Our Reasons for Raw Milk

Mandolin Creek Dairy made a careful decision to produce raw milk, after considered a number of ranging factors.

Intrinsic Value

Raw milk tastes better.

Superior Quality

Raw milk must be produced using higher levels of sanitation and testing, often resulting in a product that is safer and contains lower bacteria counts than its processed equivalent.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Stop to consider for a moment why pasteurization is necessary: potentially pathogenic material is in the milk. That material came from one of two places: a diseased animal or a dirty milking process.

Regulated Pathogen Limits

Pasteurized milk is considered safe to drink after processing, even if it originally contained a high limit of pathogenic particles. Ultra-pasteurized milk may contain an unlimited number of pathogens, because the process kills all of them. In the process, pasteurization kills any beneficial bacteria that would have provided probiotic boost for your digestive system.

Allergenic Particles

However, these pasteurization processes can only kill the pathogens; they cannot remove the remaining cellular components that are left behind, like so many littered body parts on a battle field. Those ingredients do not belong in your milk, and they should never have been introduced in the first place. Indeed, any surgeon can tell you that proper sterilization requires incinerating or scrubbing off those parts, or they will be placed inside the body and lead to irritation or infection. As it happens, allergies are caused by the introduction of such foreign components into the body.

Healthy Animals, Clean Milk

In the same way you would not ask a healthy mother to pasteurize her own bottled breast milk before feeding it to her child, properly collected and handled animal milk products should not be adulterated by a process that destroys some of its positive attributes.

Herd Testing

The animals kept by Mandolin Creek Dairy are feed and housed well, isolated on the farm, inspected at every milking, and tested regularly for disease. These protocols and tests keep the animals free of diseases that might be transmitted to humans through the milk. If an animal becomes sick, her milk will be used to feed our pigs until she recovers and can be put back into normal service.

Milk Testing

Likewise, our milking protocols include processes for testing the milk from each doe after each milking. This prevents operational errors. Mandolin Creek Dairy collects and bottles the milk from each doe individually, using aseptic equipment. Samples are taken for each animal after every milking for testing by our in-house laboratory. This process prevents an unexpectedly sick doe from contaminating an entire batch of milk and ensures that we have not introduced any pathogens through some kind of operational error.

Regulatory Environment

Pasteurization is an archaic process that remains suitable only for industrial producers that have proven themselves incapable of otherwise cleaning up their act. Our cultural knowledge and abilities have advanced to a point where milk can be produced that meets or exceeds the regulatory standards for pasteurized milk.

Scale Discrimination

State and federal regulations governing modern dairies favor large corporations that use unclean processes and unsafe products (as objectively compared to our practices and products). We have made a conscious decision to bypass these regulations by implementing our herdshare program. This model gives our customers the direct ability to self-regulate their animals and associated dairy operations, without government micromanagement.

Mandolin Creek Dairy embraces the highest scientific standards for its product and encourages inspections of its operations and facilities by its herdshare owners. However, we must kindly reject any agency that would impose regulations upon us that undeniably serve to benefit the status quo of corporate food conglomerates and industrial-scale food production systems.

Oregon Grade "A" Dairy Regulations

If you doubt our assessment of the status quo, we suggest spending a weekend reading over the nearly 450-page Pasteurized Milk Ordinance that governs all Grade "A" Dairy, then you can share your plan for how we could have started a new State-sanctioned dairy without the help of a sizable trust fund or easily influenced sugar daddy.