I’m sitting in the back lot of a small mom n pop u-store it in Northern Kentucky waiting for the drop. A few other cars, SUV’s, Cadillacs, hybrids, driven by former yuppies (what do you call them when they get old?), mostly Ohio plates, are slowly filtering in. We’re all waiting for our dealer, or in this case our farmer, since we are all technically part owners of the operation. We’re not here to buy pot though. We’re here to buy milk! Yes, raw, unpasteurized, un-homogenized, fresh milk, straight from the cows, our cows.

Somehow in our modern times, someone has decided that good, fresh, as nature intended milk is contraband, illegal to sell. Yes, big brother is protecting us from ourselves and the farmers who might actually consider selling this product to an unsuspecting, naive public.

The only way to get raw milk is to buy a cow or at least a share in a cow, pay boarding and delivery fees and then pick up your product at the drop. Feels like being a kid in the 70’s again. “i’m waitin’ for my man, twenty six dollars in my hand”

It’s amazing that you can go to the store and buy milk from cows that are fed crap, pumped with hormones to make them produce more, given antibiotics to keep them from dying as a result of their abysmal treatment, resulting in milk that needs to be pasteurized just to make it safe to drink, and yet it’s a criminal act for a farmer to free range his closed herd, keep them healthy enough to not need antibiotics to survive, and then sell his superior product to the public.

Our farmer will not deliver to Ohio because the last time he did, he was stopped by the police, kept apart from his patrons and harassed to the point that an ambulance was called because he was on the ground in clear physical distress. The emergency room people couldn’t believe he survived the blood pressure that they measured on his arrival. This despite the fact that all of the people there to pick up milk were part of a perfectly legal cooperative specifically designed to allow them access to fresh raw milk from cows that they owned.

I’m just happy that there are still people out there willing to stand up and do things properly, people that are happy to make a living instead of a killing. My hat’s off to all of you.