MMMMMilk....

    Recently I started getting my dairy products from Windy Acres Farm, a dairy farm in Prineville. Billie, the owner, offers rich creamy raw milk with no antibiotics, hormones or other bad juju. Unfortunately she is not allowed to sell her milk products because they are raw. Instead I (and all her other customers) have a "herd share" - in other words we buy into the herd and get the byproducts for "free". Each week a load of milk, butter, cream, yogurt, kefir and sometimes cheese curds are brought to Bend and left in restaurant sized frigs outside of a house near Hollinshead park. Every Weds I hop on my bike and ride over to pick up my half-gallon of milk, loaf of butter and pint of cream. Sometimes, because Billie farms other things as well as dairy cows, there will be quarts of honey, years of corn and cuts of frozen beef from a cow that wasn't preforming up to par. 

     To buy into Billie's herd is $35/year plus a monthly fee. Two gallons per month is $19. That sounds like a lot but compare it to Strauss at $4.50/half gallon which is a good company but not part of our local economy. Fifty cents extra is a small price to pay for wholesome, local and raw.

    Why raw? Isn't it dangerous? Well, yes. if it is contaminated, just as any food that is produced in a dirty environment would be. The reason pasteurization

is so necessary in large scale factory milking farms is because it is impossible to keep the milking house clean. But Billie's milking house is spotless, disinfected daily as well as the meticulous disinfection of the cows udders before milking. I have read in numerous places (www.realmilk.com and www.westonaprice.org to name a couple) that raw dairy products are healthier because they are less processed and because they have to come from cleaner, healthier cows. These days you can get eColi from factory farmed spinach, tomatoes and hamburger. There is no guarantees with food - that is why I want to know where it's coming from and who is handling it before I feed it to my son. And the only way to do that is by buying local.