161. Mark Mcafee, Raw Farm – Raw Milk Revolution: Debunking Controversies & Discovery Benefits

Leigh Ann: [00:00:00] Hello, welcome back to the Accrescent Podcast. I’m your host Leigh Ann. Oh my gosh, you guys, I am absolutely flying after the start of my PhD program this last week. There are so many things I want to share already. I might need to do a solo episode or maybe an episode with Kelly to be able to just talk about how aligned this feels for me and so many deep things.

It was, it really was like such a A momentous momentous time in my life that I think I’m going to be referencing back to a lot the start of this program With that one other update I wanted to share though is I postponed the start of the book club Because I wanted to give people more time to get set up to get the book to join.

I I tend to move pretty fast with these things, and I know that I just need to be more honoring of people’s time, timetables, their commitments. So, the [00:01:00] first book club gathering is going to be Wednesday, October 9th. Let me just triple check that. Yes, Wednesday, October 9th. You do not need to read the book in advance.

We’re reading the book, The Big Leap. We are gonna be reading through it together, a chapter a week, and then meeting, discussing our biggest highlights, our biggest takeaways, so it’s not too late to join. What I, you know, why am I doing this? What made me want to start a book club? First of all, I love getting to sit down and discuss books and powerful information and the epiphanies I’m having and hearing the epiphanies other people are having and just being able to learn and integrate together.

But I also really wanted to, I’m wanting to create more and more ways to interact with clients and individuals. For a number of reasons. One, I know that not everyone out there will be able to work with me one on one. And [00:02:00] so this is a way that someone can still, in a sense, work with me, but not, you know, one on one with a much, much lower price tag and still be able to, I think, get so much out of it.

But also, I have many, many clients who we work together one on one for a time, and then They don’t necessarily need that one on one work anymore, but they still want to stay in the world of The Accrescent. And so this is also an attempt at creating a space where even if clients aren’t working with me one on one anymore, you can still be a part of this world, this community, this mission of continuing to grow in all these different ways.

So again, the book club will be starting Wednesday, October 9th. I’ll put the link down below in the show notes to join. I’m so, so excited to be doing this. I cannot wait to connect with each of you there together. So with that, bringing it to [00:03:00] today’s conversation, this was such a fun surprise. You know, we reached out.

I did not expect them to get back and say yes, because they’re pretty big. But today we have on the CEO and founder of Raw Farm and You know those of you who are in the more holistic alternative health world raw milk is such a big thing I drink raw milk literally every single day multiple times a day I share in this conversation that raw farm is one of my favorite brands.

I drink their milk. I eat their raw butter I buy their raw cheese so many different things but we really get into the history of You and why we stopped selling raw milk. We talk a lot about how modern society. Has kind of demonized raw milk and so he helps us debunk some of those myths that raw milk is unsafe And we get actually a lot into the [00:04:00] history of what happened and where all this started to come from But then we talk about the amazing benefits of raw milk how it’s just so much more Bioavailable the amount of nutrients in it Why raw milk can be so good for allergies, eczema, so many different things.

This was really such a wealth of knowledge. But to give you a quick background today, we have on Mark McAfee, the CEO and founder of Raw Farm, the largest raw dairy brand in the world. Selling raw dairy products in more than 1, 500 stores nationally with raw milk, cream, butter, kefir, and raw cheeses.

They’re members of the International Milk Genomics Consortium at UC Davis and they’ve spent 16 years as a certified EMS paramedic in Fresno County. Taught paramedic medicine, he was a pilot for flying doctors, has spoken as an expert on raw milk subject matter at more than 20 universities in the [00:05:00] USA.

Canada and Australia and has been interviewed by countless media outlets. He says his favorite job is Being husband to wife Blaine of 43 years and grandpa to six awesome grandkids. I have to say Mark’s enthusiasm passion, but also knowledge, you know, scientific knowledge on this topic really came through in our conversation.

And I found myself being so lit up by his enthusiasm, his passion, his energy, and I think you guys will find the same as well. So please enjoy this conversation with

So with the change in seasons, I do make some slight changes to my skincare routine that I thought would be fun to share with you guys here. So, typically during the summer months, even spring, I just use the Herbal Face Food Serum 2. You guys know Herbal Face Food is a mainstay. It’s like my holy grail [00:06:00] skincare product.

Um, and I use this all year round. But typically during the summer, Spring, summer, the warmer months, this is all I’m using morning and night. But as we start to get into colder months, my skin can get a little bit drier. I need a little bit more exfoliation. And so there’s two products that I add into my routine in these colder months.

The first is Facial in a Bottle Night Treatment by Facial Lounge. This is a local brand here to Orange County. Her Facial in a Bottle Night Treatment, what I love about it specifically is it has all of these gentle enzymes enzymes that Help exfoliate the skin while you’re sleeping. So I love to use this during the winter months because it’s that gentle non abrasive exfoliation that With the drier skin helps just clear those dead layers of skin out every single night, but very very gently So it’s not too harsh on the skin and I have super super sensitive skin And then the second product that I add [00:07:00] into my routine during these months is the honeybee hippie tallow butter specifically her honey hydrate version So the way I use these three products is in the morning.

I’ll use the herbal face food serum, too That’s my daytime serum and then at night, you know, you cleanse your face I put on the facial in a bottle night treatment by facial lounge and then I top that with the honeybee hippie Honey hydrate tallow. So check the show notes There will be links to all three of these specific products down below as well as any discount codes Well, Mark, welcome to the Accrescent podcast.

We were talking off air a little bit. We’re both out here in California, but I’m so excited. I, I just need to say it right off the bat. I’m, I drink your milk every day. I have proselytized so many of my friends and family. So it’s really exciting for me to get to chat to, you know, with someone from Raw Farm and just [00:08:00] understand so much more of the behind the scenes and some of the just really interesting tidbits about raw milk, the history, all these different things, but welcome.

Mark Mcafee: Thank you. And I am incredibly privileged to be with you. I always appreciate an influencer who has deep interest in knowing more because behind you are uncounted number of people that will rely on your words. And I I’m a big educator. I spent a lot of time at UC Davis at the international mouth genomics consortium, but doing this for 25 years, I have a pre med background.

It was a paramedic for 17 years. My wife’s a nurse. So where food meets medicine is really my happy place because in all the 13 children a day that die from asthma in America today, That’s considered normal. Some of those kids were in the back of my ambulance and I was doing CPR and intubating, giving me epinephrine and stuff.

So I have a deep emotional commitment to what we’re doing because raw milk makes asthma gets better. So I’m big into the [00:09:00] study. I’m kind of a nerd on all the science and PubMed, so I can’t wait to share.

Leigh Ann: Oh, good. I’m so glad because we’re going to go, I want to go deep into all of that. We’ve got a really educated audience, um, very holistic minded audience too.

So I think it’s going to be really, really fantastic. With that said, I love an origin story. I don’t imagine you came out into the world thinking I’m going to be a raw farm CEO one day. And you even gave us a little bit of the history. So what, what was that introduction? What kind of led you to where you’re at today?

Mark Mcafee: Well, you start, I was born in 1961 and. My father was an unusual guy. He, um, wanted to see the news for himself. He didn’t trust media, didn’t trust government. He was very much an anti Vietnam activist. Um, and if you go down, you know, we won’t get into it deeply, but my dad drug me around with him wherever he went.

And we saw some stuff that nobody needs to see. [00:10:00] And I, I was really kind of, fear to me is different than most people. I, as a paramedic. I mean, multi casualty instances, you car racks. I mean, I used to make order out of that. Um, so I don’t fear what normal people fear. I have a comfort zone, which is a little different.

I’m a pilot. Um, so from that origin of my life, my first job out of high school, uh, was a welder in a mine. Oh,

Leigh Ann: wow. Okay.

Mark Mcafee: Yeah. Up in the Sierra Nevadas here, Teledyne Tungsten mine. I worked up there for eight months and thrived, did great, repaired things, worked as a 18, 19 year old guy doing all kinds of stuff.

And I saw a guy almost get killed with a timber hitting him in the head and the helicopter flew in. And the rotor wash and the paramedic and the nurse that jumped out. I just couldn’t get enough of that. It was so exciting to me. Right? So I said, I want to go be that I want to become that paramedic. And so I went off and got my premed.

I became an 81 82 paramedic. [00:11:00] I was a valedictorian in my paramedic class. I loved it. And for 16 years I taught, I taught paramedic medicine for the health department. I enjoyed, um, deep pre-med stuff at university and, uh, taught a CLS and all kinds of stuff. So that’s what I, but in 1996, my grandparents passed away and there was a thousand acres of family farm.

It was available to farm and I was kind of done with fire shifts and, uh, you know, dead people. It’s like, I can change this. I’ve done my chapter. So we took over the family farming operations, but did it very deliberately. I was not going to be a commodity market serving the processor guy. I want it to be completely differentiated.

Completely vertically integrated, and I wanted to connect to people as a customer, not a processor. And so I focused for a couple of years really intensively on understanding who my customer was and what products they wanted. And just by happenstance, in [00:12:00] May of 1999, Altadena, which was a huge raw milk producer in Los Angeles, went out of business.

Oh, wow. And when that happened, um, it refocused everything to me, because here we had people calling us saying, We want your milk, because I had a small dairy, I was doing organic dairy, um, And we want it raw. And I listened and probably the most impressive thing that happened to me to kind of begin the whole story today, Leanne, was my wife and I got a call from a guy named James Stewart in Venice beach, California at a place called the garage.

Leigh Ann: Okay. I know it.

Mark Mcafee: Here we go. Right. And so he said, Mark, there’s no raw milk in LA and we need it. We need it badly. And here I am with ice chest, the back of our suburban. In 1999, 2000, driving down to Los Angeles, my wife and I go down there for our drive. We drive in to this place called the garage in the back streets of Venice beach.

And as [00:13:00] we arrive, I don’t know if it was 50 people or 150 people. The place was packed with people and there were movie stars and all kinds of people and moms and dads and kids and everybody’s celebrating jumping up and down that we’d arrived with rum up. And as we arrived, people started taking the milk out of the back of our car.

And putting 10 and 20 bills in the car saying, come back tomorrow. You’re all out of raw milk. We brought down like a hundred half gallons, 150 half gallons, something like that, you know, we are buried in money in the car and people are just saying all these celebrations things to us. And this lady comes up to my wife and says, I have to have raw milk.

My child has this neurological problem and the raw fats really help her. And since she’s not had raw milk for a few months, she’s had more seizures than ever, and she needs raw milk. And my wife being the nurse that she was, she said she took back some raw milk that we had given, or they’d been bought from some other people, took back and gave them back their money and gave this milk to this woman for free.[00:14:00]

And, and, and heard her story. And being the compassionate humanitarian kind of people that we are, we listened and absorbed to this and we got back in our car. And as we drove away, we just said, what the heck just happened? You know, what just happened with this group of people that all had passionate stories about their need for raw milk.

And so we came home and immediately within the next 60 days or so, got a permit to produce raw milk, state of California, it’s always been legal and built a small creamery. And we partnered with James Stewart and built a million dollar market the first year delivering to stores in the Los Angeles areas with James Stewart as our partner.

And now we’re literally 30 times bigger than that with 550 stores with over a thousand stores nationally, uh, with 28 delivery trucks that we manage ourselves and, um, our own creamery, our own two dairies now, and 85 with 90 employees. Our own on farm pathogen lab. So [00:15:00] it was guidance by people and hearing their stories of healing that guided me where we are today.

Leigh Ann: Yeah, gosh, it’s fun to reflect on some of those origins and to think back to, Oh my gosh, we were literally bringing milk in ice chests to where we are today in, in all of these stores and all of the amazing products you’ve, you’ve You know, it seems expanded into, you know, I buy everything you guys make your raw butter, your raw cheese, all the things with that said though, I think something that is interesting to start with is a lot of people might not realize it all used to be raw.

And I know that almost sounds so obvious, but I think to actually many of us, it might not be because. So many of us may have grown up in a time where we never saw raw milk. It’s always been whatever it’s been, the pasteurized stuff in the bottle at the store. So can we spend some [00:16:00] time on the history here?

Mark Mcafee: Well, for about 12 to 15, 000 years, Pick your number. Um, mankind is consuming raw milk from cows, goats, sheep, horses, reindeer, camels, all around the world. And the Maasai in Kenya, uh, they don’t have a lactase persistence gene, but they drink raw milk like crazy directly from their cows, and neither do the Mongolians in outer Manchuria in China.

They don’t have a lactase persistence gene. No problem at all drinking raw milk from their cows. So raw milk has been universally accepted by the physiology of the human being, uh, as a mammalian co partner, right? As a domesticated partner in food for a long, long time, 10, 50, 000 years. So there was a dark period.

In 1880s, 90s, 18, that’s 130 years ago now, where people were taking their cows into town with them. [00:17:00]

Leigh Ann: There were more

Mark Mcafee: civilizations occurring, big towns being built because everybody, you know, 150, 200 years ago, everybody was living next to a farm or on a farm, green grass, sunshine, clean water, streams running.

And those environments, cows are doing great, but if you take the cow into the city with you, and you start feeding her things that she would never eat, like brewer’s distiller’s grains, and you had tuberculosis, typhoid, everything you’d imagine is disgusting conditions, no sunshine, no clean water, no flushing toilets, and you started seeing 45 percent of people that drank that milk would die.

It was disgusting.

Leigh Ann: So,

Mark Mcafee: it was all about the conditions of the cows, what was going on, were the cows being milked, what they ate, everything about the cows that had to do with the conditions that caused the dark period called the milk problem, it was actually called the milk problem. And a very seminal thing happened in the end, which is really important to understand how we got to where we are today.

In [00:18:00] 1893, two major principal voices started speaking about this. Dr. Henry Coit and Dr. Nathan Strauss. Nathan Strauss said, Let’s just cook the heck out of it with a parboiler, which is an early form of pasteurization. And they did. They took that filthy milk from the 1890s and they cooked the living heck out of it.

And fewer people died. They still had problems because of water quality. But the bottom line was a lot of people were, a lot fewer people died. So it was basically an excuse, a technical excuse, a technical way to get rid of the problem with the filth that they had. And the quote that Dr. Bruce German has at UC Davis and the International Genomics Consortium is, pasteurization is an 18th century solution to an 18th century problem.

We can do a whole lot better. Okay, that’s Nathan Strauss, pasteurization 1893, filthy conditions, excusing all that with heat. Now, let’s talk about Dr. Henry Coit, physician, [00:19:00] pediatrician, lost a child from consumption of some bad milk. But he knew the virtues of raw milk being so fantastic to heal with, now we know, And we’ll talk about this later.

The bioactives found raw milk that he decided he was going to form something called the A. A. M. M. C. The American Association of Medical Milk Commissions or certified raw milk. So we established these boards of physicians that would go around and certify dairies all over the country. In fact, they were all over the world.

And that milk was going to the male clinic to heal people, but it was coming from cows and pastures, sunshine, green, green pastures, sunshine, clean water, uh, sanitary conditions where the cows are being milked and chilling. The cow’s milk was being chilled by natural stream water and other ways of chilling the milk.

That milk was going to the Mayo Clinic to heal people. It was found at the White House. It was on the Titanic. It was, it was the [00:20:00] favorite, delicious, fantastic milk, but it was hard to get. It wasn’t cheap. The last certified raw milk dairy in the world was Altadena in Los Angeles in May of 1999.

Leigh Ann: Wow. Wow.

Mark Mcafee: This lasted about 106 years. But remember in the 1940s and 50s, We were fixing social problems with nuclear bombs and DDT was good for your skin, smoking was good for asthma, right? That was 1940s, 1950s. We were so detached from Mother Nature and blueprints of life it wasn’t even funny.

Leigh Ann: And

Mark Mcafee: antibiotics was curing everything because antibiotics were new and fresh and d and Bacteria died quickly from antibiotics.

Now we have antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Leigh Ann: I wanted to quickly share a personal experience that might resonate with some of you. About a year ago, I had started experiencing daily headaches, persistent brain fog, that was overwhelming and frankly debilitating to the point where I remember thinking to myself [00:21:00] one day, if I could just have five minutes, without pain, I would be so thrilled.

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Mark Mcafee: well fast forward to covid 2020 And people were told by doctors, we can’t help you stay home. Good luck.

If you’re immunocompromised, it’s a rough time. We don’t have a vaccination for you. Try some vitamin D, you know, whatever people started Googling. What is the immune system? And the immune system is 80 percent made up of the [00:23:00] gut microbiome and the microbiota in your gut. The biodiversity of bacteria, the food that beats that bacteria and the intestinal structures, the mucosal lining and so on and so forth.

So, when you look at that, people start to be aware that raw milk is a powerful gut microbiome building food because it’s the first food of life. Think about it. Baby’s born, mother’s, the baby suckles on mother’s breast, that’s raw milk. And what all these fantastic things that happen sequentially occur as a result of breastfeeding, which is raw milk, which has all these bioactives in it, which are incredibly, and I will add, this is from a study.

Done by the National Dairy Council, the processing guys. Post COVID.

Leigh Ann: Oh wow.

Mark Mcafee: They talk about, this is very, very revealing that they are very interested post COVID because consumers recognize the [00:24:00] bioactives found in unprocessed milk as being very, very strong for the immune system. And the processors want to go into raw milk, take out these bioactives and make a new pill, potion, or food they can patent.

Leigh Ann: Of course.

Mark Mcafee: This is fantastic. This just makes me chuckle. This is just powerful stuff. Well, these bioactives are destroyed by pasteurization.

Leigh Ann: And

Mark Mcafee: so they recognize that when you make a pasteurized dairy product, you no longer have these bioactives available. These bioactives include things like lactoalbumin, which is a special sugar protein, immunoglobulins, lactoferrin, growth factors, a fat globulin membrane, Uh, a leg of saccharides, a raw whey proteins, lactoferrin, alkaline phosphatase.

All these things are destroyed in pasteurization, but have the following effects. Now everybody that’s listening, listen to these effects. This is not Mark McAfee talking. This is the processing industry saying they want to take these things out to make a new patented product. [00:25:00] Brace yourself. Here they are.

Antihypertensive effects.

Leigh Ann: Oh wow.

Mark Mcafee: Anti tumor effects, anti inflammatory effects, anti microbial effects, anti viral effects. Think COVID, think flu, think viruses, think colds. Anti carcinogenic effects. Wow. Immunoregulatory effects. Probiotic, prebiotic, and postbiotic effects. remineralization, modulation of the digestive process metabolism.

It also includes MRNA, interesting protein, genetic packages of information. And stem cells.

Leigh Ann: I mean, I’m sorry. Talk about like, that’s like 50 supplement products in one right there.

Mark Mcafee: This came from Cornell university, foremost [00:26:00] researchers in the world on dairy products, Dr. Lynn and his whole crew funded by the national dairy council.

So that’s not revealing. Nothing is. There’s huge studies done in Europe about the children that drink raw milk, their asthma goes away, their colds, fewer colds, fewer flu, fewer fevers, fewer ear infections. And that’s a whole other compliment of studies. And by the way, all of this is on PubMed. PubMed is the literature archive for literally the National Institutes of Health and Medicine that has undergone the peer review process to have the rigors of science applied to it.

so you can use it as a physician to make recommendations to people for health. This is PubMed.

Leigh Ann: Yeah. So

Mark Mcafee: this is the truth. It’s not from this

Leigh Ann: 40 years ago. Yeah.

Mark Mcafee: 2021, two and a half years ago. Yeah. And when the FDA says there’s no difference between raw milk and pasteurized milk in nutrients, I say, okay, what’s the word nutrient [00:27:00] mean to you?

Leigh Ann: Mm-Hmm. .

Mark Mcafee: Because in this study they said that bioactives go far beyond nutrients.

Leigh Ann: Yes. Well, right, because it’s. It’s how it’s utilized and when it doesn’t have those bioactive components, um, we can’t use it in the same way. Our body can’t use it in the same way.

Mark Mcafee: It’s not only that in the end, bioactivity has to do with bioavailability.

Bioavailability is like, okay, you may have taken a particular pill or supplement or, uh, vitamin, but how biologically available is it? And it was being absorbed, utilized and going into the biomechanics of your body. Well, this goes beyond that discussion. This goes into three things raw milk does. It nourishes completely.

Babies don’t get anything other than breast milk. That’s it. They don’t get water. Okay? Nurses completely directs there’s genetic information, mRNA and other things that direct the cell functions and what to do, [00:28:00] that genetic bandwidth of the bacteria found there actually share genomically at the cellular level.

And it also protects so nourishes. directs and protects the three things that breast milk does raw milk does as well. Breastfeeding does it very, very well. Raw milk does it pretty well, because obviously it’s not coming from your mother. It’s not the exact link, but it’s very, very close. It has been for 15, 000 years.

Leigh Ann: So when you

Mark Mcafee: think about those three things, and bioactives being a very important part of that, a great example of a bioactive is raw whey protein. Raw whey protein stabilized mast cells, M A S T, mast cells, which keep histamines being released, which inhibits cytokine storms, which is the whole allergy response, the inflammation response.

It inhibits that. It allows you to have inflammation as needed and then goes back down to a baseline of non inflammation. So you’re always in reserve for inflammation, but it keeps information in check. So that’s just one of the bioactives. There’s many others, alkaline phosphatase, which is very anti [00:29:00] inflammatory as well.

So you just go on and on and on. This study is 43 pages long. It has 192 sightings. So when the FDA says there’s no benefit or difference to raw milk, I’m sorry, not correct.

Leigh Ann: Right, right. And your sources are?

Mark Mcafee: That is not correct. It’s highly misleading and incorrect. And I won’t use the word lie or the word.

It’s that when you are sent to the FDA to work for industry and protect them, you do things for your paycheck you wouldn’t normally do morally or ethically. So the bottom line is as a farmer, I report to our consumers and I go to the science and say, what does it actually say? What do the lactation experts actually say?

What is it that builds an immune system in a child, in a person? And you look at the truth. Let me tell you what the truth sells better than anything else. It’s the truth.

Leigh Ann: Well, yeah, and you just think about why, why would it be so [00:30:00] nutrient dense? This makes so much sense ancestrally, evolutionarily, because it’s basically these new things are coming into the earth, these new babies, whether they’re cows, deer, sheep, goats, or humans.

And biologically, we want to set that newborn up Yes. to be as successful as possible, to grow. into this adult body it needs to grow into to be prepared against some of the pathogens it’s going to face. And so it makes so much sense.

Mark Mcafee: Uh, raw milk, I think the quote is, is the food of the ages. It’s survived the generational pressures of generation by generation pressures to be the optimum or you died.

That’s what evolution is. It’s very dark. It’s like you’re good or you’re dead. So breast milk is that 100, 000 years or longer of evolutionary pressure from generation to generation for the optimal survival of the survival of the next generation to have that next generation [00:31:00] thrive. Just like you said, that’s what it is.

Blueprints of life are. The definition of it, incredibly infinite. You think about all the interactions and what we’re talking about in milk, it’s a living embodiment of its own entity. Uh, you know, it’s really powerful in terms of all the things it does for the next generation. Well, when you get to the troubled place we’re in as a society, we’ve completely dissociated ourselves with these foundational foods.

And we got ourselves in a lot of trouble now with all kinds of antibiotic resistance. We have ourselves Crohn’s disease, 130, 000 ileostomies a year, and that’s normal. 13 children a day dying from asthma. And it goes on and on and on and on. MRSA, uh, 20, 000 deaths a year, uh, C. Diff killing people in ICU is left at night.

You’ve lost the gut microbiome.

Leigh Ann: Yeah.

Mark Mcafee: And so getting back to those roots, those blueprints of life are literally 911 saving. 9 1

Leigh Ann: 1

Mark Mcafee: life saving [00:32:00] and where we are, you start consuming raw milk, you start seeing all these non inflammatory responses, you see better allergies, you see resistance to the viruses for the next one coming, not just last year’s, which was a vaccination that only took care of 25 percent of last year’s problem.

We’re talking about resilience and adaptivity to future threats. You start saying, wow. And then the first thing people say about raw milk is, Oh my God, it’s delicious. Right?

Leigh Ann: Oh yeah. I mean, there’s nothing, even just organic whole milk. You’re like, look, it’s, it’s fine. But raw milk, there’s just nothing like it.

Mark Mcafee: Correct. So it leads with taste, but then it follows with digestibility, lactose intolerance, maldigestion, and allergenicity. Okay. And then you start seeing other things start to happen. Like your skin starts to clear up, your kids don’t get sick when other kids get sick, or if they do get sick, it’s really short duration to get over quickly, all these wonderful things start to happen.

And that literally defines a responsive, [00:33:00] adaptive. Resilient immune system and that’s all you got. That’s your gut

Leigh Ann: and there’s so many. I do want to in a bit get to some more of those benefits that I think will really interest people. The lactose intolerance, some of the asthma stuff, but I do want to take a second to sit with this piece of.

It seems like a no brainer. Why would we not all be drinking raw milk? And yet, I think a lot of people have a fear of it. And so I want to sit with this of where does that come from? What is some of the common conventional narratives around raw milk? And then how can we maybe expand those beliefs to be more accurate of why we don’t need to be afraid of this?

Mark Mcafee: Well, let me start off with a cute little story, which really resounds with most people. We have a lot of fear in this country, a tremendous amount of fear that directs us in the decisions we make. And raw milk has a very dark history back in the 1890s when you tell half of the story and don’t tell the other half of the story, [00:34:00] because that got killed off in the 1940s and 50s to commercialize industrialized milk through processing.

Well, let’s talk about a little story I have, which is totally cute, but I’m standing at a farmer’s market table in down in LA and Santa Monica, and we’re sitting at the table, they’re selling our own milk and mostly teaching it. We don’t sell much of it ever. We just teach it and whoever wants it gets it.

But here comes this mom with a hard Ukrainian accent and she’s five foot nine, beautiful, straight teeth, shiny hair, not overweight and great shape. Uh, her kids are beautiful, not running around with ADHD and, you know, crazy, crazy, but being very attentive and disciplined standing right next to her. And she says to me, I love your raw milk.

Can I have 10 gallons? Like I had back home.

Leigh Ann: Oh, wow.

Mark Mcafee: And you can tell she’s statuesque. She’s healthy. She’s in great shape. [00:35:00] Okay. She takes her raw milk and I thank her profusely. And she says she’ll be at back next week. The next mom overhears this conversation of this young Ukrainian mom with hard Russian accent.

And she says, Oh, I could never drink that milk. It’s just, it’s, it’s, it doesn’t have pathogens. And, and she’s overweight, diabetic teeth falling out of her head. Her kids are running around with ADHD, like crazy, crazy. And you really have a picture in your mind, you can’t forget. And in my mind, I’m thinking, why don’t you run real fast to catch up with that Ukrainian mom and talk about nutrition and talk about health and talk about where you are versus where she’s at.

Because she’s not fearful at all. But the mom that’s got diabetes and 275 pounds is highly fearful. And she’s living on a diet, Pepsi diet with, uh, you know, every kind of preservative in her food that destroys her gut and, uh, all the other things that are happening in her life using the [00:36:00] American standard American diet, the sad diet, which is highly preserved, uh, you know, food that’s highly processed.

Doesn’t feed the gut microbiome at all. In fact, it kills it off. So you’ve got these polarities, two stories right in front of you, and that really drives to the bottom line. Why are we scared? Well, part of our fear is based on the fact that there was some dark story there. But that dark story was highly exploited to help the industrial revolution go about making pasteurized dairy products and cheap food and all that stuff that now we’re a victim of.

The other part of the story is Yes, raw milk can make you sick if it’s done improperly. And, interestingly enough, look at some data here, that 82 people have died according to the CDC, consuming pasteurized dairy products, mostly from salmonella and listeria, in the last 35 or 40 years. 82 people. And thousands of people have become sick.

But that’s okay. Because the [00:37:00] FDA says it’s a guarantee of safety when you pasteurize because of something they call the standards. Now, what standards are we talking about? Well, Dr. Bruce German said pasteurization is an 18th century solution to an 18th century problem. What the FDA did was create a perpetual excuse for 18th century problems.

So you take 50 different dairies and dump all the milk in one big milk tank and collect all the milk from around the country. It’s going to have lots of pathogens in it. Lots of E. coli, Listeria, Campylobacter, Salmonella, and that’s okay because you’re using that 18th century solution, the 18th century problem, and perpetuating the problem by not cleaning it up.

So, you have a standards created by the FDA which allow for pathogens in whatever level, it doesn’t matter, filthy is okay. Because you’re going to cook that living heck out of it.

Leigh Ann: That

Mark Mcafee: kind of raw milk absolutely should be feared. In [00:38:00] terms of consumption. Absolutely by right. I agree. A hundred percent.

Yeah. We’re not talking about that kind of raw milk. We’re talking about coming raw milk coming from one dairy, highly trained, specialized systems and in different kinds of standards. In other words, never have a pathogen ever have to meet and exceed pasteurized milk standards without pasteurizing. So less than 10 coliforms versus a thousand coliforms.

And we’re running one or two coliforms in our milk and never have a pathogen. Testing very frequently to make sure that none of your cows have an abnormal health conditions, which would predispose to some unhealthy person. So different protocols, different standards, different intended consumer, not the processor, but that consumer, the mom, the kids, there’s a different social contract.

Between that farmer and you, Leanne, my consumer, I care for you, I ethically regard your health as [00:39:00] my own, I’m morally taking a completely different high ground, I am socially committed to serving you in every way I can to the best of my capacity. And by the way, that capacity is changing with time because technology is rapidly advancing.

Just five years ago, it would take three days. to be able to detect a pathogen in our mouth. Now we have an on farm lab from Thermo Fisher that gives me data in 20 hours.

Leigh Ann: Yeah.

Mark Mcafee: With PCR. So, in just 5 years. So, with the more advancement we have in technology, the more rapid testing, pathogen testing, enrichment, all these technologies, I would suggest that in Oh, two years, that technology would probably be 10 hours.

Leigh Ann: Yeah. Two things I want to point out in what you just shared. One is, yeah, to your point, we’ve, not we, the powers that be have normalized sick [00:40:00] cows. Yes, really. And when you think about this, they’re, they’re being fed a diet. That’s not normal to theirs, a diet filled with pesticides and all these chemicals that destroy their gut microbiome.

So they’re not producing milk as, as they normally would. And when you were talking about that earlier, the very first thought I had was even if all of those farms decided to go raw, we wouldn’t want their raw milk because it would be really, really an issue. To your point, that’s not how you guys are raising and treating and, you know, nurturing your own cows.

The second point I want to make, though, because this is something that I find just kind of flabbergasting, is there’s, um, cilantro outbreaks. There’s recalls on lettuce. There’s recalls on all these different foods fairly regularly. And yet people aren’t going, oh my gosh. We should never eat lettuce again.

And yet with [00:41:00] milk, there’s this weird thing where it’s like, if, if, if something happens, that is a food group, we should just never eat again.

Mark Mcafee: And I think that what you’re finding is raw milk is a whipping boy. If you can’t beat the real victim, you beat the whipping boy. So. Raw milk is that, um, designated target to shoot at because it’s so convenient.

We, in America today, five and a half dairies every day fail or are sold. Five and a half dairies. We only have 22, 000 dairies left. We’re going to lose 10 percent this year. Wow. That is serving pasteurization, which is having dollar voting occur. saying I don’t want that anymore because it’s hard to digest, doesn’t taste very good and very allergenic.

The number one most allergenic food in America, if you went to the FDA website, is pasteurized milk. Number one.

Leigh Ann: Because of the

Mark Mcafee: triggering effect of all the dead bacteria and the loss of the bioactives, which your body goes, wait [00:42:00] a minute, get mucus, get all this stuff out of here. We’re not supposed to have dead things in our body.

Get rid of all that waste. So you have bacteria that don’t belong in your body, and your body reacts, uh, sometimes anaphylactically, which can be life threatening. So, the most allergenic food, very hard to digest, we’ll talk about lactose intolerance in a little bit, but bottom line is, people are dollar voting and saying no.

Where raw milk is thriving at these farm to consumer connected farmers that are using very high standards and testing and technology to serve customers. and getting back to mother nature’s blueprints, which are fantastic to recover the gut microbiome, which is 80 percent of the immune system. So we are making a major step forward in raw milk.

Uh, and fear is part of it and we have to educate. But I would, I would reframe fear a little bit, reframe, uh, safety and fear. Let’s look at this a second. Do we want to live in a bubble where we sterilize everything and we’re susceptible to everything?

Leigh Ann: Mm hmm. Yeah. Where

Mark Mcafee: we don’t [00:43:00] have an immune system to be able to resist those things naturally found in nature that let us to consume?

That those leafy greens that are so good for us, they have iron and all these wonderful things. Do we want to fear all of that because we have a compromised immune system and live in a bubble of trouble? Or do we want to build our microbiome with diversity of bacteria to be able to resist whatever bugs come our way, including that which might be found once in a while in leafy greens?

So we are getting away from our food sources and as a result, we are actually getting away from a strong immune system instead of connecting to it, building an immune system where safety takes on a different idea. Wrap your brain around this for a second, Leah. What is safer? Protecting the weakest of us from any illness ever and all of us become very sick because we’re immunocompromised and we eat sterilized food diets?

Or we get an occasional illness of one or two, maybe here and there, but everybody [00:44:00] thrives because we have strong immune systems and we are able to resist those things which come at us all the time. And so it’s, it’s, that’s the paradigm shift of thinking. I think it’s much, much less safe to have a population of everybody that’s totally compromised all the time and getting sick all the time than it is to have an occasional person who might get sick.

from God knows whatever, including raw milk. But what we’re doing here at raw farm, which I’m extremely proud of our team and my son, Aaron and Josh and Kaylee and all of us, um, is we’re, we put the on farm lab, a pathogen lab here and every batch of milk at the cow level is tested to make sure we do not have a trace amount of a pathogenic bacteria.

that can ever grow in your gut

Leigh Ann: because

Mark Mcafee: the enrichment process in our lab tries for 20 hours to get it to grow before it’s actually done a PC measured in PCR

Leigh Ann: and the

Mark Mcafee: thresholds are so low you can never get sick. So this is all FDA AOC approved stuff. So we’ve taken biodiversity to [00:45:00] our customers without the pathogens.

Leigh Ann: Yeah.

Mark Mcafee: We didn’t kill anything. We grew biodiversity in our milk wonderfully. We do not have pathogenic organisms, which can make the weakest of us sick. So now we’re able to say post, uh, antibiotics, post chemotherapy, post, it’s safe to consume our product because you’re going to get the biodiversity and build back your immune system.

Without a pathogen, it might make you sick. So that’s just an example of pioneering to match our customers are saying, we want more, we want more, we want to be safe, but we want more. Uh, and that’s just a pioneering mindset of a farmer who’s committed and connected to consumers wanting to do better.

Leigh Ann: Do you sometimes feel like no matter how much water you’re drinking, you’re still thirsty?

Oftentimes this has to do with electrolyte imbalances. And I recently have been using an amazing electrolyte brand called Buoy that really stands out from so many [00:46:00] of the other brands on the market. First of all, their product is three times more bioavailable, meaning your body is able to absorb so much more of the electrolytes and nutrients in their product.

They use wild harvested ocean electrolytes and 87 plus minerals. They don’t use sugar, sweeteners, added flavors. They’re non GMO, vegan, and third party tested. And what I love is they have a number of different options on their website. What I actually did when I first got started with them is I bought their sample pack, and inside the sample pack they have, you know, all of them are hydration drops with electrolytes.

ocean based electrolytes, but they have, for example, one is immunity drops, brain health drops, digestion drops, energy drops. It’s almost like a liquid supplement with these electrolytes and trace minerals added in them. So I bought the variety pack just to [00:47:00] try all the different versions of this. And I’ve absolutely been loving it.

It’s so easy to use, too. I think a lot of electrolyte drinks, it’s like a tablet or, you know, a fizzy powder you have to add in. And these little bottles are so easy to carry around. I have one in my bag all the time. And then just throughout the day, I add a little spray. Escort to whatever I’m drinking in that moment, and it’s such an easy, clean, effective way to make sure you’re getting the right amount of electrolytes that you need in your day.

Check the link below for a link to buoy as well as a 20% discount on your first order. Yeah, to your point, I’ll say it quickly and we won’t go too far down this path because. It gets sketchy, but yeah, it’s, it is more dangerous to have a sick, a sick country, a sick community. Um, but that is much more profitable.

That’s all we need to say.

Mark Mcafee: Well said. And [00:48:00] you know what? It’s so much easier. It’s so much easier. Uh, for a Costco buyer or a Whole Foods buyer or somebody say, has it been killed?

Leigh Ann: Yeah,

Mark Mcafee: because we’ve

Leigh Ann: outsourced our immune system is what we’re doing.

Mark Mcafee: Yes. And we’ve also said shelf life is more important than gut life.

Leigh Ann: Yeah.

Mark Mcafee: We’ve said we can have that last on that shelf for six months and never have to worry about it. But you know what? We don’t want that to last six months in our gut. We want it to break down quickly, easily, bioavailability, enzymatically rich, biodiverse, ready to go in that compost pile, that wonderful gut that’s in our immune system.

But that’s not what’s being fed to us. We’re being fed dead foods. That have long shelf lives. So yeah, look at the money.

Leigh Ann: Yes, yes, yes. With that said, very quick question here. Cause in some ways it’s sort of like, this seems like such a no brainer. Why is the conventional world digging their heels in so deeply as it, and is it [00:49:00] just because it is more costly?

It is harder to raise cows the right way and, you know, do that process. Is that really what it boils down to? Is it just would be. You know, less profits for them. So why change anything?

Mark Mcafee: The industrial paradigm of processing has become literally a juggernaut. a battleship, but you cannot steer. It goes one way and that’s the only way.

And that’s the only way it’s ever been. Regulations say that’s the only thing you can do. They won’t ever let them try to do UV ultraviolet light pasteurization, which has different effect on enzymes. They won’t let them try HPP, which is high pressure pascalization, which is the 80, 000 pounds per square inch they use for fresh juices, right?

It’s a pasteurization. They will not allow any of that adaptive challenge change, even though, even though the rest of the world is trying new things, they’re doing raw, but they’re going to try new [00:50:00] things. Let’s talk about this juggernaut for a minute. All of the pasteurization, industrial companies get together once a year at a place called the NCIMS, the National Conference of Interstate Milk Shipments.

The FDA sits at the king of this whole thing, and they say what goes and what doesn’t go.

Leigh Ann: And

Mark Mcafee: all of them have consensus of what they’re going to do. They’re going to A favorite quote was, Hey, we’re finding some pathogens getting by pasteurization temperatures. Should we change pasteurization? They said, uh, well, maybe turn up the heat a little bit.

Uh, what about testing to make sure that the pasteurization works? Testing. And the quote was, and I quote exactly, Oh Lord, no, we might find something. Then what would we do? Unquote. So instead of testing, they say, just send it through the pasteurizer two or three times to make sure it’s good and dead. No, it works when they do it once, do it twice or three times.

So when you [00:51:00] think about that, I asked the president of horizon back in 2003. If you’d ever be interested in doing raw milk and he goes, well, what, what’s a raw milk? He’d never heard of it. And this was at an international milk, uh, meeting. Oh

Leigh Ann: my gosh.

Mark Mcafee: And I was presenting to them about raw milk. This is 20 years ago.

And he said, you know, let me get back to you. Let me talk about operations people because nobody knew what I was talking about. So he went, he emailed me back. He goes. No, we can’t do raw milk. And here’s why number one, all of our systems we’ve created collect milk from many different farms and take it to a processing plant.

You can’t control quality if you do that. And we’d have to pay our farmers 10 times more than they’re getting now to do that. And we’d have to have an individual processing plant for that farm to do their bottling. So it would destroy everything we’ve ever built. That’s good about ultra high [00:52:00] temperature processing.

So you can’t do the operation side and then to try to promote it, you’re undoing all the stuff you said was good. Now you have to say it’s bad. I’m telling you right now, I’m in the safest place in the world. You connected to people versus a processor because I serve a different champion. I serve our customers and I ignore that other background noise that says you can’t do it.

I do what they call the impossible. I do the impossible. It’s not impossible. It’s just completely different. That’s what my shirt says. Do dairy different. We do it differently.

Leigh Ann: Yeah,

Mark Mcafee: we take care of our cow. We look at the conditions. We look at I love

Leigh Ann: it. I think something just worth sitting on because the average individual may not understand some of the nuance of, wait a second, why is this not more widely accepted?

Why, why is there actually sometimes like a smear campaign against raw milk? And when we understand some of the subtle [00:53:00] or not so subtle things going on behind the scenes, it just helps us maybe take some of those other narratives with a grain of salt and do our own research and understand the nuance.

Mark Mcafee: I would absolutely agree with you that people need to do their own research on what the immune system is.

Look up the gut microbiome, look at the human genome project, look at the studies from Europe, look at PubMed, read the stuff, get nerdy on it, dive in. Um, understand that there’s two PubMed studies out there that show that when you follow the raw milk Institute standards, the risk for raw milk are not zero, but they’re very close to zero.

Leigh Ann: But

Mark Mcafee: tremendous benefit, uh, studies done by Dr. Katrina Berg in Belgium, Dr. Whitehead out of British Columbia. He used our Rommelk Institute standards and the standards you have done in Germany at the Fort Souk standards. And so he found that these different principles, three things. High standards, trained farmers and testing changes milk completely.

And you can get the value of this. That is not the [00:54:00] industrial paradigm. And there’s an old study. There’s a little saying that says it’s all, it’s always cheaper if you can steal it. Well, that’s what’s happening in America right now. The prices for the milk is less than the cost of production. That’s why we’re losing five and a half dairies a day right now is because the processors can get away with paying less than the cost of production because there’s oversupply.

The farmers are wishing their neighbors are not business. They can be king of the hill. Well, now we’ve got 2000 cow dairies becoming 10 and 20, 000 cow dairies. Far and farther from consumers because it’s all industrial being shipped by trucks with big carbon footprints. It’s not going the right direction.

And the dollar voting is showing the opposite actually be true where people saying, I don’t want any more of that. I want less of it. They go into soy milk, almond milk, raw milk, anything but milk because the pasteurization has such a big problem. Now that doesn’t mean that cheeses aren’t going to be around for a while.

And, and yogurts aren’t gonna be around and ice creams. They’re doing okay. But they’re, they’re also [00:55:00] cultured. Uh, ice, uh, cheese is fed cultures added back in them. Yogurts have had cultures added back in them. There’s been some CPR performed to make them a little more lifelike, a little more digestible and compatible with our gut.

That all said, It is a very interesting time where post COVID our farming operations grown 35 to 40 percent per year every year, three years in a row. And we’re right now, our current growth trend is 1 percent per week, 50 percent a year. It’s insane because of influencers, many like yourself who have personal experience with the product and have seen personal change occur.

People are more interested in, Leanne, listen to this. Hearing your advice. Then the FDA’s advice, in fact, one of our more inflammatory influencers said that whatever the FDA says, it’s pretty good safe bet, do the [00:56:00] opposite, it’s safer. Yeah. So when you’ve got that kind of a sad reality, and it truly is sad because you spend a lot of taxpayers dollars with bright scientists that work there,

Leigh Ann: here’s

Mark Mcafee: advice we don’t want to follow because they don’t want to meet with me.

Because they don’t want to look at the standards we have to maybe evolve a little bit. I mean, the examples are horrendous. Back in 1980s when Jack in the box had some illnesses from E. coli and ground beef. Uh, guess what? The FDA refused to increase the temperature suggestion from 160 to 165 degrees.

They didn’t do so for 10 years. Jack in the box said to hell with you. We’re so industry led. Because they don’t want sick people.

Leigh Ann: They never

Mark Mcafee: leave. They follow by 10 to 20 years. So we don’t follow the FDA recommendations. That’s a good way to go south. You want to do your own investigation. Follow those that have good [00:57:00] advice based on sound experiences and good studies and understanding what the whole picture is.

And when you do that, you go far and you go, you get well.

Leigh Ann: Yeah. Something I think is very interesting. So I have my own, I have my own practice. I actually do something called Evox therapy. I focus on the mental, emotional, the subconscious side of health, but we also do bioenergetic testing. And this is basically scanning what your body’s responding well to or not responding well to, and cow’s milk comes up as a stressor all the time.

And I think this is just a fun point to make a note of that is worth reaching out to. ZYTO is the company I use for bioenergetic testing. I think they need to differentiate. Between raw milk and pasteurized milk, because to your point people’s bodies are having really bad responses to pasteurized milk.

I see that every week in the scans we’re doing. The responses to the pasteurized milk can be completely different. Um, oh, go ahead.

Mark Mcafee: You’re absolutely right. [00:58:00] And, oh my gosh, I mean, these bioactives are really the underlying reason. That there’s a big difference between raw milk and pasteurized milk because the enzymatic reaction we talked about very, very keenly about the first fruit of life and how you build a strong immune system in children and other mammals.

These are gifts from mom to baby. They’re, they’re part of mom’s blood that are giving life in things that we can barely understand. And there’s 2500 different kinds of proteins found in raw milk. In a breast milk and each one of those proteins has a protease or a peptidase enzyme accompanying them that are destroyed in pasteurization.

Uh, there’s 700 different kinds of bacteria found in, in, in, in raw milk breast milk as well. Same thing. It’s just, there’s a reason why they’re here, and [00:59:00] there’s a reason why we’re here today, because they’re not here. They’re Right, right. You know what I mean? Why we’re falling apart as a species, because of what we’re eating, and we’re saying is fuel for the body, is not fuel for the body, it’s fuel for the microbiome.

Leigh Ann: Yeah, to that point, and we’ve already done it a little bit, but let’s do just a compare and contrast of raw milk versus pasteurized milk in terms of Not just nutrients, but bioavailability, bioactives, cofactors, all these different things and why people who maybe are now avoiding milk because they’re having all these negative reactions, why trying raw milk might be worth a go because it’s so different.

Mark Mcafee: I think it’s worth a go for sure to experiment. And when you do raw milk, take baby steps. Raw milk kefir, I would suggest, is the gateway. Uh, don’t go to raw milk. Go to raw milk kefir. Make yourself a smoothie. Take yourself a cup of raw milk kefir. Put it into a blender. Add in all your favorite stuff [01:00:00] in there.

Some collagen powder. Really good for the gut. Um, avocado, all the berries, all these wonderful antioxidant berries are high fiber berries in there. Throw a raw egg in there. So some raw honey in there. Really good raw honey. Blend it all together. It’s going to have a little bit of sweetness to it. It’s going to have a delicious tartness, all these wonderful colors and flavors coming from the berries.

That is a concoction from heaven.

Leigh Ann: And

Mark Mcafee: when somebody has a little bit of that and it comes in and go, Oh my God, that’s delicious. And oh my gosh, it sits so well in my tummy. I feel so good. And then they’re going to start seeing bowel movements become better. You’re going to feel like you feel better because of the serotonin and dopamine link between the gut brain access.

The bioactives are there. They’re not damaged. They’re fully engaged in what’s going on. They’ve got all their friends around them. They’ve got all their good food to feed the bacteria. They’re in the raw milk. You have whole food nutrition that goes with it. You’ve got the good proteins, all this [01:01:00] stuff’s all there.

So you start out with a raw milk smoothie with, with kefir, which is pre digested by the way. It’s like, which is why

Leigh Ann: it might be a better place to start.

Mark Mcafee: A hundred percent.

Leigh Ann: Yeah.

Mark Mcafee: You let yourself start a little bit there and then you give yourself a few days of that. And then take a Dixie cup of raw milk.

I’m talking about the highly reluctant. I know people that break a half gallon their first sitting and said, I need another half gallon. They can’t stop. I’m not talking about those kinds of people. I’m talking about those highly reluctant that may have some sensitivities. Start off baby steps. Your body took a long time to get us where it’s at.

Take some time to go back and go off that path. And slowly it only takes a few days. Take a Dixie cup or two or three and give yourself some time to introduce yourself to the new sheriff in town, right? Instead of having a fight at the okay corral, you really want to take it slow. And when you do that, I haven’t seen anybody that hasn’t had a great experience.

Leigh Ann: Yeah, that’s huge. I think it’s a good [01:02:00] note though, because for someone who maybe has been off dairy for maybe years, some of the natural enzymes within our own gut Aren’t there any more to digest it? So just starting slow to introduce that, to be able to kind of build that back up.

Mark Mcafee: Let’s, let’s talk very briefly and I’ll stay high level here on lactose intolerance.

I don’t think we’ve touched on that yet, but

Leigh Ann: no, not yet.

Mark Mcafee: Very important to understand the Maasai in Kenya have no problem drinking raw milk. The Manchurian Mongolians, no problem with raw milk. And the, the cows in, in, in, in, in, in Kenya and the horses in, in, uh, in Mongolia. They do not have the lactase persistence gene, but the raw milk they’re consuming has the lactobacillus bifidobacteria and other bacteria called from bacteria.

This creates the lactase enzyme for you. That’s why yogurt, even when pasteurized is not generally associated with lactose intolerance because it has lactobacillus added into it. And the lactose sugar has a bacteria, which will make [01:03:00] an enzyme for them. So remember you have lactose sugar That’s in the milk.

That lactose sugar needs lactase enzyme to digest it. Lactase enzymes comes from bacterial action in your gut. So bacteria actually comes from lactobacillus and all the other bifidobacteria and bacteria you find in raw milk, which are killed off in pasteurization. So there’s, you’ll be on lactose intolerance.

There’s also something called maldigestion, which has to do with digestion of proteins. and other sugars which are missing their complimentary enzymes and bacteria make those enzymes because you’ve pasteurized it. So pasteurization has an annihilating effect on the, on the microbiome of the milk itself, the genomics of milk and the proteomics and enzymatics of what’s going on, the proteomics.

Lipids, lipase. That’s all the lipids. The enzyme lipase is there to help digest the fats. It’s missing in pasteurized milk. So you have this broad effect. On the [01:04:00] bioactives and the enzymes found naturally in the food And the bacteria that make the enzymes that you need in the food as well in your gut So you’ve literally you’re eating a dead highly allergenic food That’s hard to digest and it causes gas cramps and pain and all kinds of stuff Because if you’ve been on antibiotics and you maybe even kelo or god knows you’re not going to have those things for you

Leigh Ann: Yeah, and

Mark Mcafee: so this is Foundational food 101, whole food nutrition, raw milk is a whole food.

It’s all there with all of its complementary, uh, ancillary components, which are put there by nature.

Leigh Ann: Yeah, I want to say this ever so quickly and then we’ll kind of start to land the plane here. When you were talking about masks, cells. This is really top of mind for me right now, because I’m dealing with some mold stuff, but I also have done a couple interviews with some doctors who work heavily with mold, but something they’re seeing there is this mass cell activate activation syndrome, where it’s just the immune system is now firing at everything.

It’s completely haywire and frazzled and, [01:05:00] and just this idea of, man, what a great, you know, implication or application for raw milk as well, this mold community of people that is very large because, you know, so many percentages of homes have mold issues. Um, that was just a quick thought that it was really, really interesting, particularly because I’m going to have a couple mold episodes coming out following this one.

So

Mark Mcafee: the gut microbiome has to be completely intact and functioning to deal with threats, including molds, funguses, and all these other things that are around us all the time. Slog, toxins, viruses, for sure, bacteria, people coughing, the environment we’re in, if we want to be happy in that environment, you need to have a resilient immune system that can address the outer environment you’re in.

Or else you’re in a bubble of trouble. You’re in a bubble of trouble. And you don’t want to be a bubble of trouble. You want to be happy. Fully embracing your environment you’re in.

Leigh Ann: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Last two questions. One is as a fan What is in the works for raw farm? What is there anything that we can kind of expect or have on the [01:06:00] radar or be, you know Bouncing in our chairs for that might be coming.

Mark Mcafee: Are you ready for breaking news?

Leigh Ann: Yes, please

Mark Mcafee: You’re the first you’re the first place. I’m going to share about we are investigating our own farm stores Throughout the state of California.

Leigh Ann: Oh, wow. Okay.

Mark Mcafee: The reason we want to do that is because we believe that some of our valued retail partners are taking advantage of our customers.

Leigh Ann: Oh, say more. They’re

Mark Mcafee: taking 40 and 50%, 40 and 50 percent margins on our product. And that’s not fair.

Leigh Ann: Oh, wow.

Mark Mcafee: And we want the ability to serve our people, farm direct, cold, delicious, fresh, raw milk. And we want to know our customers. And so there’s nothing more innovative than starting a small little store, the Raw Farm Store, right down the street from our top selling partner stores.[01:07:00]

And bringing them to our store to buy the product, literally almost, well, 40 percent less.

Leigh Ann: Yeah. And

Mark Mcafee: it’s still more profitable for us to do it. But guess what we get to do. We get to meet customers. We get to share dialogue with our person that’s there. We get to have a better management of the dairy case.

Sometimes you get to the store and it’s all sold out, but it’s not the back storage. There’s plenty of milk in the back, but they didn’t ever put it in the front. Okay.

Leigh Ann: Yeah,

Mark Mcafee: these stores are gonna have all the product out showing right there. Plus we’re doing ground beef. I’m doing other things That will be farm direct.

So what better thing to have a place you go in and you’ll see a huge Six foot TV monitor showing live streaming from the dairy and a wonderful environment where you’re going to feel welcomed and loved and your price points are going to be reasonable and fresh delivery two to three times a week and have the raw farm experience, [01:08:00] uh, in the local communities.

And we’re thinking we’re probably put 20 throughout the state of California. So the people don’t have to drive more than 15 minutes at any point, wherever you are to get farm direct pricing. Now that doesn’t mean we’re not going to have products in all the other stores. But we do not want to be held captive.

Where these stores are just using it as a magnet product to bring people in and charging them unethical pricing, where we want to have that relationship directly with our people and our store. So that’s happening. And the first one’s going to be down in the San Clemente area. Um, there’ll be others in the LA area as well.

Leigh Ann: No way.

Mark Mcafee: Yeah.

Leigh Ann: Oh my gosh. That’s like five minutes from me. So I’m going to be there opening day.

Mark Mcafee: What a beautiful thing to be able to have the email addresses of all of our customers or text to be able to say, Hey, this is what we’ve got going on. This is a sale. This is that the other thing, so we can actually connect people.

Uh, if anybody has any concerns or questions, boom, they’re right there. [01:09:00] Um, getting to know your customer and the farm relationship has tremendous. Value added to the farm. Um, and the more we can connect to our customers, the better we can serve them. Let’s say a customer comes in with a bright idea. They tell the store never gets to us.

It never gets to us. It dies at the store. But if they come in and tell, tell our raw farm person, Hey, this is a great idea. What they’re going to call me and say, this is what a customer said. I’m going to say, well, that’s very interesting. And by the way, 40 other people said the same thing. So why don’t we do that?

So it’s ability to be able to serve humanity better, uh, to cut through the jungle, so to speak, and also keep that price point under control. Cause we’re seeing 22 a gallon milk. It’s insane. It’s, it’s just wrong. It should be 14. Um, and so we want to really make sure it’s cost effective for everybody. And that family that needs to have eight gallons a week can afford it.[01:10:00]

Uh, at least more affordable. It’s not cheap, but. It’s we don’t want anybody to be taken advantage of so we’re working really hard on that. It’s exciting We expect the first one to probably start up in the next 60 days or so Um, and so that’s exciting the on farm lab. We’re building a brand new. Oh my god On farm lab’s huge.

Uh, the uh, our creamery are building our brand new creamer. We’ve broken ground on it It’ll be about a year and a half before it’s all done But it’ll be completely tourable by people that come become fully educated in what we do and how we do dairy different You Um, it’ll be a full on experience to see the cows, pastures, milking, the lab, the, the, the bottling, making cheese, buttercream and buying it there and actually being able to see it all happen.

We have a touring platform for people to come in and watch it all happen. So we fully expect to have, uh, full tours from school buses and travel buses and things coming through, uh, kind of the must see raw milk Mecca, if you will. And so we [01:11:00] are really committed to growing this thing. Uh, my next generation, my son and daughter are fully involved.

Their kids are becoming involved. So it’s a multi generational excitement and not just for us, for other farmers in other states and other parts of California. So yeah, lots of excitement going on.

Leigh Ann: Oh my gosh. I love it. Okay. Last two questions. I swear. Is there any world in which there may one day be raw farm ice cream?

Mark Mcafee: Yes. And here’s how it would go down. Remember that the FDA, the FDA, our dear friends of the FDA has made raw milk ice cream illegal. It has a multi ingredient product and they have what’s called a standard of identity. The standard of identity says that it must be pasteurized if you’re going to call it ice cream.

Okay. Well, guess

Leigh Ann: what?

Mark Mcafee: Here’s what you do instead. At the raw farm store, [01:12:00] you have a make it yourself ice cream project where you come in, you buy out, you bring in the ingredients, you brought the ingredients there, you bring in your eggs. You bring in your berries. We have the cream. We have the ice cream maker there, and you make the ice cream there.

It’s basically custom made per customer. That way we’re not selling, we’re selling you the ingredients, but you’re making it yourself. And so there’s ways to make ice cream literally in 10 minutes. So you can actually come in with all the stuff you brought from the farmer’s market, the ice cream, or maybe we have to have them there.

Maybe we’ll have all the things because we’re going to have smoothies there too. We’re going to have smoothies. Uh, uh, so the ice frozen ice cream, excuse me, frozen berries. And all the things you would need for smoothies, we intend on having that there as well. So it’d be kind of the community, the immunity community, uh, the immunity community of what it’s the gut shop, right?

The gut shop, um, to build your immune system. Those things will be there, including smoothies that you can take away. Um, and you can make yourself [01:13:00] your own ice cream that you can actually take home, and it will be fairly inexpensive because you’re buying the ingredients to bring you there and making it there in a rapid production ice cream making system.

That’s part of what we want to do, because we all love our raw milk ice cream, but the FDA will not allow us to sell it in retail, so we won’t. We’re going to do it differently.

Leigh Ann: Yeah. Oh, I love it. You get, you get fancy with it, and that’s what we got to do. But that’s, you know, what’s so exciting about individuals like yourself is.

There’s a lot of people who go, Oh, I guess we can’t. And then there’s the people who go, this needs to be out there. We are going to find a way to make it happen.

Mark Mcafee: So that’s exactly right. Rhian, what you do is you innovate around the obstacles. It brings a tremendous amount of value, value added because all the people that said they can’t, they don’t, the ones that can, they do.

And so I, I’ve never been one that said you can’t, I’m saying, let’s investigate further, let’s figure this out. It [01:14:00] may not be possible, but I tell you what, until we do a lot of deep dive into this thing, we won’t know. And so after 22, 20, 24 years of doing this, we’ve innovated, innovated around everything to bring customers their stuff.

And. I know a lot of dairymen, um, that have, they’ve been trained not to innovate around anything. It’s not their fault. It’s just their training. That’s what they, they’ve grown to do. That’s what the Cal Poly and Fresno State and Chico and all the places that train them to do. And they didn’t innovate. I will give credit to Rick England.

Down in Phoenix, Arizona, he used to have a 23, 000 cow capo operation, sold it all 10, 12 years ago, and bought 85 brown Swiss cows. Now he’s a top selling product down in Arizona in Phoenix. He’s one of the raw milk institute listed farmers. But he’s a guy who said, I’m going to innovate and change. So I know many stories like that of other durians, but I’m going to connect myself to people versus a [01:15:00] processor.

Leigh Ann: Well, Mark, you guys are just such pioneers, not just for yourself. It’s that ripple effect of, to your point, the nonprofits you’re doing with the education, educating farmers, educating individuals. And that’s something that I feel like as a consumer, I have to say thank you for, for not giving up, for continuing to pioneer these different ways and innovate around the blocks, because I get to benefit from that.

And so many people get to benefit from that. And the hope is that that ripple gets bigger and bigger. And with that said, the question I really want to close with is what else can I do? What else can we as the consumers do for you guys to support this mission you’re on?

Mark Mcafee: You are doing exactly what you should do and what you do very well.

And that’s to educate others about nutrition, about the gut microbiome, about the bioactives found in raw milk. Those are key things. I’ll close with saying, and you can ask me more questions. I’ll be more than happy to continue. They may have [01:16:00] the guns and the money. I got the truth and the moms. And I’ll tell you what, I’ll take the truth of the moms all day long because we are passionate.

They say thank you. They dollar vote for you. They tell others. They’re sacred. Uh, and the guns of the money become irrelevant because right now it’s like two degrees of separation. Every crowd you have, people you have, you find somebody that loves you and consumes your products. So when you build a big enough market and you do it well, at some point you’ve won, you’ve won, you just declared victory.

You’ve fun, but it takes 20, 30 years of time. And we’re already 22 years, 23 years into this, and we’ve already started to win, um, nurses, I mean, CHP officers, judges, uh, Teachers, principals, uh, people that are regulators that come out and do our testing, love our products. You literally get [01:17:00] everybody eventually connected to everybody and you’ve won.

And so I’ve always believed instead of fighting the other side, just build a market and educate like crazy. And when you build your market and you have the support of your customers, you’ve done a good job to be faithful to them with safety and everything. Then eventually you just, you just win because that is the market is, is reality.

Leigh Ann: Okay. Last, last, last question. I swear, just for people who may not know, where can they find you? I know here in orange County. Sprouts, Mother’s Market, uh, Fermentation Farm are the three places we can get raw farm milk here. But, is that pretty, uh, statewide?

Mark Mcafee: Yes, we have about 550 state, uh, stores throughout the state.

All the way from the Oregon border to the Mexican border. All the way, both sides, everywhere along the coastline, everywhere. And we have about 28 trucks driving to those stores every week to deliver. And we have a couple of [01:18:00] small delivery, uh, that go all the way up to Chico in Northern California, because it’s too far to drive.

But, um, rawfarmusa. com has a store locator, which is pretty current.

Leigh Ann: And that

Mark Mcafee: shows you all the stores that we carry our products in. Um, and if you really want to get into the nerd side of this, the science, you go to rawfarmusa. com. Uh, raw milk institute dot O R G and you can look at all the studies and stuff that we cannot put on our website because the FDA will shut us down because we’ll be making medical claims.

Although you go to raw milk institute dot org and that’s all the pub med stuff. Now, at raw milk institute, we don’t talk about raw farm, raw farms listed, but we talk about all the farms. And it’s a generic thing about promoting all raw milk, not just a brand of raw milk, and the science is very powerful there about what we do differently.

So I encourage people, if you have a gut problem, to try raw milk slowly, because I know a lot of people that had gut problems, and that’s America today. And that’s the [01:19:00] CBD immune system. Try raw dairy, try a whole food diet as part of that diet. And you will see a transformation in your gut over two to six months.

You really, really will.

Leigh Ann: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Well, Mark, thank you so much. This was such a tree. I absolutely, absolutely love this.

Mark Mcafee: Well, thank you so much for inviting me. And it’s a privilege for me to be associated with an awesome teacher, influencer, and people listen to you. And that’s, that’s important because that means we trust each other.

And I think that’s beautiful. Thank you.