In Reason Magazine, Jacob Grier reports on the important but low profile struggle between federal regulators and raw milk farmers:

On May 1, Pennsylvania state troopers arrived at the home of Mennonite farmer Mark Nolt, seizing a reported $20,000 to 25,000 worth of farm equipment and placing Nolt under arrest. His crime? The illegal sale of unpasteurized milk and other dairy products. And Nolt isn’t alone. In February, federal investigators subpoenaed two employees of Mark McAfee’s Organic Pastures Dairy in California. Though the subpoenas do not indicate the purpose of the investigation, McAfee told me the feds were seeking evidence that his dairy was selling unpasteurized milk for human consumption across state lines.

These are just the latest skirmishes in the growing conflict over the right to sell unpasteurized, or “raw” milk. On one side of the fight is an odd coalition of whole foodists, dairy farmers, and libertarians who want the government to butt out of their milk-drinking decisions. On the other side are public health officials and assorted busybodies determined to tighten regulations.

Our regulatory environment is completely bereft of any acknowledgement of contingency or historical circumstance.  Regulations are largely reactive measures; they are created in response to abuses with the aim of preventing any further abuses and they are usually crafted within the context of a very specific incident (regardless of how broad they are) or circumstance.  This applies to agricultural regulations as much as it does to anything else.  Most of our regulations were crafted within the context of large-scale industrial husbandry, where a combination of poor conditions and poor diet yield animals far more likely to develop illness and disease, and far more likely to produce products rife with dangerous bacteria (among other things).  Under these conditions, it makes sense that regulators apply regulations vigorously and punish those who refuse to comply.

But every farm isn’t an industrial farm, and not every animal is confined to an industrial life.  Even if unpasteurized milk contains a higher concentration of bacteria, it’s likely it is nowhere near as harmful as the bacteria present in industrial dairy, since “raw milk” cows live far healthier (and ecologically sound) lives.  With that in mind, it doesn’t make any sense to apply standard regulations to raw dairy farms.  Regulators however, oblivious to both history (”grass-eating cows have become so rare that, to California health officials, they seemed unnatural.”) and contingency (to them, what works for one must work for all), refuse to modify their to raw dairy farms (or for that matter, ecologically sustainable farms like Polyface in Virginia).

Now, one solution is for Congress to craft a new set of regulations - specific to small, local farms - allowing them to sell their products as they see fit, with a minimal set of standards to adhere to.  And another is simply for Congress to carve out an exception to existing regulations for small, local farms.  But both of those solutions would leave for the federal government a part in determining what these farmers can or cannot do with their product, and I’m inclined to say that’s unacceptable.  We regulations for industrial farming and husbandry because the negative externalities - disease ridden lagoons of pig shit, for example - are so great as to almost require federal intervention.  The same can’t be said for small, local farms.  The consequences of small, local farming - whether from the farming itself or vis a vis the farmers and their customers - are so local and so personal as to make it impractical and, frankly, wrong for the federal government to intervene.

I understand the need to regulate certain transactions, but let’s keep things reasonable.  There is no reason (outside of a pathological need to control) for preventing a farmer who trusts her product from selling it to a consenting adult aware of the consequences.