AP News, March 20th, 2007
It may look just like milk at the grocery store, but dairy farmer Donald Dell says his product is superior.
It hasn't been pasteurized.
As a growing number of people seek so-called "raw milk," Maryland legislators are considering a law allowing the state's embattled dairy farmers to sell milk straight from the cow to niche customers.
"The milk you buy at the store is hardly milk," said Dell's grandson, Gary Dell, who oversees operations at the family's 470-acre Cranberry Meadows dairy farm just outside Westminster. "It's been beat up, burned up, torn up and mixed back up again."
Gary Dell told The (Baltimore) Sun he'd be happy to sell raw milk, even though pasteurization can prevent some bacteria from reaching consumers.
The change is needed, Gary Dell said, for a dairy industry in sharp decline.
The industry "can't get any worse than it already is today," he told the newspaper.
Not everyone thinks that allowing raw milk sales is a great idea. Earlier this month two people in Pennsylvania were sickened from drinking raw milk, leading to a warning from that state's health department.
Twenty-eight states allow raw milk sales, The Sun reported. Some others, including Virginia, allow multiple owners to buy a cow and share its milk.
Despite an apparent market for old-time milk, the Maryland Farm Bureau and the state Health Department opposes the legalization of raw milk sales.
"We don't need to open up or expose people to a risk we know is dangerous, for whatever benefits," said Ted Elkin, head of the state's division of milk control. "When you have an outbreak, children are often affected. Their immune systems are not completely intact."
The risk that such milk could sicken a consumer is too great a liability for the ailing dairy industry to bear, according to the Farm Bureau.
"People stopped eating spinach when they had that E. coli outbreak out in California," said Valerie Connelly, the Farm Bureau's director of government relations in Annapolis. "If someone gets sick, it taints the whole industry."
Still, some dairy producers say they should be allowed to sell raw milk.
Charles Iager, owner of Maple Lawn Farms in central Maryland, said more customer choice could bring profits to the lagging dairy industry. Still, his farm would continue to have its milk pasteurized, he said.
"You should have some pasteurized, some nonpasteurized, and one more thing: pasteurized but not homogenized," Iager said. "That gives it the consistency of what bottled milk used to look like. I think the consumer would like to see the cream at the top."
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LITTLE ROCK (AP) _ Arkansas may have a state grain to go along with its state butterfly.
By a 97-2 vote, the House approved a bill that would name rice the official grain of the state. The proposal would follow the lead of a bill signed into law last month that names the Diana Fritillary as the state's official butterfly.
Rep. Bruce Maloch, the proposal's sponsor, said he was lobbied by his 12-year-old daughter to file the bill long before the session began in January.
Maloch said the measure would demonstrate the importance of rice to Arkansas. Last month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that rice was the top crop in Arkansas, coming in with a value of $892 million.
Maloch said the designation would not mean any additional printing costs for the state. The bill now heads to the Senate.
