In short
Podcast Summary: Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Episode: Mark McAfee
Episode Overview This episode features Mark McAfee, CEO and Founder of Raw Farm, which is the largest raw dairy operation globally. McAfee, a fifth-generation farmer, discusses his journey from a paramedic to a raw milk dairy farmer, emphasizing the benefits of unprocessed, nutrient-dense dairy products.
Key Themes and Discussions
Personal Journey
- Background in Dairy Farming: McAfee grew up on a family farm with a non-traditional dairy heritage.
- Career Shift: After years as a paramedic, witnessing traumatic events, he transitioned back to farming motivated by the desire to connect with consumers directly.
- Discovery of Raw Milk: Initial production of organic milk for pasteurization led to an overwhelming demand for raw milk, culminating in a transformative event where he witnessed the powerful impact of raw milk on people's health issues.
Raw Milk Advocacy
- Consumer Connection: McAfee emphasizes the importance of selling directly to consumers rather than processors.
- Health Benefits of Raw Milk: He argues that raw milk serves as "food as medicine," supporting gut health and a strong immune system due to its full spectrum of nutrients and living bacteria.
- Public Perception and Regulation: The episode touches upon the fear surrounding raw milk, largely fueled by government regulations and media portrayals that favor pasteurized products.
Legal and Regulatory Challenges
- Government Resistance: McAfee has faced numerous hurdles from government regulations, including raids on raw milk producers.
- Strategies for Compliance: He discusses the importance of complying with safety standards to operate within legal boundaries while advocating for raw milk.
Distribution and Growth
- Building a Distribution Network: Conversations on how McAfee established a distribution system, including partnerships with various grocery chains and local markets.
- Surge in Demand: The episode highlights the growing consumer interest in raw milk post-COVID, with a notable increase in sales and demand.
Production Practices
- Grass to Glass Process: McAfee explains the meticulous production process of raw milk, emphasizing the importance of maintaining high hygiene standards from milking cows to bottling.
- Nutritional Comparisons: He contrasts raw milk with pasteurized milk, stating that pasteurized milk loses beneficial nutrients and can cause digestive issues.
Educational Initiatives
- Raw Milk Institute: McAfee founded the Raw Milk Institute to educate farmers on producing safe raw milk. This initiative includes training programs and resources for sustainable practices.
Global Perspective on Milk Consumption
- Cultural Differences: The episode discusses how raw milk is perceived and consumed differently around the world, contrasting the fear-based narrative in the U.S. with more accepting attitudes in Europe and other regions.
Key Takeaways
- Nutritional Superiority: Raw milk is presented as a nutritionally superior option, providing essential enzymes and probiotics that are beneficial for health.
- Consumer Education: The importance of educating consumers about the health benefits of raw milk and the misconceptions surrounding it.
- Challenges for Farmers: The difficulties faced by small-scale farmers in a regulatory environment heavily influenced by large processors.
Conclusion Mark McAfee’s insights into the raw milk industry highlight the intersection of health, food systems, and regulatory challenges. His advocacy for raw milk not only underscores its nutritional benefits but also calls for a reevaluation of current perceptions and policies surrounding dairy consumption.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:02Tetragramata.
0:22I grew up on a dairy when I was a child for a few years and I milked cows when I was 12 and 13 years old. But my dad was not a traditional dairyman. His father was not a traditional dairyman. My grandfather was actually a schoolteacher, the son of a Presbyterian minister. So, daring was kind of in my blood a little bit as a child, but it wasn't something that was traditionally a multi -generation thing at all. When did you first come to realize the benefits of raw milk? Did you know that your whole life? No, not at all, not at all. You kind of have to get a perspective of my whole halfway of how I got to where we are today to understand why raw milk is so near and dear to me and what's going on with raw milk.
1:07I grew up on a farm and then first thing out of high school, I worked in a mine for the mountains and I saw this guy that was almost killed, a timber hit him in the head. His way up in this year and about is teledine tungsten mine.
1:24And I just couldn't get over the rotor wash and the paramedic to jump out with his orange jump suit and the nurse with him saving his life. You know what? I got to be that guy. I got to be that paramedic and I went off and I got my pre -med done. I became a certified paramedic and I graduated top of my class. I spent 17 years as a certified paramedic and a pre -sector and a medical educator. As a medical educator, I taught paramedic medicine. I had 15 ,000 paramedic calls over that 16, 17 years and I taught paramedic medicine. It was an operations director. Did everything you can imagine? ACL instructor, everything in paramedic medicine.
2:03That all came to a screeching halt in 1996. My grandparents had passed away and the farm ground, we had a thousand acres of land out here near Fresno, California, was available and on my brothers were off doing things in Silicon Valley, doing other things off farm and they didn't want to farm. And I was kind of over dead bodies and shootings. It was exhausting 24 hour shifts and the emotion of dealing with children with asthma and the compassion that needed the wounds in your heart as a paramedic. Pretty pretty tough. So I said, you know, chapter over. So we took the family farming operations and I said myself, I want to be consumer connected, not processor connected.
2:44I don't want to sell to a processor. I want to sell to people. And that went through various different iterations for about three years to figure it out. And Rick, the most compelling thing that drove me to become a raw milk dairyman was we were producing organic alpaca selling it off to be used by organic dairy. I said, well, why don't I feed my own cows? I did it as a child. As I, great. So we started our own little organic dairy here selling on milk to be pasteurized. But my brother Adam worked for Apple computers right down the hallway from Steve Jobs. He said, let's put up a website. And this is like $19 ,992 ,000, which is very early in the internet.
3:22So we put up a story about what we were doing here at Macafee Farms. And lo and behold, people looked at that and said, we want your milk raw. And I said, I'm all ears. I want to hear it. And what really transformed my soul was I got a call from a guy named James Stewart. He's in LA with the garage, the Rossum story. He said, how fast can you drive down here with a bunch of ice chest to the back of your car with which you're raw milk for us? Because Alton Dina just went out of business in Los Angeles and may have $19 ,992. We need raw milk. You don't have any. So my wife and I, Blaine and I got in our suburban and put a bunch of ice chest to the back with a bunch of milk we bottled out of our bulk tank.
4:04No labels on it or anything. All handcapped. Just, you know, very illegal. We drove it down to LA and we drove into this back alley in Venice Beach called the garage. It was the place that you could buy everything you couldn't get in the store, homage food, you know, various different things. And there were movie stars there. There was all kinds of people there. I don't know how many people I didn't count. But the entire alleyway was packed with people. I would say 100 people, 80 people. I don't know. But we drove in and people started to cheer and jump up and down and go crazy because raw milk was there.
4:37And they opened up the back of our suburban and started grabbing raw milk out of the back of these ice chest. They're just throwing 10 and $20 bills into the car saying, please come back tomorrow. You're out of milk. You're out of milk. These 150 half gallons are gone. And my wife's a nurse. She has her master's degree in nursing. And she's delivered babies, labor and delivery for many years. So here you got my wife who's a nurse and myself as a paramedic. And we see all these people grabbing milk. And this one woman came up and the milk was all gone. And she said, oh my god, I have to have some milk.
5:11My child has this problem with her brain. She has a seizure disorder. And she has to have the raw fats for her seizure disorder. And Alcadita's been out of business for a while. And we haven't been able to get raw milk. And she's having a hard time. And medications aren't working anymore like this should. And my wife went up to this gal would grab like eight gallons. She took back three or four. And she gave it to this woman who was crying saying she'd for free. She gave him this money to take this home. We needed to give back the money to the woman who taken eight. And that was very compelling to myself and my wife.
5:42And we got in our car and we said, we'll be back. We'll be back with more raw milk. We left it. We said to ourselves, what the hell just happened? And it was transforming to me because as a caretaker, as a paramedic, as a nurse, my wife's a nurse, we were bringing people food as medicine. They were passionate about it. They couldn't get it in the pasteurized form. And the stories, each of those people were telling us, went right to our heart. So on the way home, we got on our cell phone, which is pretty primitive at that time in 1999. But got hold of my son and said, let's build a crewmory right now.
6:14Get a hold of the state of California. Get a permit for a processor's license to make bottling and everything happen on the farm. So we got a hold of the state. They said, yeah, you can do it. It's legal. No problem. Althena did it for 50 years. And so we bought a big huge reefer van. We had a chiller on one end. We put a wall in the middle. We bought them on one end. We stored it on the other end. And James Stewart, the rossum guy, came by with his truck and picked up our milk twice a week. And we built a million dollar market the first year. So that's the genesis of the beginning of raw milk.
6:46But then I became very good friends with the steveys, which owned Althena and they told me their trade secrets. And I hung out at the farmer's markets and talked to the moms with a heavy accents from Germany and in Russia that said, we want our milk like back home. And we started serving people. And that was very, very transformative. I used to shop at rossum myself. Oh boy. It was such a great scene. What do you know about what happened? I've only seen videos of what looked like a SWAT team with machine guns coming in. But it wasn't a drug bus. They just took the milk. I know the story extremely well.
7:21I was down there within a few hours after that event happened. James Stewart and I were very close during that period. And it wasn't rate. It was a raid to send a message to those that didn't line up with what conventional thoughts were supposed to be. And James was basically kind of operating outside of normal. And they didn't like that. They didn't like it for lots of reasons. The transactions were taxed. They were like this that and the things going on. And they didn't have the proper labeling and Ramokra is going across state lines from the omniscient. All kinds of stuff. And so what better way to send a message and stick a gun in her face, right?
7:59And that's exactly what they did. And it scared him to death. He eventually was incarcerated. And I was the one who posted his bail to get him out. It wasn't just one gun. It was a whole fleet of people with machine guns. I've never seen anything like it. It was a raid on a small town guy providing a healthy service. You had to join the club to be able to buy anything. You couldn't just walk in off the street. You had to be a member and he followed all the rules of doing it. Well, what a way to send a message to those that are operating a little bit out of inside the systems and have 20 guys with air 15s poking at your head, right?
8:38Yeah. And the video surveillance cameras of the Rossum facility captured it all. And it really showed the onerous scare tactics at the extreme to control choices we make in food. And everything he was selling was super fresh and super healthy. It was the best of the best. Yeah. Yeah. And didn't something recently happen to Amos the Amish farmer? Yeah. The story is, you know, he refused to get a permit to produce raw milk. There are 150 or 160 permits to produce raw milk in Pennsylvania. But he had some issues with his religious convictions about not doing the permit and all that stuff and decided not to do it.
9:20And again, government saying, you will comply. You will have a permit. You will be within the confines of our regulatory structure or you're out of business. And so that's what they did. I've met Amos I've been on his farm. I know his story well. But what's interesting about our perception, our way of going forward and making tremendous progress is I've studied the rules very, very well. And I said, I'm going to comply with every one of those rules perfectly. And I'm not going to fight with anybody because fighting with government regulators, they have massively deep pockets and they've got air of 15s.
9:58And lots of guys with blood proof. So I've always said, they even have the guns of the money, but I got the truth and the moms. And so if you want to really avenge correct proper whole food nutrition, what you do is you teach raw milk. You don't sell it. You teach it. And then you build a hell of a market and it building a big market. The other side's voices become irrelevant. You've got CHP officers drink at I'm out. He got judges drink at I'm out. He got schoolteachers. He had the state of California guy drinker Jerry Brown was drinking at I'm out. You become so powerful because you are the brand that supplies nutritionally dense foods with all its bioactive intact that gives you that incredible immune system boost.
10:44And that is transformative. And you don't need to fight anymore because you've won by building the market. Tell me some of the hurdles that you had to jump over to do it legally. Well, legally it wasn't wasn't that hard to do because there was a permit you went, you got there's five producers of raw milk in California, but we're probably 95 % of the market share. And certainly on the store shelves were probably 95 or 98%. But here's the thing, you get a permit. You're inspected on a monthly basis. You have to submit past your testing and do all kinds of stuff. And the hurdles are not easy. They're not easy.
11:16But what you do is you challenge yourself to be excellent. And you say that's the challenge I am going to focus on and always be excellent at it. And the problem is we didn't get any help. That was the hurdle. We didn't get help. Everybody wanted us to fail. I shouldn't say everybody, but the regulators went on on a side. At least for the first 10 years, they were like fail, fail, fail. You have to stand up, stand up, stand up. You get hit the head, stand up again. And you have to learn from whatever you failed on and get better. And that's what I think we did really, really well is always stand up and always own it and always get better, always engaging better science, better technology to test your milk, do this, do that, and learning it better.
11:58Now we've come through that, that tough valley, 25 years. And we've earned our self deep respect to the CDFA, California Department of Food and Drug Culture. They treat us with incredible respect down. We're losing a dairy a week in California because the low milk prices paid for pasteurized milk. They're getting 18 to 20 bucks, 100 weight now. They need 28 to 30 to break even. And we're getting much, much higher than that because the cost of production and we also get to set our own prices. And we're serving people not a processor. So we've earned the respect of the regulators because we stood up.
12:34We respected them. We have a picked fights with them. We've said, what can we do to be compliant? What can we do to be better? And they've helped us a little bit in last few years. And we can actually collaborate now. But we earned that position by standing up repeatedly over 25 years and not being disrespectful for saying, I own it. Let's get better and go forward. And now it's interesting to hear the inspector say, I'm sure I'm glad you're in business because all the other dairies are going out of business. We got a job with you. Yeah. Walk me through from taking the milk from the cow. Every step in the process.
13:06How does it work? We call that grass to glass. And I teach that. We've taught thousands of farmers around the world, including a hundred and 75 farmers in Great Britain a few years back. That's amazing. The raw milk institute was founded in 2011 to teach farmers how to produce raw milk for human consumption, not raw milk or the processor, which is filled with literally excuse for filth is what it is. But we teach how to produce very clean, safe raw milk. And the process goes something like this. The right conditions. So the cows are laying down in the right environments. They're not laying down in a bunch of mud.
13:45If they're laying down on manure, it's dry manure that's been cultivated and it's a dry pack or pasture or other bedpack where the cows are comfortable in the not in mud. Nutrition of the cow. Make sure they have a little micro minerals. Nutrition is very important. Are the cows all outside? They're outside, but they also have shade right now or 110 degrees today. They don't do well in the heat. So you want to protect them in the winter from the rain and the summer from the sun. But season laying the fall in spring, they'll be outside and they're out today, but they'll be out only in the morning and the night.
14:16During the day, they're going to be protected in the heat because they just don't do well 110 degrees. But the water has to be clean. Make sure the water is filled with pathogens, like in 1800s, when I did. So the nutrition of the cows, excellent to make sure they have the micro elements and micro minerals to make sure that they are really healthy cows. And then you go on further to where you milk the cows to make sure the udders are impeccably clean. So you're getting milk only, not manure and milk. And then make sure that the milky machines are well maintained, that the milk pathway to the bulk tank is very, very clean.
14:47They don't have biofilms in it. You can easily have biofilms in the milk and actually contaminate your milk easily. All you want is that clean, delicious milk coming out of the udder to a place we call a rapid chiller or a plate chiller. And that milk from 99 degrees body temperature of the cow down to about 35, 36 degrees, just three degrees above freezing in literally two minutes. And then it goes to a bulk tank where we send samples off to be tested to make sure there's no bad bacteria in it. And then we take that milk to our cream right where we bottle it, we make buttercream, cheese, all these products here, you know, wonderful products you see in the stores.
15:21And then we rapidly send it off to the stores and it's on the store shelf within a couple of days. And it gets a nice 21 day shelf life because it's done clean and it's rapidly chilled. Now if I was described to you in that milk, by the way, it's never come megal with any other dairy. It's our dairy. We take whole responsibility for it. If I was compare that grass to glass ideology of what we do, that principles of praxis, with what pasteurized milk is, it's a whole different world. Describe it. Yeah, it's not even the same solar system. It's just that milk is produced rapidly on a conventional dairy that goes to pasteurization where the concern for the health of the cow is not that high because everything gets in the bulk tank gets pasteurized who cares.
16:04So the milk can come from 50 different dairy and come megal all together. It paid the guy minimum wage to throw a machine on the cow that may or may not have a clean utter. So the milk filter is just covered in manure sometimes. And by the way, if you spend a lot of money to have super clean milk, you're actually a fool. It gets combined with everybody else's milk, which is dirty. So where's the incentive to do a great job of cleaning milk? The pride is lost of how they export milk because it's all combined. The milk is then collected into a bulk tank and guess what? You don't have to chill the milk immediately.
16:39Further pasteurized milk ordinance, the FDA ruled up to two hours to get below 50 degrees. Milk doubles its bacteria count every 20 minutes of body temperature. You're going to get yourself some really high bacteria count, not tasting very good, short shelf life. Milk, this got all kinds of problems because you don't care about the cow's health. So they never test for pathogens ever. We test for pathogens every day in our milk. So that milk goes to a big query where it is then back to food gated. It is pasteurized, it's homogenized. It's been made into milk, butter, cream, cheese, all this up.
17:13But there were no bioactives left at all. The bioactives are the electo -fair and the alkaline phosphatases, all the enzymes, the peptidases, proteases, light paces, all day long. The thousands of bioactives put there by nature to build an immune system as the first food to life for babies. That's all gone. And it's actually rendered, if you look at the FDA, to be the most allergenic food in America. Pasteurized milk, number one. And it doesn't taste very good because it's been pasteurized to death, literally. I mean that. And to render it safe, it also makes it very hard to digest. You get sent out untoryginaric brand to shelves, where it's in decline at 2 to 10 % per year because people can't drink it because of allergenicity and the digestive problems.
17:57And they're going to everything butmilk, almond milk, soy milk, macadamium milk, almond milk, you name it, everything butmilk. But now, with what we're doing at raw milk institute, where we're doing with as raw milk producers, we can get back to the real stuff. The milk that's co -evolved with mankind for 15 ,000 years. I've been saying, oh, raw milk's such a fat. It's such a fat. I'm sorry, 15 ,000 years is not a fat. Let's recaracterize this. It's pasteurized milk, which is an excuse for filth from the 1800s. Yeah, it may have saved some lives by killing this stuff with killing people in the 1800s in certain derries.
18:34But pasteurization has probably met its doom because of the quote from Dr. Bruce German at UC Davis, he's the International Mepjunomics expert in lactation. He said pasteurization is an 18th century solution to an 18th century problem. We can do a hell of a lot better. Well, that's exactly what we're doing. Clean raw milk with testing and conditions is phenomenal and people love it. And so raw milk is absolutely back. It's back better than it's ever been.
19:20LMNT. Element electrolytes. Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun? You want to maximize your endurance and feel your best? Add element electrolytes to your daily routine. Perform better and sleep deeper. Improve your cognitive function. Experience an increase in steady energy with fewer headaches and fewer muscle cramps. Element electrolytes. Bring it in the sauna.
19:57Refreshing flavors include grapefruit, citrus, watermelon, and chocolate salt. Formulated with the perfect balance of sodium, potassium, and magnesium to keep you hydrated and energized throughout the day. These minerals help conduct the electricity that powers your nervous systems so you can perform it your very best. Element electrolytes are sugar -free, keto -friendly, and great tasting. Minerals are the stuff of life. So visit drinklmnt .com slash tetra and stay salty with Element electrolytes. LMNT.
20:46If I was traveling and I wanted to find raw milk, how would I go about finding raw milk wherever I am? LMNT. This is breaking news, my friend. Breaking news. Amazon has raw milk now. LMNT. No, really? LMNT. Yeah, as of about a month ago. LMNT. Wow. LMNT. And you know what? It's interesting. We didn't have a whole lot to do with that. They recognized the growth trends and all the things we were doing at all around everywhere. And they just grabbed the data on how popular raw milk is when you look at the spins data and you look at the analysis how we're growing it 35 % to 40 % per year, year every year.
21:20They said, well, why should we carry that as a key product for us? LMNT. Is it difficult to find clean, healthy cows? LMNT. We have to actually have them ourselves. We have to create them ourselves. We buy the best cows, not the worst. We never go to an option to buy our cows. We always buy the very best cows. And then we quarantine them for a month, month and a half. We do all kinds of testing on them to make sure that their milk is perfectly fine before they're ever going to a book tank. So there's a lot of investment in making sure that our herd is really sharp. And you know what? If they're not, they make fantastic ground beef.
21:57LMNT. You only create milk from your own cows. You don't take milk from other farmers. LMNT. Never. Never. That's like religion. If you were to do that, you'd bring on a wave of problems in terms of the pathogens are known to be there. Mysteria, E. coli 157, H7, Campylbacter, Salmonella, even tuberculosis, the brusolosis issues could be a problem there. Those are generally relegated. We've already taken care of those problems. But you want to make sure you know what you got. And you can only know what you got in your own herd. If that's the case, does it limit how much you can ever make? Or is it something that you can scale with your systems?
22:41We are building a brand new creamery. And if you've done any research on us, we've lost our creamery two and a half years ago from Arsson. Somebody burned it. On purpose, we don't know who it was because they never found them. But all three investigators said it was Arsson for sure. It wasn't you guys, but somebody burned your creamery. And they we lost our creamery. We're building a brand new one, a 28 ,000 square foot mega beautiful thing. It has a lot of agritourism. We can observe all the proxies made, the school buses coming in, the school kids and everything. An educational site, a mecca of raw milk.
23:18With all the best food safety stuff we've ever been able to put together that we've learned over the years. Has anything ever happened like this with Arsson of a creamery? Yes, in the last couple of years, three or four years. There's been three or four Arsson. There was one in the middle Oregon. There was one in Reno, Nevada, of creameries that were burned. Very suspicious. Don't know why kind of a thing. Azure standard had a big fire. So we don't know. And I'm not going to point fingers. We just go forward. But I'm saying on the scaling question you made, Rick, we started dairy number two already.
23:51And we took some cows out of dairy number one, bought some additional cows, corned them, put them in a dairy. It's in Kings County. And that dairy is also inspected. It comes back to our creamery again. We actually rented a creamery immediately after our fire because we had to have a place. And within seven days, it was a miracle. We worked our bucks off 24 hours a day, probably made 25 hours a day. And we were up and running within seven days, bottling milk. And we did not bicep beat in our markets. But we found a creamery that had been vacated for a couple of years, an old cheese plant. And we moved in and we just started scrubbing and cleaning and painting and investigating and doing all the things we needed to do to change and brought in the bottle fillers and plastics and labels and everything.
Read the full transcript
24:32And we made it our own immediately in seven days. And we're able to get up and get going. So yes, we can scale what we're doing. But it must be under operations. We control operating as are our standards with incredible ethics, responsibility, testing to make sure that's high quality going to our creamery so you control that. If you let it go out to any old person, you get all kinds of problems. Now, we'll say that in the future, that may change a little bit, but that's in the future. You have to incentivize the dairymen. They have to be fully committed and they have to be set on a benchmark of perfection.
25:08And they have to have consequences for not achieving that. We're not there yet. And that's possible maybe someday, but not now. And you have no problem selling the milk you produce. There's demand for what you're making. Correct. We're producing about 85 ,000 gallons of milk a week. And we're short. We're short. We're just meeting demand right now. But I know with our interstate, a commerce of raw pet food products, I have a feeling we'll be short. So growth is with phenomenal. I would say that one of the greatest things that happened to things is influencers like Dr. Paul Saladino. And the fact that COVID was a wake up, Clarion call, a Clarion call, that you are on your own to create your own immune system in your gut.
25:56That 80 % or more of your immune system is the diversity of bacteria and the ecosystem, the biome in your intestines that got. And so when you got Paul Saladino, a distinguished doctor who was all about nutrition as an example and speaking the truth to people and other influencers doing the same thing too, not just Paul. But then you've also got the FDA and the White House and everybody on the COVID thing in March of 2020 saying, I'm sorry, we can't help you. Don't come to the hospital because if you're immunocompromised, you might die. People say, okay, quick Google, how do you build a immune system?
26:33Well, let's talk about the briser piece here. Let's talk about the gateont of a little bit of negotiated agreement. Breast milk is raw milk guys. And there's no contest anywhere. The FDA, CDC, NIH, World Health Organization, every physician's organization, all safe breastfeeding is fantastic for babies because it's got all these bioactives to do these fantastic days to build your immune system, decreases as the colds, ear infections, the studies out of Europe are phenomenal on this whole thing. Well, guess what? Dr. David Dallas at Oregon State University at the International Mepcinomics Consortium in New York, Ireland said last year and we know this, but he said it.
27:11He said, quantitatively, there is elements found in raw milk between breast milk and cow's milk, quantitatively are different. That means you have more fat or less fat or more proteins, but qualitatively it's practically identical. So that's why we can consume raw milk for the last 15 ,000 years. And when mom finished breastfeeding, the baby got raw milk from a cow goat sheet horse camel reindeer. And so we are literally looking at Mother Nature's blueprints here. The blueprints of life. When a baby is born comes out of the birth canal, what's the first thing it does? It supples on mom's breast and it gets colostrum for the first few hours and then it gets raw milk to build an immune system that did not exist before birth.
27:54A perfect food to start off, including a biodiversity bacteria, the food to feed that bacteria, prebiotics, probiotics, and postbiotics. It does three things. It nourishes, it directs and protects three things. So when people post COVID saw that and people weren't stupid anymore, they could read PubMed, right? And if not they can listen to Paul Saladino who does read PubMed and you find out that raw milk is the most powerful immune system built on planet earth on purpose for mammals because it protects babies from dying. You saw a wave of interest. We've grown 35 to 40 % per year every year since COVID, three years in a row because people want to have a strong immune system to deal with the future threats.
28:36That little flu vaccination dealt with about 25 % of last year's problem, not a future threat. So if you want an adaptive and resilient immune system, you better work on your gut and raw milk and a whole food diet will help you earn that wonderful. And I say earn because you got to work at it, build a fantastic immune system and be adaptive and resilient to the future threat. Tell me about how you built your distribution network. That's a team effort. I can't claim it as my own, that's for sure. It started out with Rossum 25 years ago. You were right there at Rossum. They were the first to sell them up, but then it branched out into the whole foods and then branched out into sprouts and then it went to forest markets and grew and it grew and with more and more interest, people talking to one another saying, you got to get on this stuff.
29:19It's delicious. And my God, my kids don't have allergies anymore and their asthma's got better. And you know, when that happens, you got this person to person mom, the mom, dad to dad talking about this and kids love it. How do you build your distribution system? Well, you get the call. People say, hey, the store wants this product. So KG, HEB, they say, we got to serve people because they're barking up the tree saying, we want raw milk. So then you get those relationships and Josh has worked very, very hard. My son -in -law married to my daughter, worked really hard working with those distributors, getting that milk cold, fresh and fast, two stores across where it needs to be.
29:54And we're 500 stores in California and 1 ,000 stores and more nationally. And it's a top seller. The data is very clear. With castorized milk and declined, we're growing like crazy. And so the truth is self -evident. And the market is driving this because consumers are having a very, very good experience of raw milk. It's delicious. And the way we're producing it, it's very, very low risk. You check the news every day. The top line is something you recall being, whether it's onions or pasteurized ice cream, just this last week, best of recalling that. A can of those killing people. I mean, if you were to eat by recall, you better just stop eating.
30:30Just stop eating all together. There's been water, this be recall. So bottom line is, when you're looking at that world of food that has a threat or could, what the most scary, most unsafe thing to do is to have a compromised immune system yourself. So in this world, we must take responsibility for our own ecosystem, our own internal microbiome, and build an immune system. What better way to do that by leading off with raw milk and whole foods? Whole foods. That means the foods that don't have a long ingredient list with sodium bends away. And every other color preservative and crap in there with lots of sugar.
31:07No, no, no. We're talking about the ingredient list that has three or four things tops, or maybe you're one or two things, or in case of our raw milk, one thing. So, yeah, it's a paradigm shift and it's happening right now. In the pasteurized milk, do they also put preservatives in it? Nothing I'm aware of. Now, I'm not talking about all pasteurized milk. There may be some that do, but I do know that pasteurized milk is highly processed. And if I was going to drink a pasteurized milk, I would not ever go above just a minimum pasteurized milk. I would not go to anything ultra pasteurized. Ultra pasteurized milk, there's a big study that just came out, it was done internationally, on HAAs.
31:49That's the hetero cyclic aromatic amines. They're found in ultra high temperature pasteurized milk. Unfortunately, that's the little box milk that doesn't need to be refrigerated, given the kids. That's stuff associated with cancer. So, if you're going to give pasteurized anybody, which I don't recommend, I recommend a strong raw milk. It should be a cultured pasteurized like a kefir that's cultured because some of the life's been put back into it, or yogurt, because it's more bioavailable because it has living organisms put back into it, it's not dead. But if you're going to drink a pasteurized milk, have it minimally pasteurized, like low and slow or just HTST, because when you go above 200 degrees, you start cooking stuff, you start having some serious problems with uncoorded side effects that are not good for your health.
32:32What is A2 milk? A2 raw milk is fantastic, nothing wrong with it. But there's interesting, there's a lot of technology, a lot of science about this whole thing. But I'm not a huge A2 supporter. If you think about A2, the corporation, A2, it started out in Australia and New Zealand, and it was all about ultra -pasturized milk, not raw milk. And yeah, there's a difference in the protein, the amino acid, the 67th and the leal is a little different, doesn't have the queso morphine. I'm the only farmer in the room at the International Milk Genomics Consortium Conference. It's every year for last 12 years.
33:08I attend Serena by PhDs are way smarter than me, and I listened to all this stuff. And the studies have not been replicated. We only had a couple studies done in China that were pretty out there and weird. And remember that if you have A2 raw milk, great, fantastic, there's a lot of it all, but there's also nothing wrong with A1, A2. What might be the problem is the fact that our gut, as a human, a host, is very permeable with today's diets. And when you allow some of these proteins to get in your bloodstream and you've got autism or something, you can really have a problem because the queso morphine could make you kind of loopy in your head.
33:43But here's the thing. When you pasteurize even A2 milk, you destroy the proteins and the A2 as you're relevant. You cause the car wreck in the milk. So I'm not a big A2 guy, but if you've got a cow with A2 characteristics and she's healthy and she's great, great. Knock yourself out. Wonderful. A2 raw milk. But A2 is a pasteurized product. It's correct. And they've been sued multiple times. They've been a bankruptcy. Their claims cannot be validated again. There's a reason why A2 actually existed. A1 actually exists. Mother's breast milk has a combination of both. It's not pure A2. Because if you ever had children and you've been married, A1 is a marriage saver.
34:22Because it's called a milk coma. The baby gets nourished and goes to sleep. It makes the feel good. They go to sleep. That's part of nature's blueprint for babies to rest after they've eaten to go to sleep and mom and dad can have their time. If the kid is constantly looking at orated because they haven't done that queso morphine that's in the milk, which makes you feel good and relaxes the muscles and calms you, and it's the feel good thing in milk. So I don't think we want to take that out of milk. We want to let nature's blueprint be normal. And so in our area, probably 85 % A2, but we left the A1 in there because we think it's part of the bigger picture of what's natural and normal.
34:59How does raw milk interact with other foods? It is the synergistic. It makes the compost pile work. You take food that is not bioactive or not bioavailable and you put raw milk with it. You now have the biodiversity bacteria and the bioactive elements in it that start interacting and start making the vitamin D and C all bioavailable. So you can absorb it. The atyric acid found in the buttoffat makes the lower gutter properly and rebuilds the mucosa lining, which is where foods get digested. So raw milk makes your diet more bioavailable. It makes it more bioactive. So the foods you may be eating which aren't particularly whole, you'll be able to extract the value from it because you've got activity in raw milk.
35:47It's almost like it turns it into a liposomal mixture. Yeah. Well, you know, you think about the evolutionary pressures generation by generation for let's pick a number. How about a million years to bring it to where it is today? Only the good survived. The pressures are incredible that the bad diopt and feed the bacteria and other predators and only the good survived. Well, raw milk is one of those foods which evolved those pressures and survived so we can thrive in our most vulnerable state which is being newborn. And we long ago as Cabe been figured out that you know what I'm starving over here and you know what that animal over there is succulent on that teat.
36:31I need to go over there and do the same thing and start to domesticate that animal wherever it was. A reindeer, cow goat, sheep horse, camel and wherever mankind was able to domesticate an animal. Guess what? They thrived because they had portable milk. They had portable food supply and if they got really hungry, they could kill the animal or the soft spring. You see the Messiah and Kenya. Rive on raw milk. World class long distance runners tall, strong, strong teeth. Messiah, their blackest coal, right? They come to America and they all have lactose intolerance. They don't have the problem. They have no problem at all.
37:05The problems and the processing of the milk. The bioactose are gone. You can't digest it anymore. The same with those in Asia. You go out to Eter Mongolia, Manchuria. There's more horse melt being consumed. You can shake a stick at. They have no problem with lactose intolerance. They don't have the lactase persistence gene. But if you go into China, they have lactose intolerance like crazy. But there is the problem with the processing, not the milk. So I'm a big proponent that pasteurization is actually very racist because of the fact that it sorts people out saying you're not good enough. You're not white enough.
37:39You're not norther European enough to drink milk. When raw milk is good for everybody around the world because it brings with it its own bioactive elements for self -digestion and assimilation. So it's the food of the ages.
37:56So much of today's life happens on the web. Squarespace is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy using one of Squarespace's best in class templates. With a built -in style kit, you can change fonts, imagery, margins and menus. So your design will be perfectly tailored to your needs. Discover unbreakable creativity with fluid engine, a highly intuitive drag and drop editor. No coding or technical experience is required. Understand your site's performance with in -depth website analytics tools. Squarespace has everything you need to succeed online.
38:45Create a blog. Monetize a newsletter. Make a marketing portfolio. Launch an online store. The Squarespace app helps you run your business from anywhere. Track inventory and connect with customers while you're on the go. Whether you're just starting out or already managing a successful brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create and customize a beautiful website. Visit squarespace .com slash tetra and get started today.
39:25So many people talk about being lactose intolerant now. Have you had experience of people who have a history of lactose intolerance trying raw milk? That's a core concept here. I would expand it to say it's not just lactose intolerance. People thrive through with raw milk. They have no problem with raw milk. But it's also something we call mal digestion of milk. Mal digestion is those things beyond lactose sugar. It's the proteins. It's the other things found in milk that have in raw milk, the proteins have an accompanying enzyme, the proteases, the peptid aces. They're destroying the pastures.
40:04They should extend shelf life so it doesn't break down. Well, you want milk to break down quick. When it gets warm and it gets, you want it to go now. And that's exactly what raw milk does. We know that for a fact. And there's a study done by Dr. Chris Gardner at Stanford University. He went out into the public and he said, anybody with lactose intolerance that can't digest milk, let me know. We want you to be a part of a study. This happened back in 2015 or 2016. He got 400 people plus or minus their respondent. I can't remember the exact date. It was about 400 people that responded saying, I have a hell of a time with pasteurized milk.
40:34It causes pain, gas, everything else. You know how many people survived to get into the actual analysis of the lactose intolerance test? With 16 people got into the actual survey. 16. Because they're the only ones that actually blew a positive HBT or hydrogen breast test were clinically diagnosis lactose intolerant. Whatever happened to the other 400 people or 390 people that couldn't digest milk, they have no problem on raw milk. So I think it's fascinating to know that it's much broader than just lactose intolerance. It's mal digestion of a highly processed food that people's gut can't handle.
41:09But they can handle. Everybody does great on their mom's breast milk. No problem at all. But I tell you what, you started doing highly processed milk that doesn't have the accompanying enzymes and bioactives available in the probiotic bacteria. By the way, there's not that many people that have lactose intolerance with yogurt. There's a reason. Even though it's been pasteurized, it's had some CPR done on it, right? It's been brought back to life somewhat by the addition of bacteria and it's been cultured. So cultured dairy products do not have the prevalence of the much mal digestion and lactose intolerance.
41:41Still has some because the bioactives are missing, but still has some life put back into it. So it's very interesting. The raw milk has not only all the yogurt bacteria, but also much more than that with the bioactives that are destroyed by pasteurization. So these are the foods that have been accompanying mankind, co -evolved with mankind for 15 ,000 years at least. Do you know anything about the main ingredients in popular baby formulas today? Mother dextrin? I can't even spell it. It's fake sugar. It's not lactose from mama. It is all kinds of weird things and you look at the ingredient list.
42:16They're too long to memorize. And that ingredient list is not something you want to have in a baby's belly. And it wouldn't be something you find in Ram Elk. And it's interesting. Our sales jumped tremendously a few years ago when there was a national baby food shortage. Everybody said, get on Ram Elk, get on Ram Elk, get stride on our Ram Elk during that period with the baby food shortage. So yeah, well anytime you try to extract something out of Ram Elk and make it a pill or a potion or a formula afterwards, it's missing its matrix of whole. It doesn't act the same way when it's extracted and it's treated in some funky, weird way to put into some other food.
42:57It's meant to be in its blueprint matrix of the evolutionary solution of food. And it's proportionally perfect. Everything's about it. When you put it in a baby formula, it's mankind and lab trying to fake mother nature and don't work very well at all. If you freeze Ram Elk, does it hurt it? No. We have to remember that frozen eggs and sperm make life. You can create a baby from a frozen sperm and egg. So there's very, very little change. Over time, over five or six months period of time, we know that there's slight changes. Absolute and some nutritional values change. But the bioactants are still there, the bacteria are still there, enzymes are still there.
43:38We know this from all the tests done on breast milk bake. Breast milk baking is all frozen milk and that's meant to preserve what's coming out of mom's breast for a month or two or three. But we don't suggest like six months. We suggest two or three months not a problem at all. There's no change. Tell me the difference in shelf life between pasteurized milk and raw milk. Raw milk, when done expertly and rapidly chilled, gives you a three to four weeks if you keep it cold. Or else it becomes another food. It doesn't ever become dangerous. It just co -easelves by kind of souring, fermenting, lacto -fermenting to become its own natural form of kefir.
44:13It wants to become kefir. So pasteurized milk, 18 to 21 days, it's actually a little shorter than raw milk. That's unbelievable. That's the low temperature pasteurized milk. That's 145 degrees in 30 minutes. That's called low and slow. 21 days. And it doesn't taste very good. But let's go to the higher temperatures. You go to 175 and 15 seconds. You go to 220 and four seconds. You go to 282 and two seconds of the ultra -ide -temperature pasteurized with a culinary steam injection. Now you get 60 to 90 days shelf life or even a year shelf life, but it is completely dead. It's like water. It's just white water.
44:52It's toxic. Because remember it holds the HAAs. It's got this aromatic amines which are actually oxidated, which causes and triggers and are associated with cancer. So that highly cooked stuff is quite dangerous really. Although it's been the greatest savior of organic milk, because you can send it around all the places that want this wonderful milk, but the shelf life completely occludes and shades the gut life. What we're looking for gut life if we want to build a immune system. Remember that the Department of Energy started viewing research in 1990s and was actually mature and actually reported to Congress about the human genome.
45:34That whole study revealed that we have to have a biodiversity of bacteria for our genome to work properly. We may get 23 ,000 Gs from mom and dad to make us look like we do, but I tell you what, the way we function is driven by bacteria and viruses and the DNA of the bacterial biome and viral that we are in and on. That has not been a very popular discovery because it really flies at the face of overdoses and using antibiotics all the time and preservatives and food. And so it's a very to quote Al Gore a very inconvenient truth. To say yeah, antibiotics are great to save a life, but boy, they destroy the immune system and you better not use them very often because if you do, then you have antibiotic resistance and you also destroy your gut microbiome become compromised in your immune system and you can get sick from anything.
46:24So let's be very, very cautious with modern medicine. We use very sparingly. We should be relying much more on nutrition and avoiding all this stuff and only using as the last -ditch effort. So I am a big believer in synergizing, putting together modern medicine, but having it be 10 % of the solution and 90 % of the solution is literally farmers over pharmacies and looking at what they're doing in France and Italy where they just push in farmers markets and getting fresh good food for people, farm direct foods, but the problem with that in America is the processors don't win the farmers do. The farmers and consumers win.
47:00Processors, they have to kind of take a different position because they have to start thinking about nutrition versus profits. Why do you think there's a fear around raw milk when there are other foods like fresh fish? If you buy fresh fish, you know in a few days it's liable to be a problem. You're right, Onric. I stood in front of farmers markets tables for years of my life at LA and I heard, I don't know how many thousands of people speak about their story as we were talking back and forced back raw milk. And you have this beautiful young lady coming out of the Ukraine, coming to you with this broken Russian accent with gorgeous children and straight peat and she's not obese and she's looking great.
47:45She's saying, please I want four gallons of raw milk like I got back home interbroken and I say, you know, wonderful. And you get this mom that comes up saying, I don't want to have anything to do with raw milk because if that stuff killed people, is it really dangerous? And she's obese. She's diabetic. Her kids are running around with ADHD, going crazy or teeth are falling out of her mouth. And a few times I was at that farmers market table. I said, will you two moms go have chit chat together because you guys got to straighten this out? You look at yourselves. Look at how you're presenting here.
48:18So it's very much that we've had a driven in our brain that raw milk is absolutely dangerous. It's a marketing campaign by processors and the FDA, the processors are one and the same. And the reason that's the way that is, I've been there, I know. The NCIMS, the National Conference of Interstate Milk Shippers is the party. It's the group of processors that get together with the FDA every year and they talk about the science of processing and they talk about the pasteurized milk ordinance. They talk about what they should do and they shouldn't do. One time in 2007, the raw milk guy, I was there and I did a presentation in front of that group of people.
48:54And I tell you what, the quote afterwards was, you could hear a pin drop and it was like saying there is no God at the Vatican. That's what they said my speech sounded like to everybody in the room. Because I was saying, we don't need you. We need to go farm to consumer direct because your processing is screwing up the milk and all they were with processors. So this is very much driven by the FDA and a scare tactic and they do it continuously. They'll find any excuse they can to scare people from raw milk and they absolutely refuse, refuse to ever meet with me and look at our science and look at the raw milk institute science.
49:32And there's all kinds of stories I have about that. The bottom line is they are stuck in their paradigm. And if you're trying to make raw milk fit their paradigm, the processors wouldn't fit. Their paychecks depend on supporting processors.
49:48Tell me the history of raw milk, how it was used, access delivered from earliest times to before it became difficult to get. Sure. 15 ,000 years ago, the science says that raw milk was collected in gourd or containers from cows, goats, sheep, horses, camels, reindeer, donkeys, water buffalo. Anybody that's got a teeth got milked, right? They got milked into something that was not clinking. It helped milk from last week. And that milk had cultures in it, bacterial cultures that were local cultures that were a noculum, the mother culture, the moussai have it, they literally have it, mother culture in their gourd.
50:29And they'll milk directly into that which immediately causes a culture milk to be created, which is a local kefir, which has a very long shelf life. And then you could take that that milk, that clabbered milk and you could put it through a cheesecloth and create farmers cheese, add some salt, add some herbs, and you had food that would last months, if not years, it got better with time. That was 15 ,000 years ago. We were literally starving. And hunter gatherer said, I see a cow goat sheep, all these animals, and I want to get some milk out of that because I'm hungry. And you don't have to farm anymore, you don't have to wait, you don't have to fish, you don't have to hunt.
51:02Sometimes the hunted got hunted themselves, the hunter's got hunted. So it's much safer to have a domesticated animal. And that happened all over the world. Not everybody had that, but it was a lot of people that thrived had those things. All the ancient cultures, Romans, land of milk and honey, land of milk and honey wasn't characterized guys. What would Jesus eat? You think about that through history coming through to modern times, the first settlers in America, no pilgrims stayed in America before they arrived on the first cows. James Town had cows, everybody had to have a musket and a cow or you died.
51:34That's the history. So we were founded in America and Canada with cows and goats as part of our literally our living environment. We lived by them or neighbors next to them. So the bacteria they had we had and the milk they had we consumed. So let's look at the very interesting time period of 1860s through 1890s. Well, we were starting to build bigger cities and people were bringing their cows into the city and out of the environments in the countryside, which was clean, fresh water, the streams and grass and sunshine. And that environment, you could actually coexist in a biome that worked. You're okay, you're good to go.
52:09You didn't get diseases or problems with the cow. But you take the cow into a downtown area in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Moscow and even Great Britain and England. It happened there too. And you started feeding those cows, what was available, which was the byproduct of breweries, which is distiller's mash and no more green pastures and no more clean water and no way to clean the milking systems because you milked by hand. And it was really cold in the morning. So why not put your feet in the milk because it wanted your feet? Fricking disgusting. Okay. So that milk was called the milk problem.
52:41And there was two solutions that were proposed. Dr. Henry Kuwait said, clean up the milk, go out to the farm and get it, do some testing. And it's great for kids and fantastic. And that milk was going to Mayo clinic to heal people. That was in 1893, Dr. Henry Kuwait, the American Association of Medical Milk Commission. And by the way, Al D 'Dina was the last AAMMC certified dairy in America. And they closed in 1999. The other solution was proposed was Nathan Strauss. Nathan Strauss brought in called the poor par boiler, which was early pasteurization technology for France. He said, just cook the hell out of it.
53:17And what he did, 40 % fewer people died because he killed the milk. Yeah, it was a solution for filthy milk. But also during that time, the water quality was very poor. And so water was causing a lot of disease and illness as well. So you had water and and cleanliness together, caused the problem with this milk problem. And so raw milk as the AAMMC, Dr. Henry Kuwait and the Nathan Strauss pasteurized milk kind of lived in semi -harmony for about 40 years until 1930s and you enter World War II, we didn't have any money. And DDT was good for your skin and smoke heat was good for your lungs and nuclear bombs solved social problems.
53:58Okay, so we were not really embracing mother nature at all in the 1940s. It was an ugly time. Nutrition was to the back. You know, we had margarine, terribly oxidative, horrible vegetable oils, making fake butter. I mean, disgusting. That is when pasteurized milk kind of won over raw milk because raw milk was kind of a processor's dream to get rid of raw milk so they could own it all and they could use their technology to take care of bringing milk and cheat, really cheat from all these dairies and not worry about quality because you're going to cook it. So raw milk kind of died off in the 40s and it kind of peed it out to the end without adina with the certified raw milk.
54:37We captured on a new phase of raw milk, a whole new world that evolution, a generation of raw milk, where we kind of embraced the AAMMC in the conditions and the health and nutrition. But we also married in modern technologies, the PCR and other testing to find and make sure there was no pathogens. Because remember, this in the modern raw milk, we no longer have the immune systems that we had in the 1800s, which is very strong. The biodiversity eating whole foods only without modern processing. So we will die to be ill. There's no question they did. But the fact that they could tolerate the environment around them and thrive was something that came from the 1800s.
55:16We do not have that anyone. Now we have compromised immune systems because we embrace wholly terribly processed foods with lots of preservatives, sterilized foods that don't have the biodiversity and antibiotics. I think one of the most telling things, and I come as a paramedic saying this, one of the most telling things incredibly inconvenient truth in modern medicine, a person is on their deathbed in the ICU with plus treating him difficile, C -diff, which kills tens of thousands of people a year when you exhaust all the antibiotics. What's the therapy that literally saves 92 % of people's lives is fecal transplant.
55:53Fecal transplant, going to a nurse that is eating a West City price diet and drinking raw milk or whatever, got a fantastic gut microbiome and taking her feces. Her fecal, having her take a poop in a bag and taking it down the lab and putting some water with it, making a solution and flushing the lower gut saves 92 % of the people's lives. What the shit, right? That's the shit. The bottom line is that tells you a whole lot about what's needed in the gut. It's not antibiotics that are needed. It's whole food, nutrition, the bioactives, the bacteria. That's what heals the lower gut. That's extremely telling about modern medicine kind of hitting its dead end in terms of in the ICU.
56:37Doctors are literally access to heaven. That's it. They're dying and it saves their lives. When you've run out of modern medicine, you go to fecal transplants. That's really telling. Tell me about Westinay price. They sell it to Allen and Westinay price and the Price Potterger Foundation before Westinay price. We're all foundation until the core of the educational programs and the studies that Dr. Westinay price did around the world. He studied nutrient dense foods in the MSI, he studied those in Switzerland, he studied all over the world and discovered that. These nutrient dense foods with raw fats and these raw proteins and these nature's wonderful bounty that comes from the soil and animals.
57:19Literally, the reason why they had straight teeth and well -formed bones and lived healthy lives and didn't get sick. So, yeah, they're the core of what we all started. We've grown beyond that in terms of the broad spectrum in the mainstream now, but they were the beginning for us for sure. Absolutely. They always stay in our hearts. They're the core. What were the specifics of the Westinay price diet? What was good and what was bad? It wasn't the same around the world. The estomose didn't eat the same things in the MSI, but they had common things. They all had raw fats. They all really embraced organ meats.
57:53They always had nutrient density, which is very high. They also did some other things. They really learned from the ancestry coming forward what their grandparents had done. So, they always did multi -generational education. The water was excellent. The nutrients found in the water was excellent. So, that was the common thing around the world was nutrient density and from different sources, a raw fish in the estomodiet versus raw fats in the raw milk in the MSI diet. So, it's very interesting to see that common with the raw fats and the raw fish and the nutrient density and the biodiversity, the vitamin D, vitamin K, grass feeding.
58:28All those things came together were found as a common theme, although they all eat different foods. Would you say raw milk is alive? 100%. It's absolutely alive. And in fermented forms, even more alive, because you've taken it and allowed it to grow and just prosper and flower and bloom because the bacteria grow like crazy and they become extremely probiotic, extremely prebiotic, which is the food that feeds bacteria, and also postbiotic. Postbiotic, some people don't know what that word means, but that's the bacterial waste products that are building blocks for other things to grow. So, with this metabolism that occurs where prebiotics are being consumed by probiotics, postbiotics are actually creating the building blocks for long life.
59:14So, raw milk's got it all. It's got to have it all because without it, babies would die. Nature's blueprint says, all you have to have is raw milk for the first six months of life as a baby, no water even, and you thrive. I know of people that literally ate a lactobor diet, what all they drank was raw milk. So, isn't that kind of boring? I said, nope, I love it. I said, okay, great. Extreme diets are kind of interesting around the world, but you know, some people just absolutely love raw milk because it's so delicious. What are all of the healthy natural foods downstream of raw milk? What do you make where raw milk into?
59:48Geffir, number one, raw milk, keffir, low pH, easily digested because it's already pre -digested. I would say that beyond keffir, you're looking at cream. The reason why cream is so valuable is because raw milk and raw milk keffir have maybe 4 to 5 % butter fat. 60 % 60 % of the bioactives found in raw milk are carried on the butter fat globule. That says a lot about homogenous acid. You're destroying the butter fat. You're getting rid of the good things without any real purpose. It's not pasteurization. This homogenous acid is crushing butter fat. So, cream is very, very bioactive because it's 40 % butter fat versus four.
1:00:31So, you've got 10 times more bioactives in raw cream. And raw cream is incredibly important in terms of being anti -inflammatory, very good to help the shuan cells and the nerves be better insulators for your brain. It's just really a superfood raw cream. Raw butter has 86 % butter fat and it hasn't impassurized. So, the bioactives in it are off the fricking charts, right? You got 4, 40 and 86 % of the carrier, the butter fat, is carrying these bioactives. Cheese is good if it's truly raw cheese. There's a lot of fake raw cheese is running around and I'm not going to take it away from the guys who are doing the other raw cheese.
1:01:08It's fantastic. If it's raw, but there's no real definition of raw cheese. There's a definition of pasteurized cheese that's taking it at 145 degrees in 30 minutes. But below that, by two degrees, it's considered raw or if you don't have a pasteurized or license, you can take it to whatever temperature you want. Call it raw cheese. This is not regulated. So, a lot of fake cheeses mask -grady is raw because it's a better market. We make a truly raw cheese that is literally never taken above body temperature of 100 degrees. Truly raw cheddar cheese. It's delicious. We can't keep it in stock. People buy it like crazy.
1:01:42So, it's a nibble food for babies. Kids love it. It's six months and just eat it. They eat it like crazy. So, butter, cheese, kefir, cream, and we have some of those products labeled as burpets. Have you experimented with an ice cream? We make raw ice cream all the time, but the FDA will not allow us to make raw ice cream because it's a multi -agredient product. And it's not pasteurized. So, the influence of the eggs or whatever, there's a little bit of understanding that it can make somebody sick because you're putting raw things together. But we do it all the time. We use raw eggs and raw cream and honey and all kinds of stuff to make a fantastic raw ice cream.
1:02:23It's very, very popular, but you have to make it yourself, unfortunately. Is mad cow disease still a thing? No. Mad cow disease was over 10 years ago. And it was not really ever a problem with raw milk. That was the prion in the brain matter of certain cows that had this disease. And I'm not suggesting it wasn't dangerous. Probably what it really was. But I'm sorry, we're not cutting out the spinal column of cows and eating it directly. That came out of processing plants where they had mechanical processing of cows and making ground beef that was getting into the food stream. When you slaughter cows more directly, by hand, you actually don't get into the spinal column at all.
1:03:00But mad cow has been dispensed with many, many years ago. Historically, people think of milk as a mucus producing food. What's been your experience? Well, the interesting thing is mucus is a new -seen response. New -seen response is part of the immune system. Well, guess what? When you have the most allergenic food in America that triggers mass cells to release histamines, you get all kinds of mucus. And that's one of the reasons why people are shucking and avoiding pasteurized milk. Raw milk is actually opposite the raw way protein stabilizes mass cells and keeps histamines in check. Raw milk is one of the most anti -inflammatory foods on earth.
1:03:36It keeps the cytokine storms in check. It does all kinds of things. So you don't overreact. You don't overre -spot. You do response in your back to normal. So it's a very anti -inflammatory food. So our experience with raw milk is you doesn't create mucus along. In fact, it's contradictory. It keeps your runny nose from running. It keeps your ear infections in check because you don't have the mucus build up or the inflammation. So it's a wonderful food that doesn't have anything to do with the uca set off. Tell me about the difference between cow milk, goat milk, sheep milk, and camel milk. Cheap milk has fat globules at about one third the size of cow's milk.
1:04:10They're casing proteins are slightly different. Camels milk actually has been researched in Europe. And they say it's fantastic for kids with autism. The elements of the protein found in it, I'm not sure exactly what the arbit. I've heard speeches, presentations at the International Moped Genomics Consortium from researchers in Europe to talk about how fantastic camel's milk is for autistic kids. Water buffalo milk has 10 % butter fat, great for making cheese in mozzarella. Every one of these species of animals has their own levels of fat and levels of protein. And men kind has done very well in all of them as seen by the history of 10 ,000 ,000 years.
1:04:45So there are differences, a little bit flavor difference, a little color difference. Jersey cows have more creamy, yellow or milk and butter fat than a whole state. But all of them, like I said, are qualitatively very similar, but quantitatively different. We are mammals ourselves. We can't forget that. We're mammals ourselves. Tell me about colostrum. Oh, colostrum actually is not milk. Remember that colostrum comes from the arteries, the veins. It's their blood constituents, a lot of fats and antibodies that come from the blood of mom. They're stored right before delivery of the baby. They're stored in the areas inside of the udder or inside the breast.
1:05:24And that is suckled by the baby as the first fruit of life to take the antibodies from mom to go into the very permeable gut of the baby. This very leaky gut is normal for a baby to absorb those antibodies into the baby's blood street. Because remember the mom and the baby don't share the same blood. The placental barrier separates the two and the baby can have a different blood type than the mom. So the blood is not shared between babies. But the colostrum is a representative of moms and antibodies. The good stuff from moms and antibodies in her bloodstream being shared into the babies bloodstream through digestive tract and absorbed through the leaky gut.
1:06:00That only lasts for a few hours, maybe a day or two. And then with the potassium response and the other hormones that are exchanged in the breast and the brain and the pituitary, you start to see a letdown of milk and lactating the lacteoglanz which lactate create milk and release milk. And that washes out the remaining colostrum. So you have high levels of colostrum becoming intermediate levels becoming no levels and then raw milk coming into washer. And then raw milk nourishes all of that first initial anoculum that was put into the gut. And then you start putting sugar in there and you're putting bifidobacteria in there.
1:06:37You take all the bacteria from mom's nipple or the breast or the teeth of that animal being put in the gut which gives the biodiversity bacteria in the gut of the child which is the first experience that has with the outside world. But then you remember the babies put everything in their mouth. What are they doing? They're crawling around the floor. They're sucking on kitten paws and they're picking up dog food and they're putting everything in their face because they're sampling their ecosystem to build that diversity bacteria to have an immune system that works in the environment that they're in.
1:07:05They're not in a sterile bubble. They're very much wanting to participate in interact with their environments but raw milk is what feeds them through that process.
1:07:17Welcome to the House of Macadamias. Macadamias are a delicious superfood. Sustainably sourced directly from farmers. Macadamias, a rare source of omega -7, linked to collagen regeneration, enhanced weight management and better fat metabolism. Macadamias, art healthy and bring boosting fats. Macadamias, failure friendly, keto and plant -faced. Macadamias, no wheat, no dairy, no gluten, no ghee, M .O .s, no preservatives, no palm oil, no added sugar, the house of Macadamias. I roasted with Namibian sea salt, cracked black pepper, and chocolate dips. Snack bars come in chocolate. Go cannot wipe chocolate and blueberry white chocolates.
1:08:24Visit houseofmacadamias .com slash tetra.
1:08:36If you can remember, tell me from that first time that you drove milk down to Rossum, the systems, what were the first things that changed? Well initially we didn't do any product testing at all. We just got the milk and I made a couple of kids sick. I was like, whoa, that was a screw up. What do you mean? I was like, why? Here I am but paramedic, right? I don't want to make people sick, I don't want to make people healthy. They didn't die, they recovered fully and it's all good. I was like, wow, what a learning opportunity for me. So I started testing our milk and I started using more and more advanced technologies.
1:09:16I started learning what practices created what kind of milk. It was constantly tweaking of those practices to make better and better milk with less and less bacteria that might compromise somebody who's got to compromise immune system. Remember that when I sell milk in a bunch of stores here in California, I don't pick my consumer. They pick me. I don't know who they are exactly. I think I reach out and I could talk to them. But it's an unbelievable how many people have compromised immune systems which could get sick from a bad bug because they want to build a strong immune system. So I've got to be game on for the worst case scenario at all times, which is zero pathogens in our milk, but all the biodiversity, all the bioactives to help whoever is consuming our product be as strong as it could be and recover from chemotherapy, right?
1:10:05Recover from antibiotic abuse, recover from compromised immune system, heal their gut and Crohn's disease and irritable bowel and ABS. So we evolved over 25 years to using very advanced technologies and different kinds of protocols. For instance, we test every subset of 20 cows gets tested separately at our dairy. We're milking 1800 cows in two dairies, but we treat those cows like their 20 cow dairies because you can have a bad bug in your milk tank and actually not find it when you can actually find it in the non -deluted samples of 20 cows mixed together. So we treat our our dairy like a 20 cow dairy with intensive testing in 20 cows.
1:10:45That's something we learned just the last couple of years. So it's been an evolutionary process of me becoming sharper and sharper and better and better. For the last 12 years, hanging out with the International MFG and I'm always consortium PhDs at UC Davis around the world. I've been our host Denmark twice, Sydney Australia, Quebec Canada. I just got back to work Ireland. I'll be going to UC Davis again this year to learn more. They always say, if you're the smartest guy in the room, you're the wrong room. And so I always try to get myself in a room that I always wondering how do I figure this out because I want to learn to be the best I can possibly be as a like long learning kind of thing.
1:11:20And why not hang out with really smart people? They can't really really speak because the grants they get come from the FDA NIH. They are from processors. So I allow their research to become real in our world. Do you teach the practices that you've learned to other dairies and other farmers? Yes, we do. I realized many, many years ago, 15 years ago, that raw milk would not emerge gracefully and with purpose if it was chaotic. If we didn't all understand how to produce raw milk well, if you intended to serve people not processors. And so raw milk institute was formed in 2011. We have a board of directors.
1:11:57We have a PhD from Rutgers University on there. Dr. Peckman is fantastic. In the past, we've had Dr. Katarina Berg from Belgium was on our board. Veterinary and epidemiologist from California, she formed us in the first seven years of our lives. So the best brains at the raw milk institute serve on our board. And we have now we have Sarah Smith, we've got Kelsey, their foot that actually trained farmers around the world that we've exposed farmers, 50 farmers who actually certified, but we trained a hundred to say five farmers in Great Britain alone in 2018, a hundred to say five in Great Britain where they have raw milk that's legal on the farm.
1:12:28So we've trained and exposed to training thousands of farmers around the world. We have a four and a half hour video series that talks about all the elements from grass to glass that you need to do to have raw milk this low risk. We've also come up with a pamphlet to send to the Amish that can't have access to online. So we actually put this stuff consolidate down the old document to give the Amish. So we've done our very best to penetrate. We've trained farmers across Canada. We've trained farmers in South America and Argentina. We trained farmers in New Zealand and Australia. We trained farmers in India.
1:13:00We trained farmers all over the world, but they have to reach out to us. We can't reach them. And so farmers that want to learn, it's readily available. And yes, we have absolutely learned that we need to have training for all farmers. In fact, we have two PubMed articles out now. Two, they're in the literature by two international researchers. One is Whitehead and the other ones, Dr. Berg from international resources that took our data because we collect data on the testing of the milk from these farmers. And it's so different than what you get from farmers that are pasteurizing or will be pasteurizing.
1:13:29It's filthy milk versus clean milk. And what we've done is we put that in pure view, Gerald. And it's now at the NIH. It's FDA. You can see it at PubMed. These two articles we have now about how when you do three things, you use very high standards. You train the farmers in those standards and you do routine testing. When you do these three things, you have world -class, very low risk of all milk. And we've done that very effectively for everybody because this is the Wii project, not a Wii project. Now, I tell you what, we share our customers. Somebody that's been trained, Rick England, down in Arizona, phenomenal product, it, fondle lock serves the customers in Arizona.
1:14:04Guess what? His customers come to California. They get a wonderful product from us. Our customers go to Arizona. They get a wonderful product from him. We're using the same kind of standards. Not exactly the same, but very close. So it's a wonderful sharing of people that move around. It's also a great driver of jealousy. When you go to a place that doesn't have raw milk, people say, why can't I have it? They get really pissed off. And so it's really driven the market to train farmers so that we can share customers. But also, when you go to a place that doesn't have raw milk, people ask, why can't I have it here too?
1:14:35Are there any places in the US where raw milk is illegal? Yes. Where? Hawaii, Nevada. Wow. And there's a lot of places in where it's illegal. However, the laws have changed the last few years to make it legal to buy on farm or buy as part of a cow share, where you buy the cow and therefore the farmer doesn't get paid for the milk, it's paid to care for the cow. I'm very proud that the Ramel Institute was very foundational in the change of laws in Delaware. There was a change of law in Delaware. The governor is about to sign it. It hasn't been signed with the governor, but it passed 39 to two in favor of raw milk because people in Delaware, they've lost so many diaries in Delaware.
1:15:16They're down to 13 now. They used to have hundreds. 13 diaries are surviving. They said, we have to have raw milk or we're going to be dying as a dairy. And instead of people driving from Delaware down to Pennsylvania to get their milk and drive back four hours round trip or more, now they're going to have world -class raw milk with on farm testing, the secretary of agriculture up there, Michael Scuse said in my raw milk in Delaware, we're going to have world -class raw milk. The best there is and we're going to have on farm labs for every farmer to test their milk every day. That's two dollar test cheap.
1:15:45That's the kind of wonderful leadership we bring to a place that can visualize having the best raw milk instead of saying, no, no, no, no, no, you can say, yes, let's take care of our farmers and our consumers with world -class raw milk. So what's happening? It's happening now. If you live in the other states where it is legal, can you usually find good quality local raw milk? If you really want to find it, you can. You have to search for it. I was at a National Farmers Union conference a few years back in Hawaii and Maui. Those raw milk come out on halfway. You just have to know where to go get it.
1:16:17You had to know a guy or a gal. So that's kind of what's going on. You have to know somebody or ask. There's a website called realmilk .com and realmilk .com has a search bar and find raw milk everywhere in the world. Sometimes it's not called raw milk. Sometimes it's called theopathra's bath milk. Sometimes it's called pet milk. Sometimes it's of courte -share. Sometimes it's something else, but it's raw milk intended for human consumption. That raw milk finder doesn't really talk about the quality of the milk. It just shows you where you can find the milk around the world. Tell me some of the legal hurdles you've had to jump to do this.
1:16:57Raw milk's always been legal in California and I have to get credit to Al Tadina who stood as a guardian at the gate to make sure the laws didn't change to make it illegal. In areas they did not have good illegal raw milk. Sometimes the pasteurizers, as a favor to themselves, changed the laws to make raw milk illegal. Some of those laws changed back in 1930s. That's why it's so hard to get laws changed as they're indoctrinated literally in 90 years old law. But as far as legal challenges are concerned, we've been sued by the FDA because we don't fit their model very well and they bark of a tree all the time.
1:17:32With the FDA, we say, we want to meet, we want to talk. We want to work together. We want day -taught. We want you to learn from us. We want to learn from you. We want a relationship. They refuse to have that. They go to their friends at the Department of Justice, the DOJ, to have their attorneys talk to us because they don't want to talk to us. Because by talking to us, they admit they must receive information when you communicate. Communication means two ways back and forth. You and I are talking right now. They refuse to talk or communicate with us. They want to be at an arms length or through an attorney because they don't want to deal with us because we are absolutely upset in the paradigm.
1:18:06They've a set, which is the excuse for filthy milk from the 1890s. Tell me about milk consumption in other parts of the world. If you're in the United States, we kind of made milk kind of a flashpoint topic. There's a lot of indoctrination about milk and pasteurization and raw and all that kind of stuff. In other parts of the world, raw milk is not a big deal or it's not considered a flashpoint or a really big divisive or big issue. It's like, oh, you want raw milk, you want pasteurized milk, you're called, no big deal. It's the culture. It's the indoctrination. It's the the role of the processors and also the advertising, the role of the regulators and those that inspect milk in production.
1:18:46Germany has the Ford Sufmelk, very readily available. In Italy, there's raw milk available in France, there's raw milk available. You just have to look for it. Sometimes it's more convenient than other places. Almost all those places have really, really good raw milk cheeses and oftentimes have a lot of raw milk to fear because the fear is easily made because you can ferment it and then has a long shelf life. It doesn't require a lot of refrigeration. Where raw milk will sour quickly. I know when I was a child, I was a representative of the United States in Russia in 1977. I went to ArtPek, the International Peace Camp there and I represented I was one of 12 students.
1:19:19I was the only farmer in the group, but they had a raw milk kefir. It was delicious and we all drank it. I didn't know what it was, but it was delicious and I drank it every day. I think it's culture by culture, place by place, kind of a reflection of the history and processing. I know that right now Europe has really taken a very good responsible position saying we want to know the bioavailability of food. We want to know the carbon footprint of the food. We want to know how local your food is and we certainly want people to easily get whole foods at a farmer's market. This farm directs. I think you see that in the pictures of people and how obese they are walking down the streets in the United States versus in Europe.
1:19:55I think you see that. Unfortunately, there's slipping a little bit in some areas with your bracing order in America, which is please, detour, go back. That's a bad sign. Don't do America. You might want to wear our blue jeans. That's fine, but don't do America. The way we eat sucks. In the US 50 or 60 years ago, the milkman would deliver a glass bottle and put it in a cooler outside of your door. Was that pasteurized milk? Some of it was raw. Some of it was pasteurized. Well, you had to have a certified raw milk dairy. It was certified. It was the AAMMC milk. And that milk was very popular. Altonina built a huge market for themselves in LA.
1:20:33Other areas like Atlanta, Georgia, that was a dairy there. There was Stereo's Oliver in America. There was the Gordon Walker, the Walker Gordon dairy in Virginia. It was extremely popular from 1906 to 1971. Had a thousand cows. They were operating as 100 cows subsets with literally 10 farmers that managed each farm. And they're all milked at the same facility. And that milk went to the Mayo Clinic. It was on the Titanic. It was at the White House. It was presidential food.
1:21:03It was not as easy to do as pasteurized milk. And so if it's more difficult, it's more expensive. And so it's not as readily available as you're going to see the pasteurized milk. That's for sure, including today.
1:21:18Any feelings about milk in plastic versus glass bottles? We started out for the first three or four years in glass bottles. It was very, very difficult. There's nothing wrong with it. It's wonderful. Except that there's a deposit of $2 for every glass bottle. So you get into the store. The store gets the person that takes it home, consumes it, brings it back to the store. They want the two bucks back. Well, if it's going to chip on the top of the glass bottle, the store has to get back to two bucks. The store takes it. The store is stuck with the two bucks now. And you get there. You got to take it back and you can't use it.
1:21:52You also have the state testing the glass to make sure it's clean. You have to make sure the milk is clean. You have to have extremely sterile bottle when plastic. And we source our plastic very specifically and not have any isoestrogens and not have any of those things that are going to leach into the milk. And when you kept cold, there's no leaching at all. But if you were to heat the plastic, absolutely with the leach. So you don't want to have any leaching and heating is what brings that on. So we're very cautious of that. But we did glass for the first three or four years. The other thing was that when you put the glass in your truck, the glass weighs a lot.
1:22:23And bring it back from the marketplace with heavy, heavy trucks that are filthy with all these glass bottles was very hard on the delivery drivers as well as the diesel consumption for the trucks with heavy trucks coming back. Or you're not carrying food, you're carrying package for the food. I have a big supporter of glass, but I tell you what it's very, very hard to do. Would there be any benefit in having a glass option that costs more, but for the people who care about that? Maybe. And we might do that. But we always advocate for people if you want glass, port immediately in the glass and keep your glass to go away.
1:22:54And that way it doesn't spend three weeks in the plastic. And some people do that. But we have grown so incredibly forereciously, you know, just incredible demand that some of these things we had to kind of put in the back burner because just getting the milk in a plastic bottle to get out to the stores is enough to feed itself when you've got 35, 40 % growth year -over -year going from COVID forward. It's just having enough milk to get to anybody, any way we can and make sure it's safe is the biggest challenge we have at this point. And we're doing better and better and better with it. But at the same time, being glass would be kind of a distraction from that.
1:23:25And it has a different kind of bottle filler. Has a different kind of transfer you have to bring the glass back, you have to wash the bottle. Be very tough. We may do it someday, but not right now. How many years do cows produce milk for? That's kind of an indefin number. They started two years old and they go 12, 15, 20 years, depending on how healthy they are and what the environment they're in. Unfortunately, the way the K -fo operations, the confinement animal feeding operations are now, they don't make it beyond four and a half years. Because it's kind of like a race car. You know, you blow the engine up on a quarter mile sprint.
1:23:59And that's what they're doing, pushing them with everything they can to get as much milk as they possibly can, including hormones in some cases, antibiotic use, inflammation. Lots of really high rich foods to get 12, 15 gallons of milk a day. But that cow burns out. That's not our cows. Our cows are used to a moderate diet. We want to have a long, healthy life. But I'm looking for a race car effect. We're looking for a really sustainable, moderate production account that's in peace with itself is doing well that can sustain, sustain over the lifetime. Because that's the cow it's going to give you a really healthy raw milk.
1:24:31A cow that's a race car, she could have problems, a lot of problems and many different kinds of problems. Do your cows only eat grass and food on the pasture or do you give them additional feed? They absolutely need additional feed. They get pasture, yes. And seasonally more than in the summertime, it's super, super hot. They don't give that much because at 110 degrees, cows don't do well. But in the spring and fall, yeah, they get a lot of pasture. But we also supplement with all kinds of things. Like what? Althalpha. We actually have certified organic althalpha on our farm that we produce for our cows.
1:25:02Our farm is certified organic. Our end products are not certified organic because we couldn't do local sourcing of cows or additional feeds. We're bringing in organic cows from literally two states away. We're bringing in organic feed from three states away from Colorado with three to gallons of diesel to get it here. So if you wanted to get an organic milk, you could go down the local store, it's ultra high up at your pasturized. That's thought us. So right before COVID, I just come back from a national milk genomics consortium conference in our who's Denmark. And they're talking about how local is your food, what's your carbon footprint, what's your nutrient density.
1:25:35And I was like, well, that's not very good bringing feed in from four states away. So let's be local. And so we shifted from certified organic on the end product to non -GMO project, which is wonderful, no roundup and pesticides in our products. And be local. So we have a tin gallon ride from a neighbor that loves us and takes good care of feed and brings it right here. So we became much more local doing raw with a low carbon footprint, extreme bioavailability our foods and kind of moral lying with what they're doing versus what's being promoted in the presented floor treatment.
From the publisher
Mark McAfee is the CEO and Founder of Raw Farm, the largest raw dairy operation in the world. On his family-owned farm, McAfee, a fifth generation farmer, works to offer nutrient dense dairy products that are unprocessed, living, and retain their beneficial bacteria. As the Chairman and President of the Board of the Raw Milk Institute, McAfee’s leadership is based on humane care of his cows and upholding high safety standards for raw dairy products. Off the farm, he lectures on the gut biome benefits of raw milk at Stanford, University of Southern California, and medical schools in the United States, Australia, and Canada.
------
Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team:
LMNT Electrolytes
https://drinklmnt.com/tetra
------
Squarespace
https://squarespace.com/tetra
------
Lucy
https://lucy.co/tetra
------
House of Macadamias
https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra




