Transcription
Raw milk time. I was surprised to find that most of the talking points about how raw milk is a magic food that will cure a lot of your health problems is coming from one raw milk dairy farmer in California. So, let's get to know him.
More than just one guy. This is a great chance to talk about media literacy in agriculture in general. I'm a small farmer who's worked in agriculture for 27 years. And I'm going to walk you through some of the basics of how to listen to farmers and not just hear what they say, but also watch what we do. Let's get started.
One of the things I like to do besides just googling people is look them up in the farm subsidies database. That can really help me flush out what their daily is. Here we learn that Mark McCaffy has gotten over $800,000 in federal subsidies. It's 118,000 and change under his own name and over 682,000 under his LLC, Organic Pastures Dairy. Despite getting nearly a million dollars in free money from the federal government, he really likes to complain about how the government is out to get him just because he's been accused of starting multiple outbreaks by selling raw milk that's not very clean. But he's a good guy. He visits those sick kids in the hospital in his private plane.
And real quick, yes, you can make cheese and other dairy products with raw milk under very specific circumstances, but that's not something to play around with. For this video, we're just talking raw milk. No fermentation, salt, heating, or other processing, just raw milk.
Now, a farmer having a small plane or helicopter sounds extra, but it's actually somewhat common for larger, wealthier farm families. It's usually more of a bush plane than a private jet. You can use it to get around to your various properties if they're spread out. You can give little rides and smoosh uh with people like lawmakers or a buyer who decides what to put on the shelves in a large grocery store chain. Maybe that helps explain how this folksy little raw milk guy has his product in hundreds, perhaps thousands of retail locations across the country. In fact, you can get his raw milk cheddar at the fancy grocery store here in Fagville, North Carolina, over 2 and a half thousand miles away from his farm.
But hang on, we still have to circle back to that whole oppressed by the government thing. Caffe also got a $10 million USDA backed loan to help build him a brand new factory to make raw milk dairy products in 2022. With the USDA backed loan, it's not that the USDA gives you the money. They just tell a bank, "Hey, if you loan to this person and they go under, we the government and the taxpayer will bail you out. It's risk-free." This is the government's way of getting banks to invest in critical businesses like agriculture that they might not want to lend to otherwise. So, the USDA got us, the taxpayer, to co-sign a $10 million loan for this guy, plus you know, almost a million dollar in free money in subsidies. If that's what being oppressed by your own government looks like, y'all hook me up.
And we are going to return to this USDA backed loan situation later, because it does involve his old cheese facility burning down in an arson case that some might describe as suspicious. There's also some really interesting stuff going on with the finances of this farm that can also be a good case study for farm literacy. If that's something you'd like to see a video on, let me know in the comments and subscribe so you don't miss it.
I looked up Mark McCaffy's farm on Google Maps and was a little surprised to see that his grass-fed dairy is a standard large commercial dairy. The kind of farm that many people have described as a factory farm or a feed lot. It's got about 1,200 cows standing and lying around in what we call a dry manure pack in the farm biz. Dry manure pack is when the cows hang out and eat in the same area long enough that poop kind of builds up and gets trampled, but it's dry enough that it's not a mud pit. This is exactly how many or even most dairies in dry parts of the western United States work. And I want to point out that while a dry pack isn't mud, it's also not really dry dry because each cow makes about 8 gallons of pee and 60 pounds of poop, which is moist per day. And there's 1,200 of them in a fairly limited area here. Cows don't really potty train and they also like to lie down in their belly and chew their cud most of the day. So, their utters are going to be lying on that most of the day. That's what we're working with here, farm literacy.
But, of course, Google Maps can be misleading. Maybe they're actually on the field most of the time, just not when the satellite photo is taken. Sometimes it's wet and muddy, so you have to take the cows off pasture for a few days so they don't just completely destroy the grass. Well, great news. This raw milk farm had an influencer come and do a video tour and they put it on YouTube so we can get a better look. And what we learned from this video tour is that Google Maps was not misleading. This innovative grass-fed farm is in fact a standard large commercial dryack California dairy. Here the cows are in a shed eating prepared rations from a feed trough with a big empty green field behind them. Based on all the alalfa hay bales and silage corn we see around the farm, these cows are probably eating the same silage and alalfa diet that pretty much every other large commercial dairy in the arid west uses.
Here, Macaffy is explaining why he keeps the cows on a dry pack, so that they can be under shade to protect them from heat stress during the hot part of the year. Grazing in the heat stresses cows out because it's too hot. And that is 100% true. Holsteines are big animals and they're most comfortable between 30 and 60° Fahrenheit. It's straight up just not humane to graze cattle in high heat. The thing is, this is Fresno. For cows, the hot part of the year is most of the year. By the way, this whole thing drives Wisconsin dairy farmers crazy. California had a marketing campaign about how their dairies raise happy cows out in the sun decades ago, and Wisconsin farmers are still mad about it. Anyway, the heat is why most big commercial dairies in central California work this way. They keep their cows in the shade, grow fields of alalfa and corn, process them into hay and silage, and then feed them to the cows in the shade. So, marketing this farm as pastured, grass-fed dairy that's different is a choice. And it's all possible because grass-fed and pasture-raised have no legal definition. It's literally meaningless. So, anybody can call their farm that and say, "Hey, I'm not like the other farms while being exactly like all the other farms."
On to the milking barn. This is where the rubber hits the road. Now, like many people, the YouTuber here doesn't really know much about farming, so he has no idea what a good milk barn should look like. And I don't really believe in griping about how the ignorant city people don't know agriculture. Farming is a job. It's weird to expect people who don't do a job to know how that job works. singling out agriculture as the one whole industry that everybody should just understand in their bones and if they don't they should feel a deep shame about that. I think that's weird. I don't do that. But for a certain kind of farmer, there is a huge upside to how so many people don't understand agriculture and feel shame about that ignorance. People like that are ideal targets for marketing tours because they're so easily impressed. You can show them an absolute hot mess of an operation. Tell them it's topnotch and they'll believe you. They're so scared of looking ignorant about agriculture that you can point to the sky, tell them it's green and they'll say, "Yeah, yeah, totally. Wow, I'm learning so much today." They're so preoccupied with showing respect for agriculture that they're just completely gullible. And gullibility is not good. That's why we're doing egg media literacy today.
I also just want to point out real quick before we get into cow milking logistics. Cows and people are built different. Believe it or not, the human memory gland is located well above the butt for hygiene and convenience. That's the kind of milk that the human immune system is built around. Our bodies expect that any milk that's coming in is going to be quite clean. But for cows, their udder is right under their butt and their poops are sloppy. Because of that, calves immune systems are geared to accommodate a certain amount of poop eating. And they still get scour, which is what we call life-threatening cases of diarrhea surprisingly often, even when they're getting all the colostrum and mother's milk they want. That's why drinking livestock milk, raw or otherwise, is not as traditional as it's being marketed today. People went to the very big expense of hiring human wet nurses instead of feeding livestock milk to their babies. Probably did that for a reason. Even for adults, livestock milk was mostly seen as a raw ingredient to ferment into dairy products. They were often also treated with a lot of salt to give it a shelf life and kill off the bacteria that comes with feces. So, if you want to talk tradition, that's a great tradition to respect.
All right, with that intro out of the way, on to the milking barn. I want to highlight a couple key moments in this part of the tour here. McCaffy says, "Look at this nice clean udder." He says that his farm is special because they clean the uters real good before milking. Unlike all those other farms that pasteurize. So, here's the thing. Because cows utters tend to be funky. Every farm cleans them before milking. If you have a dirty udder, even if you pasteurize it, the milk quality is still not going to be good cuz there's there's like poop in it. Nobody wants that. Everybody, every dairy farm uses te dips with iodine or other antiseptics. That's the normal thing to do. That's not a special little extra thing that this farm is doing for raw milk. It's also normal to use a tea dip after milking that has iodine or something else in it to help prevent mastitis and moisturizers to help keep the udder in good condition. They're working hard. We don't need chapping. We don't need cracking. And he didn't mention that part, the postmilking tea dip. And that could just be a time issue. It might have just gotten cut out. But that's a very normal and important part of uare that got totally left out of the spiel about look at us. We're so innovative and we take such extraordinarily good care of our cows. Got totally left out. And also, they did not succeed at cleaning off that cow before milking. There's still poop ground into the skin between the wrinkles. There's also dried up, crusty little balls of poop stuck to the whiskers between the teeth, where it's harder for dairy workers to clean, and it's also harder to see. That's why the YouTuber missed it. He didn't know that the real test of cleaning is licking between the teeth. He didn't know to do that. Having this much manure ground into the skin is both a pretty natural consequence of how cows flop down to chew their cud along the day and don't mind lying in their own poop. It gets really crammed into every nook and cranny and hair and micro crack in the skin on the udder. It cakes and dries up. It takes a really thorough spa experience to remove it all. And the whole time you're doing that, the whole time you're washing them off, you know what cows do? They just keep on pooping the whole time. One must imagine cisphus crappy. Then it gets on their tail, which is already wet from being washed and they swish it everywhere cuz it's their flatter. And you can see there's flies in this barn. That's why not only did this farm fail to get that cow clean, but the poop has now escaped containment and there's feces painted all over the rail. And I want to be clear, this amount of poop we're seeing actually is pretty clean for a dairy barn. Really makes you think. Back in the day before pasteurizing, people tried inspecting dairies. They said, "If we can just keep them clean, maybe that will make the milk healthy." And they found that it didn't work. That's why we pasteurized. They already tried to keep the cows clean and realized that's just not possible.
Okay, next. Here we've got three different employees who are tasked with cleaning off the cows and equipment by spraying them down with water in between milkings. This is a big classic rookie mistake in food and agriculture. Spraying water on poop doesn't make it go away. It launches the poop everywhere. Now your raw milk dairy is full of wet poop mist and it'll settle into a nice thin layer on everything. The teets you just cleaned, the worker's eyes and lungs, the vacuum claw that goes on the tits, there's poop mist inside of that now, too. That's why anytime I worked with a farm client on logistics and food safety, don't spray things clean was a top priority. Do not clean anything in a food handling area by spraying or pressure washing it ever. Even if your normal equipment is broken, as the Robbel dairy owner says in this video, do not spray or pressure wash your messes is really basic hygiene 101 when you're making food. And we are breaking it here with gusto and enthusiasm.
Anyway, to summarize this part of the tour, one, this raw milk farmer insists that utters are clean when you can see with your own two eyes that they are not. So, he's saying things that contradict what you can see right in front of you with your own two eyes. Number two, but this poor YouTuber does not realize that's happening. There's caked on poop right in front of his face and he's not seeing it. And that's why if you're going to go talk about agriculture or be an influencer about food and agriculture, farm literacy is so important. That's why we're doing this today. Three, this hygiene situation might help explain how this raw milk farm has got involved in at least a dozen outbreaks and recalls.
Throughout the video, Macaffy makes all kinds of claims about raw milk's health benefits and how he's being unfairly persecuted. Just bear in mind, he also describes utters with crusted on poop as extra clean.
Now, let's wrap it up with a couple other little things I noticed in the video. If you've heard about cats drinking raw milk, getting infected with bird flu afterwards, and then dying, many of these cases were traced back to Macaffy's product. Because with,200 cows, he just sells so much raw milk. Macaffy likes to use his barn cats as proof that his milk is fine. If all those cats got sick and died, it definitely wasn't from his milk. Cuz look, here are my cats. They're doing great. I just think it's funny how none of his barn cats seem to be very old. The lifespan for barn cats tends to be shorter than pets, maybe four to seven years, but every cat we see in this video looks like a kitten or a teenager. I can't say if that actually means anything just from a video. That just stuck out to me. Also, cats are fine in barns where cows live, but they really shouldn't be in the milking barn. They track whatever's on their little litter box paws, and you can make cows walk through a foot bath, but not kitties.
Okay, we're finally done with poop. Up next, arson. Let's get back to that whole got a $10 million USDA backed loan thing. He got that loan to build a new cheese factory to replace the one that got burned down. Except that's a little out of order. It seems what actually happened is the USDA backed loan he got came from a COVID relief loan that he applied for. But even with the USDA co-signing the loan, that bank still had questions. They wanted collateral, which is a normal thing for a bank to want with a $10 million loan. And unlike most of us, it seems Macaffy had $10 million worth of property and land to use as collateral. He just didn't want to, which relatable, I guess, but that's not how banks work. They're a business, not a charity. They need collateral. Also, the bank told him no at first because Macaffy already had $6.7 million in other loans he hadn't paid off yet. Imagine someone who already has $6.7 million in loans asking for more money. Well, why can't you pay back the loans you already have? What's going on? That can be a very uncomfortable conversation for the borrower, but it's a very normal question for a lender to ask. After he found out that he had to pay off the $6.7 million in loans that he already had before he could get another $10 million loan, Macaffy's old cheese plant randomly burned down. The fire was ruled in arson. Then he managed to pay off that $6.7 million in loans and get the new $10 million loan. Interesting sequence of events. I'm just saying.
I'm still looking. It may be out there. But I haven't been able to find any word of the sheriff's office doing any investigation into finding out who did the arson, which is wild because in the farm tour video, Macaffy says he uses his own plan to help the sheriff with search and rescue. Assuming that's true, Macaffy says a lot of things. It's so crazy that someone can be that helpful to the county sheriff and then get hit by arson and then the sheriff just can't even be bothered to find out who did it. That's so weird.
Anyway, that's that for today on Macaffy. I'm still digging, but his whole business finance situation seems eventful. I hope you enjoyed this lovely and slightly gross video about farm literacy. Have a good day.