RAW MILK, RAW DEAL? ‘IT’S JUST TOTAL HYPOCRISY’
The cattle have all disappeared, all 11 hoofing it into nearby woods — the Jerseys named Jade, Emilie, Isabelle and Jennifer, Beverly and Apple, and various heifer hangers-on — spooked by the sound of loudly crunching snow.
How now, brown cows, with your dark eyes and terrible timing?
“They’ll be back,” says farmer Michael Ilgert, 54, standing in the barnyard on a beautiful sunny day at his rolling 50-acre farm deep in Renfrew County. “They know where the water is.”
But here’s what won’t return: Ilgert’s raw milk operation, which he shut down this month after pleading guilty to three provincial offences and agreeing to $1,500 in fines.
“The whole issue around raw milk in Canada screams hypocrisy,” he says, now on a stool in the kitchen. “That qualifies everything I’ve gone through. It’s just total hypocrisy from beginning to end.”
It is legal to drink raw milk in Ontario — and surveys say about 80 per cent of dairy farmers do. But it is illegal to sell or distribute it, which is exactly what he was doing for about 60 customers, including a number in the Ottawa area.
Defence lawyer Doug Baum, who has helped the dairyman’s legal fight, drew attention to the double standard.
“The province says you can’t drink raw milk because it’s unpasteurized and dangerous. However, if you’re a farm family, you can drink it. Go knock yourself out. And if I drive up to Mike’s place, he can serve me all the raw milk I want.
“But he can’t put it in a bottle, drive it to Ottawa and hand it to someone.”
Adds Ilgert, a tradesman who jokingly refers to himself as “drywaller to the stars” for his roster of high-profile customers: “I’m doing nothing wrong. I’m giving healthy food to people who ask me for it.”
And there the disagreement sharpens. Public health authorities, with all the science behind them, say dairy milk must be pasteurized, a rapid heating process that destroys harmful pathogens such as E. coli, campylobacter, salmonella and listeria, microbes that can cause serious illness.
Thus, by law, all the milk massretailed in Ontario and across North America has been pasteurized for decades.
Yet Ilgert and others say consumers should be permitted the choice, making their own decisions about the health risks and benefits involved in drinking unprocessed milk, as they do in dozens of American states.
Customer Jean Simon Bédard, 25, a software developer, drank Ilgert’s raw milk for about two years to cope with ulcerative colitis. He said the terrible side effects of pasteurized milk — “like dumping a sandbag in my arteries” — stopped immediately and described the raw version as “tastier.”
“I wish we would put more resources into figuring out what the deal is with raw milk. I know I’m not the only one who has no (allergic) reaction to it.”
Ilgert started small in 2010. A farm kid, he grew up drinking raw milk and started to produce enough for himself and sharing the excess from a single cow with friends and neighbours. Then word spread.
Before long, he was listed on a U.S. real milk website and calls started coming in from Ottawa. At his peak, he was producing about 300 litres a week from five or six cows.
The milk came straight from the animal, was filtered through a cloth, then poured into onelitre jars that were refrigerated. He would make regular runs to drop-off points in Ottawa, selling the milk for about $3 a litre.
His customers fell into three categories, he said: those allergic to pasteurized milk, immigrants accustomed to raw milk in their homelands, and “foodies” who are keen on organic, locallyproduced foods that don’t come from a factory.
Raw milk has had a lively legal history in Ontario over the past 25 years, largely focused on Michael Schmidt, the southern Ontario farmer who has had many court battles over pasteurization.
Ilgert has taken workshops at the Schmidt farm and both were using a novel approach to get around provincial laws by exploiting an apparent loophole. They sold shares in the cows, thus making customers partowners of the animals and a kind of long-distance farmer engaged in a co-op.
Ilgert operated on that basis, selling shares, even hosting his own website. It caught the attention of the Renfrew County health unit, which eventually sent inspectors over to have a look. Some raw milk was bought “under cover” and the farmer was slapped with five charges in 2017.
He was fighting those charges when, in January, a ruling from Ontario Superior Court Justice Phillip Sutherland in Newmarket threw out the “cow-share” defence as a way to legally distribute raw milk.
Ilgert was worried he was risking jail time, raids or seizures from health unit inspectors. So he stopped production and settled an outstanding case by pleading guilty to three charges.
So now the cows have gone dry and Ilgert is working on Plan B, which is to lobby for a change in the Health Protection and Promotion Act.
He’s already been in touch with policy advisers to Attorney General Yasir Naqvi.
There is no guarantee, he points out, that mass produced food is safer. He says more people have died from contaminated romaine lettuce than from raw milk in the past 45 years.
“Why are we being targeted?”