A journalism student recently wanted to interview me about regulation of raw dairy. She was especially interested in the efforts of Amish dairy farmers to ship and sell raw milk  across state lines, which is illegal under U.S. Food and Drug Administration rules. Might the farmers be arrested? Might they go to jail?

I tried to break news of the new raw dairy regulatory realities as gently as I could: The farmers need not worry, because no agency under the purview of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is going after raw dairy producers…..unless people start getting sick. Which brings me very quickly to Mark McAfee and Raw Farm LLC (formerly Organic Pastures) of Fresno, CA, the largest raw milk producer in the country.

Raw Farm has been under regulatory pressure from the FDA and California public health regulators for the last several weeks because of illnesses linked to its raw cheddar cheeses and illnesses of seven people, at least three including children.

It’s all part of a bad streak on the food safety front for Raw Farm; two years ago, 11 people were sickened by raw cheddar from Raw Farm.

What makes these illnesses especially concerning is that the pathogen causing all the problems has been E.coli O157:H7, generally regarded as the most dangerous pathogen, especially for children, who can suffer kidney failure and death. Another source of concern is that the illnesses came from raw cheese, which has been legal in the U.S. since the late 1940s, so long as it is aged at least 90 days. There’s really no excuse for producers of raw milk cheese selling tainted product.

But raw dairy illnesses for Raw Farm have been a nearly regular occurrence over the last several years. In 2023 and 2024, at least 171 people were sickened by salmonella associated with its raw milk. All this data is from a recent NYTimes article.

Raw Farm finally announced a voluntary recall in the last few days, “under protest,” it said, because it hasn’t found any pathogens in its testing of cheese and milk; pathogens are known to appear only episodically at contaminated dairies.

You’ll find a more complete history of Raw Farm’s association with illnesses from pathogens in its raw dairy at Food Safety News. It’s not a pretty picture.

The denials by Raw Farm are sadly ironic, because Mark McAfee, founder of the dairy, has headed up a long-term effort by the raw dairy industry to improve safety and establish safety and education standards, via the Raw Milk Institute.

Why is Raw Farm having so many illnesses? No one knows for sure, but I have a simple theory that I feel confident explains the problem: Raw Farm is too big. It has many hundreds of cows at its Fresno dairy. Raw milk is most safely produced in small batches, 100 cows or less. Raw Farm won’t hear of this simple solution since slimming the operation down so much would take all the huge profits out of the business for Raw Farm.

How long can Raw Farm continue operating this way, making people sick periodically? I don’t know for sure, but I do know that it’s not a sustainable business or marketing approach—in an industry where sustainability counts for so much.

I have learned well how food safety regulations can be twisted to harass food producers; we saw a number of examples during the period of 2006 to the early 2020s, when farms were shut down and even put out of business over the discovery of pathogens in milk or cheese, without any illnesses.

And I’ve learned in research I’ve done on my family’s tallow business in Germany that the Nazis used food safety to not only shutter businesses, but to throw Jewish owners into jail for years. That’s food for another post.