At the beginning and end of each day, cows line up in a Sequim milking barn. They're about to give what advocates call "nature's perfect food."
Except, that food comes with a warning that Jeff Brown calls a badge of honor.
"Anything God's designed I like better than what man adulterates," Brown said.
Brown's interest in raw, unpasteurized milk started with a friend who had cancer and claimed it reduced nausea. He didn't have a license to sell it at Dungeness Valley Creamery, so he gave it for free.
Soon after, Brown learned that demand for raw milk offered a niche market.
"Raw milk was what everybody wanted," he said.
Dungeness Valley Creamery has set a sales record every year for 9 years. It costs $6.75 a gallon, double the price of most pasteurized milk.
Consumers are willing to pay for it, convinced of its health value because it hasn't been processed, despite a label required by the Department of Agriculture that reads:
"WARNING: This product has not been pasteurized and may contain harmful bacteria. Pregnant women, children, the elderly and persons with lowered resistance to disease have the highest risk of harm from use of this product."
"It's a slap in the face," Brown said. "We're on the same level as the cigarette."
It's not a bad analogy if you ask foodborne illness attorney Bill Marler. He blames pathogen infections from drinking raw milk for leaving his clients paralyzed, causing strokes and other physical ailments with hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical expenses.
Bill Marler tells stories of his clients on http://www.realrawmilkfacts.com, a website he developed with researchers at the University of California.
Since 2005, he's worked on several raw milk illness cases every year across the country. Many of Marler's clients are children.
"That kid didn't get to choose whether they'd drink raw milk," Marler said.
CDC research shows an increase in outbreaks associated with raw milk nationwide, in large part because of increased consumption. There were 30 outbreaks between 2007-2009 compared to 51 from 2010-2012.
In total, Washington reports 6 illness outbreaks that sickened 49 people from 2005 to the date of this report.
Dungeness Valley Creamery has been cited for E. coli, most recently in 2013 for its raw cream, though no illnesses were reported.
"Raw milk is an inherently risky product, period," Marler said.
The risk exists for the same reason consumers are thirsty for it: it's raw and unchanged from the cow to the bottle.
Though the CDC website reads: "There are no health benefits from drinking raw milk that cannot be obtained from drinking pasteurized milk," advocates of raw milk disagree, pointing to a month-long shelf life or longer for many pasteurized dairy products.
Most raw products need to be consumed within a week.
A national campaign for raw milk is being waged by supporters of the Weston A. Price Foundation, which developed the website RealMilk.com. The site promotes enzymes, vitamins, beneficial bacteria and proteins they claim don't survive most forms of industrial dairy pasteurization, especially ultra-pasteurization and homogenization.
"It's just not the same," Jill Smith said. "It changes the milk. Milk is a live product that continues to culture and change."
Smith and her husband, Richard, own Pure Eire, a dairy farm in Othello. They began with only a few cows and now milk 200 every day.
Jay Hardman is one of their regular customers.
"We depend on raw milk," Hardman said. "We pay double or more for the price because we know it's good for our kids."
Hardman's family drinks 12 gallons of raw milk each week.
Like Dungeness Valley Creamery, the cows at Pure Eire are grass fed, eating hay in barns now because it's winter. Iodine is used to clean their teats before milking. It's milk produced to be raw, they say, not like industrial dairies with far different farming practices, like cows that do not graze on pasture.
"Milk has to be researched," Smith said. "We don't think about that."
A decade ago, only a few raw dairies existed in Washington. Now, there are 35 licensed raw dairies across the state. The Department of Agriculture inspects them monthly and tests for harmful bacteria. Dungeness Valley Creamery and Pure Eire test their cows for a range of disease every year, from TB to Q fever.
Pure Eire has considered moving away from raw milk because of a concern about lawsuits, but the demand for their raw product is so strong, they continue to sell it to the customers who want it.
"Raw milk drinkers come to us," said Smith's husband, Richard. "We never seek them out. Ever."
Pure Eire offers a lower temperature pasteurization to protect the milk's makeup but avoid lawsuits. It's heated to 145 degrees for 30 minutes. In contrast, ultra-pasteurized milk is heated to 161 degrees for about 15 seconds.
Jill and Richard Smith believe their dairy is safe, but also worry raw milk is blamed for outbreaks that may originate elsewhere, though researchers say the bacteria has a genetic footprint that's easy to trace.
"Raw milk advocates believe so fervently that the raw milk is somehow magical that it can't be the raw milk," Marler said. "Well, in fact, it is the raw milk."
Twenty states prohibit the sale of raw milk for human consumption. It's banned from interstate commerce and cannot be sold over state lines.
"Is it going to be the vegetables in my garden? I can't eat those next?" Hardman said. "You should have the choice to choose what you eat."
Raw milk drinkers like Hardman feel more like food freedom fighters, pointing to other potentially contaminated products like peanut butter or spinach which carry no bacteria warning label at all.
"I think it's ridiculous, Brown said. "I have for a long time."
Dungeness Valley Creamery now sells more than 300 gallons of raw milk every day. They've often sold out in the last 2 years and can't accept new retail accounts because of limited supply.
Even though that supply comes with a warning, or a badge of honor, if you see the glass as half full.
