Smaller farmers and operations can often invest the time and money to do what’s necessary to produce clean unprocessed milk from healthy cows in a clean environment.

At least in my case, the local small farm I was buying my raw milk from ended up having extremely unsanitary conditions inside. They would open an entire vat of milk inside the barn where the cows were kept (and where flies were buzzing around) to ladle out the milk into a jar. It suddenly made sense why a family member had e-coli poisoning not long before.

I stopped buying raw milk after that, though I can see how, if done in a sanitary way, it wouldn’t be quite as dangerous as my local farm ended up being, but I think state inspectors might’ve had the work cut out for them, or maybe it wasn’t strict enough?