It’s a typical afternoon at the Scarborough home of Stacy Brenner and John Bliss.

Baby Flora is upstairs taking a nap. Emma, 12, is practicing the piano on an electric keyboard in the living room. Bliss is outside shoveling wet spring snow and Brenner is sitting on the edge of the bathtub, filling five-gallon buckets with hot water.

She takes a full bucket in each hand and walks toward the door. Setting them down, she slides into her boots and grabs a rubber and metal claw-like contraption off the coat-rack, slinging it over her shoulder.

It’s four o’clock. Time to milk Dulcie, the family cow.
Walking across the unfinished wood floor between the house and a barn, she passes a refrigerator full of gallon jars of milk.

The milk is raw. Unpasteurized, unprocessed, it’s straight from the cow — and it’s going to stay that way. Brenner and her family will make some of it into yogurt, cheese and butter, but the milk they drink will remain raw. That’s why they bought the cow.

Brenner and Bliss are beginning their second season at Broadturn Farm, their organic-certified farm co-op that lets members work or pay for shares of the farm, and therefore the produce.

Dulcie came along as an afterthought.

The family’s preference for raw dairy could have been met by stores like Lois’ Natural Marketplace in Scarborough or Whole Foods in Portland. But raw milk is a specialty item supplied by small, local and often organic-certified farms. It isn’t cheap.

“We were going broke buying raw,” says Brenner as she puts “the claw,” a milk-pumping device, onto Dulcie’s udder. Since they were already well into farming, the couple figured they might as well get a cow.

“It’s traditional for a farm family to have a single dairy cow,” says Bliss. He explains that a cow has four teats and, according to that tradition, the first is for her calf, the second for other farm animals, the third for the family and the fourth for sale.

Though they aren’t yet licensed to sell their milk, teat number three has become a necessary part of their lives.

“We live in a modest amount of poverty,” says Brenner, whose part-time job as a labor-and-delivery nurse helped start the farm and buy Dulcie. “But we have really good food. Milk is the best stuff in the world. I couldn’t live another day without a cow.”

But you don’t have to have a cow to enjoy raw dairy in Maine — it’s one of only six states that allow raw milk to be sold in retail stores.

While some Maine farms produce small quantities of raw milk and sell it at the farm (which is legal in 28 states), a handful of small dairies are able to produce enough to sell to stores around the state.

Farms producing and selling raw milk in Maine aren’t regulated any more than conventional dairy farms –– but they have to be more careful.

Safe raw milk comes from healthy, properly fed cows. There are good reasons that conventional dairies are required to pasteurize their milk. Their cows are typically fed corn, rather than grass, and some don’t live in optimal conditions. These dairies move hundreds of cows through the milking room, and since it only takes one to contaminate the lot, pasteurization is used as a precaution.

At Winter Hill Farm in Freeport, Jim Stampone and Kate LeRoyer milk seven cows. They used to filter and bottle milk in their kitchen, selling it to their neighbors. Recently, Stampone built a milk-processing addition onto their barn and the couple were given a license to sell to retail stores.

“People do want to know where their food comes from,” he says, which is why 35 families come straight to their farm to buy milk and yogurt out of the ancient Coca-Cola cooler in the barn. “They know that all our cows have names, and that we let them be cows.”

He looks across the snow-patched pasture toward Lilac, who is due to give birth at any moment. “Some of the kids have even named calves. They feel like they have ownership.”

Like Brenner and Bliss, Stampone and LeRoyer keep all their milk raw.

“We believe that the health benefits are far superior,” says LeRoyer. “The nutrients haven’t been cooked out.”

Stampone nods as he looks back toward his wife. “If you pasteurize and kill everything, you have to put the good stuff back in,” he says, explaining that raw milk doesn’t need to be fortified with any vitamins. Thanks to cows living and eating like cows, those vitamins are already there.

Also, like Brenner and Bliss, these farmers recognize that conventional dairies shouldn’t go raw, but feel that restrictions placed by many states on raw milk sales are unjustified.

“If it weren’t for milk, where would we be?” says Stampone. While pasteurization is only about 100 years old, he says, people have been drinking milk for as long as humans and cows have been around.

The farmers aren’t alone in their beliefs. Dr. Stuart Cayer of Scarborough has been drinking raw milk since he discovered it.

He’s a chiropractor, or as he puts it, a wellness doctor. Nutrition is a topic he discusses daily, and dairy is a large part of that.

He came across data supporting raw milk at around the same time he had started avoiding dairy “because of the concept of it,” he says, referring to conventional industrialized farms.

He’s been touting raw milk to his patients and his family ever since and his daughters, ages 6 and 8, have only ever had raw milk at home.

“It’s what they figure milk is,” he says.

Why go raw?

What makes raw milk so great?

“It’s alive,” says Stacy Brenner. “It still has immunoglobins and lactase enzymes, which help you digest lactose better. The amazing thing is that people with auto-immune disorders actually see an improvement in their symptoms.”

She lists Crohn’s disease, asthma and eczema as examples, and cites a book called “The Untold Story of Milk,” by Ron Schmid, as having informed her family of the benefits of raw milk.

Her husband, John Bliss, mentions a study he read in which E. coli bacteria were put into both raw and pasteurized milk — the “good” bacteria present in the raw milk were able to fight off and destroy the pathogen.

The Food and Drug Administration doesn’t necessarily agree with the farmers.

A 2004 FDA publication citing the Center for Disease Control says that in 2002 more than 200 people got sick from drinking raw milk or eating cheese made from it. For comparison, the CDC reported in 1999 that approximately 5,000 get sick annually from vibrio after eating undercooked shellfish. The same FDA publication says that the pasteurization process “destroy(s) harmful bacteria without significantly changing milk’s nutritional value or flavor.”

The FDA cites the richer, creamier taste of raw milk as coming from its higher fat content, and says that one benefit of pasteurization is that it kills bacteria that lead to spoilage.

Raw milk is estimated to last about 12 days, if refrigerated after milking. According to farmers Jim Stampone and Kate LeRoyer, you can safely keep using raw milk once it has gone sour, especially in cooking and cheese-making.

You should not use pasteurized milk once it has gone sour, which Stampone thinks is “a good argument that probably milk wasn’t meant to be boiled.”

How is it different?

Pasteurization involves heating milk to 161? for 15-20 seconds. Ultra-pasteurized milk has been heated to 240? for a fraction of a second. Pasteurizing milk became commonplace in the early 1900s, when cows were kept near whiskey distilleries in the city and were fed the nutrient-poor grain byproducts of that process.

Homogenization involves putting milk through a process similar to spinning it in a centrifuge. It changes the molecular make-up of the milk, and prevents it from separating in the jug. Your habit of shaking the jug before you pour has been passed on from before the days of homogenization. Most raw milk is not homogenized.