Why raw milk

Raw milk is preferred by a growing number of people across the world for a variety of reasons related to nutrition, food security, variety in selection, and fairness in the production of the dairy we consume.

Raw milk is emblematic of the greater struggle to maintain our right to produce, trade, and consume food independently – outside the controls and bottlenecks of the commodities market.

Raw milk is a nutritious food, safer than ever, has many uses beyond drinking, and our regulatory environment should make way and support our choice to access it freely.

This is a plain-language overview of the reasons people seek out direct-to-consumer raw milk. GetRawMilk.com is a global project, so consider the wide range of opinion that exists in this space.

Utility in the rawest state

Raw milk is required to produce an array of distinct cheese varieties. There are many cheeses across the world which are not available for export, but are possible to create if you have raw milk. Cosmetic products like soap can also be made with raw milk.

Raw fluid milk is a raw material with a long list of applications. The raw milk purchaser is simply acquiring that milk at the direct endpoint of production, for use in any of these applications.

You can also pasteurize your own raw milk. Many people get raw milk to use in cooking.

Fairness in food production

As our state, national, and global food systems are increasingly consolidated by large-scale private industry, many consumers would like to maintain access to small-scale local producers.

Raw milk for human consumption is produced, filtered, cooled, and bottled on the farm. Producers then sell the milk themselves. The milker/owner might drive it to the store, or their employee might drive it to a pickup spot – they introduce their product to the market directly.

Milk for pasteurization can only be sold to milk processors, who then sell the milk under their label. Because the farmer who produces raw milk for pasteurization can only sell to the milk processor, with only a few exceptions in states who allow on-farm pasteurization, processors are able to skim off the already low price set by Federal Milk Marketing Orders. Some processors are worse than others.

Processors can also reject the producer’s milk, due to operational constraints or other reasons, forcing the farmer to dump good milk down the drain as they cannot legally sell it elsewhere. Depending on the commodities market is putting farmers out of business, and driving some into raw milk production (an upgrade).

Choosing raw milk allows our farmers to maintain ownership of their production from start to finish.

When a raw milk farmer needs an extra buck per gallon, they are free to set the price. This makes the independent raw milk operation more resilient, and ready to perform in a rapidly changing environment, than the conventional dairy farms who are bottlenecked by milk processing corporations.

Food security

Conventional dairy production is a fragmentation of local monopolies. If the food processor shuts down, the output of many dairies in the region are halted. Those farms must continue producing milk, just to pour it down the drain and hope the processor starts buying their milk again soon.

Raw milk production is distributed. Caretaking of animals, milking, cooling, filtering, bottling, and storage are all conducted on the farm. Raw milk products are then delivered to points of distribution by the farm. If one farm shuts down, only one farm shuts down.

During covid, it was big news that food processors were shutting down or constraining their operations. Organic pasteurized milk was off the shelves at my grocery store for two weeks in one stretch. Raw milk farmers in my area didn’t miss a delivery, and they grew because of that. This project, which began in 2018, started to grow because consumers were finding raw milk as the only organic-esque option available to them in that time.

Safer than ever

Switching from pasteurized milk to raw milk represents a move from near-zero risk to very-low risk.

We are no longer in the era of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, or the Swill Milk Scandal. There are exceptions in the large scale ag industry, but that’s another topic. Unpasteurized milk sales were made illegal in a wave of insanely high illness from milk produced in the early industrial era. Not only did that wave end a long time ago, we now have technology to help produce clean raw milk.

Similar to eating out, raw milk illnesses are usually caused by mishandling. Raw milk can be produced cleanly by ensuring each step of the production process is clean. Cows can be tested. Equipment surfaces and crevices can be tested. Bulk tanks and bottles can be tested. Unlike the 1800s, we have ways of catching pathogens before they hit the shelves. Watch as a raw milk farmer tests their milk on-site.

Updated consumption and illness data from Lando et al. (2022) and Koski et al. (2022) puts the per-consumer illness rate at approximately 1 in 15,000 per year – representing any illness, from a mild stomach ache to something more serious. The risk of severe illness requiring hospitalization is a fraction of that. Compare this with the 0.69% of leafy green eaters who fall ill from leafy greens each year. Plant-based imitation milks contributed to the deaths of two people in August 2024, reminding us that the illnesses attributed to raw milk are not uniquely dangerous – these same pathogens can be delivered by foods other than raw milk.

Key takeaway: Pasteurized milk carries fewer pathogens than raw milk, but raw milk is safer than leafy greens. This is what the data tells us. If you are not suspicious of leafy greens, but you are suspicious of raw milk, there is a disparity between reality and your perception of reality.

If you must have zero risk, consider pasteurization.

The disagreement is not whether or not a risk exists, but whether or not the real occurrence of foodborne illness related to raw milk qualifies as too risky and deserving of exclusion. Growth in the market of raw milk demonstrates that many people do not find a sense of urgency in these numbers.

None of this is reason to become apathetic in terms of food safety, nor to deny or minimize the discovery that fresh fluid milk can be an attractive environment for unanticipated bacteria to cultivate.

Nutrition unaltered

More than microbes are destroyed when milk is pasteurized. The official test for ensuring that milk has been sufficiently pasteurized is the alkaline-phosphatase test, which verifies that the enzyme phosphatase has been destroyed. View the full list of enzymes present in raw milk.

FDA’s position is that this damage is insignificant, or that the loss of nutrition is not significant enough to take priority over maximizing food safety towards pathogens. Many raw milk consumers are deciding that this gain in nutrition takes priority for them.

For example, raw cow milk contains roughly 1–2 mg of Vitamin C per 100mL (about 14–22 mg per liter), and pasteurization can reduce that by 30–60%. There isn’t much Vitamin C to begin with relative to daily requirements, so this loss is minimal in practical terms. The same applies to lactase, which does not occur in raw milk at the start but is produced by naturally occurring lactobacillus microbes that are destroyed by pasteurization – the amount is very small, but many raw milk consumers want the absolute minimum reduction in nutrition.

Interestingly, rare nutritional components like lactoferrin are completely wiped out by heat. We know this because labs extract lactoferrin from milk to produce anti-bacterial products, and to do so they need that milk to be raw. While raw milk consumers aren’t receiving effective medicinal doses of lactoferrin in a glass of milk, effective microdosing of these substances might lend some contribution to our gut health over time.

Raw milk is also without additives. Vitamin D, added as a supplement to conventional milk in 1933 to help stave off rickets in susceptible populations, may present a conflict in someone’s nutrition plan where they are already deriving enough Vitamin D from supplements, food, or sunlight. Unfortified raw milk allows for more granular control of personal supplementation.

Tolerance and digestibility

All ancestors of milk-tolerant individuals started off intolerant to milk. They simply tolerated it, and now we can enjoy dairy products. Some are choosing to embark on this journey today.

Many raw milk consumers report adverse effects on their body when consuming pasteurized milk, and that consuming raw milk does not instigate this effect. A frequently cited study said to debunk their experience is limited in scope – it focused specifically on markers for lactose intolerance in a small sample, as opposed to the broader range of reactions people report.

We know now that there are many different kinds of negative reactions that people have when ingesting dairy foods, from mucus production to stomach pains which many report do not occur when they consume raw milk. Historically, adverse reactions to milk were avoided by switching to goat milk, A2 milk, and non-homogenized whole milk. Raw milk often contains one or more of these characteristics.

Fermentation has also been used to prevent adverse effects of dairy consumption within individuals, cheese and kefir being common solutions.

We don’t know the exact mechanism to attribute when someone reports that raw milk resolved their milk intolerance. There could be different mechanisms at play for different people. I’m in the camp that assumes enzymes and probiotics are immediately deconstructed on contact with stomach acid. However, those components might act on the macronutrients in the milk in a way that renders them easier to digest and assimilate.

Taste and terroir

Conventional milk is purchased from many farmers, batched together, and then sold under their own label. This blending of many sources removes the distinct character that each individual source of milk originally had.

Goût de terroir (goo duh teh-WAHR) is wine terminology for taste of the soil. Different regions, by the soil in those regions, can produce distinct notes that are unique and sought after if that terroir is captured in the food or drink.

Raw milk usually comes from singular herds. Guernsey cows and Jersey cows produce slightly different milk profiles. Some farms feed more or less grain, sometimes as a treat, sometimes to make it through the winter, and different grains can be selected.

The ability to choose your farmer, thereby the herd and practices, allows for a greater variety of taste.

Policy and legislation

Raw milk is found all over the world, not just in America – it’s milk. The movement to cultivate a market for direct-to-consumer raw milk sales is bipartisan and predates any particular political moment.

California’s raw milk reform in 2007 permits raw milk cheese, butter, cream, kefir, and more to be sold in grocery stores. In 2023: Iowa, North Dakota, Georgia, and Alaska legalized raw milk sales. In 2024: West Virginia, Louisiana, Delaware, and the City of Albuquerque, New Mexico legalized raw milk.

In 2025 and 2026, legislative activity has continued to expand, with more states introducing and passing raw milk access bills. At the federal level, the Interstate Milk Freedom Act of 2026 (H.R. 7880) would end the FDA’s decades-old prohibition on raw milk interstate commerce – a significant bipartisan effort championed by both Republican and Democratic co-sponsors.

Republicans have introduced raw milk policy improvements in Iowa, Georgia, North Dakota, West Virginia, and Louisiana. Democrats have introduced policy improvements in Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Delaware, and Albuquerque. The policy momentum is real and it is not owned by any one side of the aisle.

This movement existed before any particular administration and will continue regardless. The direct-to-consumer raw milk market is driven by consumers, farmers, and advocates who have been building it for decades.

Regulatory context varies considerably outside the United States. In many European countries, raw milk vending machines are common and direct farm sales are legal and regulated. In others, restrictions are similar to or stricter than U.S. federal law. GetRawMilk.com maps farms across 60+ countries.

A movement forward

Raw milk sales are growing and states are facilitating this growth through the creation of new regulatory frameworks. This is not a movement about “going backwards” – it is about moving forward with standards and technology to ensure that people can access the safest raw milk possible, without corporate gatekeepers standing between the farm and the consumer.