Aaron Hartman, MD argues raw milk's safety depends on how cows are raised and treated. He points to pasture diets, the cow's gut microbiota, and removing sick animals from milking as key factors. He recommends meeting your farmer and inspecting their operation.
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Is raw milk going to kill us or is it going to make us healthier? It actually all comes down to how the cow is taken care of. And ultimately this is an issue of the relationship between the cow and the farmer. Cows are allowed to go around. You see grass back here, we have our cows over there and eat fresh fescue, or taking very hard to digest grass, which if you ate or your cat or your dog ate would throw up. They take this and ferment it and make short chain fatty acids, protein, a bunch of really cool things out of it. So when you have raw milk, you gotta make sure one, is your farmer having access for their cows to clean fescue? The second thing is, are they giving the cows antibiotics? Antibiotics will actually mess up the bacteria make up in the cow's gut. Sometimes cows do get sick. If that happens, do they actually pull the cow out of the rotation for milk and either dump that milk or do something else with it? With our raw milk that we drink, we actually have met our farmers, we've actually been to the farm, we've actually checked it out. So the trick with raw milk is actually doing your own due diligence.