean that farmers cannot sell raw milk to regular customers on a routine basis.
The Minnesota Constitution states that “any person may sell or peddle the products of the farm or garden occupied and cultivated by him without obtaining a license therefore.” The Minnesota statutes also contain this exemption. The state interprets this provision to apply to produce farmers and their right to sell on site and at farmer’s markets without a license. The department does not apply the licensing exemption laws to raw milk farmers with the limited exception of occasional sales to consumers on the farm. Several farmers are contesting the department’s interpretation of the licensing exemption laws.
Update Spring 2004
The Minnesota constitution guarantees farmers the right to sell the products of their farm or garden without a permit. The State interprets that provision as forbidding delivery of raw milk and got a favorable ruling when they took dairy farmer Mike Larson to court. Mike plans to appeal but meanwhile, his customers have arranged car-pooling to pick up milk at the farm.
If anyone has more information about Minnesota State raw milk laws or Department of Agriculture activities (new investigations, farms being targeted, etc), please let us know in the comments below — or contact blogger El Dragón (Barth Anderson) through my profile page.
Photo by Erwin Schneider, Creative Common License
We asked our MN Dept of Ag Dairy inspector about selling raw milk and he told us everything you have posted here. Anyone who is selling raw milk should be very, very careful. Also make sure that your insurance policy covers sales of raw and processed products from the farm (you also need this coverage if you are selling pumpkins, apples etc along the roadside or have a direct marketing business of any kind). This covers your butt (and your farm’s) if anything should happen.
Another place to be careful about, is making sure you are within your county zoning allowances. Even though on our farm we can legally (by MDA standards) sell any agricultural product without a food licensing permit, we technically cannot have customers on the farm without an administrative approval from the county planning board.
Even though we find a high value in the raw milk we drink from our family dairy, we still have concerns when it comes to actually selling it. We don’t need the sales and for us it is not worth the risk, even though we know many who make a good living off of it.
Emily Zweber
Thanks for the confirmation, Emily. It felt cheeky of me, a city guy, to write a post telling farmers their business, but I think there’s been a real sense that it’s easy for a raw milk exchange to happen totally under the radar.
Well, 2010 is the year of the Raw Milk Crack Down, and it’s not happening in Minnesota alone. I think the Wisconsin bill to legalize raw milk was the watershed (milkshed?) moment, a wake up call to Big Dairy that the raw milk movement has gotten big and vocal, and to preserve marketshare, it needs to flex.
To be completely fair to the public health side of the argument — which I think is somewhat legitimate — there have been more illnesses traced to raw milk consumption recently. I do agree that raw milk sales need to be regulated, though I’d prefer stricter-than-pasteurized standards for best practices, licensing, and inspection to what Minnesota has now.
Hey, maybe I can try some of your raw milk when I visit??
That was not an advertisement and you only can get is occasionally.
Since we don’t sell, you can probably just have a glass on the house.
Emily
This farmer knows what she’s doing. Watch and learn, people!
The Hartmann family issued a press release that is on SGT today (June 3). They state that of the two e. coli victims they have been able to reach, one is not a customer and the other denies consuming a raw milk product. They have not been given access to any testimony or evidence that was given to the judge who issued the warrant, nor has the state released to them the results of all the testing done at the farm on the day the warrant was executed. Those tests only take 15 hours.
Does any of this smack of a rush to judgement? Consider what happened to the tomato growers a few years back when the real carrier was peppers. The real culprit in these infections may be getting away if health officials heard “raw milk” from one patient and assumed it caused all the cases.
A few years back, Flo Minar was quoted saying that Cedar Summit milk tests significantly below the post-pasteurization allowable bacteria even count before they pasteurize the milk. In such a case, why would that milk need to be pasteurized?
Curiouser and curiouser.
There certainly could be a rush to judgement, and I do believe that a concerted nationwide crack down has begun on raw milk, a tthe behest of the dairy industry.
Nonetheless, I will say that Dr. Kirk Smith, the epidemiologist on this case, has considerable experience tracking bugs (read the 2nd to last paragraph at that link). After all, Smith was the one who determined that peppers were to blame in the outbreak you mentioned, while other disease trackers were blaming tomatoes.
Smith has rarely been wrong, and he doesn’t jump to conclusions. But there’s always a first time for everything, of course.