One day a week, a woman on a small farm in Southern Colorado loads her pickup with goods she plans to sell across the border. To the unpracticed eye, the load bound for New Mexico looks innocent enough: eggs, lamb, milk. But the woman is wary when she peddles her unpasteurized milk — some see it as illicit fare.

On her side of the state line, a law allows the woman to sell raw milk to members of a "herd share" she operates with her husband. Herd-share members have signed agreements to be cow co-owners. Their milk fees are payments toward a grass-fed Ayrshire.

When the woman carries raw milk into New Mexico, however, it becomes contraband. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration prohibits transportation of raw milk across state lines. New Mexico allows raw-milk sales with a state permit, but it can't issue one to a Colorado farm. The concern, say state and federal officials, is the potential for disease. They have a long list of bacteria that lurk in raw milk.

The woman is willing to take the risk, to smuggle her milk, because some people in New Mexico — dozens from Santa Fe — demand her product. Some are healthy people who want healthy food, she says. Others are advocates of local agriculture. They want to know where their milk comes from.

Tawnya Laveta of Santa Fe has been a customer for about two years. "I usually try to get most of my food from as close to the source as possible," she says. She also drinks raw milk for health benefits. "It's a nutrient-dense way to get vitamins, minerals and probiotics." When you pasteurize milk, she says, it's boiled down to nothing.

The Colorado couple have one other class of customers, the woman says. These people are sick. Their conditions vary: cancer, lupus, arthritis. They believe raw milk has enzymes and antibodies that aid them in their battles for health. "I can't turn my back on them," the woman says over the phone.

And besides, she says, "we don't feel like there's a state line." Communities in the two states are interwoven.

On the one hand, the woman is bold: "If somebody comes up to me ... I'd say, 'Take me to jail!' " On the other hand, she wants to conceal her identity and the location of her farm. "Just in case."

She has two groups of loyal customers in Santa Fe. Members of each group pool their money and send one driver to a meeting place in the middle or to the farm, which is six hours round trip. It's a long way to go for a gallon of milk, admits Laveta, a member of one group. But raw cow milk is hard to come by in Northern New Mexico.


The drive down a long stretch of highway heading north, toward greener pastures, is stunning on a sunny morning. The farm isn't hard to reach — just two turns down winding roads and a couple of bridges to cross. At the foot of the mountains, the farm is nestled on 200 acres of lush grass and clover fields, where the Ayrshires graze. It looks like any small, family operation. Trailers and trucks are strewn about. Chickens peck near the front porch. A lamb chews on weeds growing around a greenhouse that has long since collapsed.

A truck pulls into the drive, and a man hops out. He's 72, and he's from a family with deeps roots in this rural community. About five years ago, after retiring from two other jobs, he decided to settle down and get some cows. He laughs. He still works 14 to 16 hours a day, he says.

And he's tasted the milk from every batch he's produced. "I don't think there's a person in the world who drinks more milk than I do."

No beverage is better, he says. He offers a glass from a batch he produced the day before. It's thick with cream, sweet but not heavy. A full glass goes down easily.

His wife is out of town, the man explains, but he has time, before milking, to give a tour of the farm. We climb onto his four-wheeler and set off toward the herd. He yells out facts about the farm as he drives. He's milking 14 cows, he says, and they're all fed from his fields. He doesn't use sprays or fertilizers or antibiotics. He doesn't feed them grains. What you see is what they eat, he says, indicating the acres and acres of high grass. "We try to keep it as natural as possible."

The cows are healthy, he says, and because of this, he's never had a customer complain of illness from the milk.

He keeps the calves with their mothers, so his overall milk production isn't high. He charges $11.50 a gallon, but it's not a lot, he says, "if you figure what I had to do to get it."

When we reach the herd, he points out a calf that's smaller than the others. When it was born, he says, it wasn't thriving. He gave it an injection of raw milk whey, and it survived. "It's better than penicillin."

As we head back out over the fields, we pass a broken-down fence. "We don't have time to mend fences," he says. And besides, the cows are free to wander.

He warns that the ride is about to get rough. "Hang on."

We drive to the far side of his property, across a creek, where horses huddle under a tree. The man says he has about 20. He has no time to ride them. They just roam the fields.

Under another cluster of trees, about 250 Navajo Churro sheep are gathered with their guardians, a great Pyrenees and a sheepdog. "I hate to butcher them," the man says, but that is the fate of the young males. Luck favors the females. "Many of our ewes die of old age."

His tour is done, but before the man sets off to the old barn to milk his cows, he has a secret he wants to share: The key to a healthy immune system is colostrum, also known as "immune milk," the nutrient-rich substance the cow produces just after giving birth. When a calf is born, he can get about five gallons from the mother, he says. He wouldn't drink it straight — "It looks like pus." Instead, he mixes it with fruit, raw eggs, raw honey and yogurt.

He says he's seen a cancer patient cruise through chemotherapy with a daily dose of fresh colostrom. Don't tell the doctors, he says. Then he laughs. "Many of my customers are doctors."


Arina Pittman is another raw-milk advocate. That's what she drank in her home country, Belarus. When she was a child, she says, she and her mother used to wake up at 5 a.m. so they could buy milk still warm from the cow. "Steamed milk was always more expensive."

Belarus' green countryside is an easy place to raise cows, she says, but the New Mexico landscape is better suited for goats. They're browsers, not grazers. They prefer woody plants to weeds and grass. Their favorite is elm.

Her goats, Rosa and Katya, spend most of the day in an alfalfa field on her permaculture farm in Pojoaque, but she takes them for walks so they can feast on a range of fare. They give Pittman about two gallons of milk a day, she says, and this keeps 10 herd-share families supplied with fresh, raw milk and chèvre.

Pittman's little operation hovers in a gray area as far as the state's concerned. She doesn't have a permit, but distribution is limited to members of her herd share.

Alfred Reeb, director of the New Mexico Department of Agriculture's Dairy Division, says he doesn't spend much time trying to track down herd shares, but if an outbreak is linked to a milk producer without a permit, he warns, the producer could get sued. A state permit, at no charge, can offer legal protection for the producer, and it helps assure the consumer the milk is safe. This is the route he would prefer raw-milk producers take.


Down in Bosque Farms, just south of Albuquerque, the Simons family spent more than a year preparing two green acres and an outbuilding to serve as a small raw-milk dairy. The farm received its state permit in April. Business was slow at first, but now customers snatch up the creamy cow and goat milk as fast as the family can produce it. It's been several months since they've bottled too much, the Simonses say.

At 3:30 p.m., the family gathers in the milking room at Sunshine Farms to milk four goats and four cows; two milkers per animal make the work go faster. They lead in two goats first, Wonder and Peanut, and then two cows, Dandelion and Blossom. They start by washing the udders.

When he was kid, Mark Simons says, his grandfather had a dairy farm, and he loved to spend time there. He'd been planning for years to get a dairy cow of his own before he moved from Rio Rancho to Bosque Farms, a community of family farms along the Rio Grande.

The Simonses first bought a goat, and then a cow, in late 2005. They were just milking for their family and drinking the milk raw. Mark Simons' wife, Bernadette, had read The Untold Story of Milk by Dr. Ron Schmid, a naturopathic physician, and she was intrigued by the book's claims about raw milk's health benefits. She also discovered the state had no cow dairies licensed to sell raw milk.

The Simonses decided to get a state permit. Their son, Luke, got involved, and so did their daughter, Megan Ripper. They went to work setting up facilities, buying more animals and wading through the permit process. It was a big effort, Luke says, but worth the work. Now the family is able to fill a niche.

Milk at Sunshine Farms costs $5.50 for a half-gallon and $10 for a gallon. The family sells about 60 gallons of cow milk and 15 to 18 gallons of goat milk each week. "The potential for profitability is good," Luke says, but right now, the farm is just covering its costs.

Distribution poses problems for Sunshine Farms. The state's largest city is close by, but the family can't sell there. Albuquerque has banned raw-milk sales, and Bernalillo County "frowns on it," Luke says. Customers come straight to the farm, and that's OK for now. But the family plans to expand.

Luke and Megan begin to hand-milk Blossom while their parents tackle Wonder. Eight hands work in a quick, steady rhythm. The siblings' pail fills faster with the cow's frothy milk. They empty it and start another. When it's half-full, Blossom kicks it over. Luke and Megan are bewildered — "Look at all that wasted cream!"

Bernadette laughs. She pauses from milking to pat her goat. "You can't cry over spilled milk," she says as Luke and Megan clean up the mess.

Bernadette says the family keeps the farm clean and treats the animals well. She doesn't worry much about an outbreak from tainted milk. "If you have healthy animals," she says, "you're going to have healthy milk."




The following recipes are from Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats, by Sally Fallon, a journalist, chef, activist and co-founder of the Weston A. Price Foundation.

RAW-MILK YOGURT
(Makes 1 quart)

1/2 cup good quality commercial plain yogurt or 1/2 cup raw-milk yogurt from previous batch
1 quart raw milk
A candy thermometer

Place 1 quart raw milk in a double boiler and heat to 110 degrees. Remove 2 tablespoons of the warm milk and add 1 tablespoon yogurt (commercial or from previous batch). Stir well and pour into a quart-sized wide-mouth mason jar. Add a further 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons yogurt to the jar and stir well. Cover tightly and place in a dehydrator set at 95 degrees for 8 hours. Transfer to the refrigerator.

VANILLA ICE CREAM
(Makes 1 quart)

3 egg yokes
1/2 cup maple syrup
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon arrowroot
3 cups heavy cream, preferably raw, not ultrapasteurized

Beat egg yolks and blend in remaining ingredients. Pour into an ice-cream maker and process according to instructions. (Modern ice-cream makers, with quart-sized containers that are stored in the freezer, eliminate the need for ice and salt and make ice-cream making a breeze.) For ease of serving, transfer ice cream to a shallow plastic container, cover and store in the freezer.

Ginger Pecan Ice Cream: Add 1/4 tablespoon ground ginger and 1/2 cup finely chopped crispy pecans (instructions below).

CRISPY PECANS
(Makes 4 cups)

4 cups pecan halves
2 teaspoons sea salt
Filtered water

The buttery flavor of pecans is enhanced by soaking and slow oven drying. Mix pecans with salt and filtered water and leave in a warm place for at least 7 hours or overnight. Drain in a colander. Spread pecans on a stainless steel baking pan and place in a warm oven (no more than 150 degrees) for 12 hours, turning occasionally, until completely dry and crisp. Store in an airtight container.

ALL-RAW CHEESECAKE
(Serves 12-16)

2 cups crispy almonds (recipe below)
1 cup pitted dates
4 cups homemade cream cheese, softened (recipe below)
4 eggs, separated, at room temperature
1-1/4 cups milk, preferably raw
2 tablespoons gelatin
1/2 cup raw honey
1 tablespoon vanilla
Pinch sea salt

In a food processor, process dates and almonds until they form a sticky mass. Press into a buttered 9-inch by 13-inch Pyrex pan to form a crust.

Put egg yolks and milk in a sauce pan, beat lightly, sprinkle with gelatin and warm slightly until gelatin is dissolved. In a food processor, combine cream cheese, honey and vanilla and process until smooth. Add yolk mixture and process until smooth. Transfer to a bowl and place in refrigerator while beating eggs. Beat egg whites with a pinch of salt until stiff, fold into cream-cheese mixture and pour into crust. Chill several hours before serving.

CRISPY ALMONDS
(Makes 4 cups)

4 cups almonds, preferably skinless
1 tablespoon sea salt
Filtered water

Skinless almonds will still sprout, indicating the process of removing their skins has not destroyed the enzymes. Skinless almonds are easier to digest. However, you may also use almonds with the skins on.

Mix almonds with salt and filtered water and leave in a warm place for at least 7 hours or overnight. Drain in a colander. Spread on a stainless steel baking pan and place in a warm oven (no more than 150 degrees) for 12 to 24 hours, stirring occasionally, until completely dry and crisp. Store in an airtight container.

RAW MILK CREAM CHEESE
(Makes 5 cups of whey and 2 cups of cream cheese)

2 quarts raw milk

Place the milk in a clean glass container and allow it to stand at room temperature 1-4 days until it separates.

Line a large strainer set over a bowl with a clean dish towel. Pour in the separated milk, cover and let stand at room temperature for several hours. The whey will run into the bowl and the milk solids will stay in the strainer. Tie up the towel with the milk solids inside, being careful not to squeeze. Tie this little sack to a wooden spoon placed across the top of a container so that more whey can drip out.

When the bag stops dripping, the cheese is ready. Store whey in a mason jar and cream cheese in a covered glass container. Refrigerated, the cream cheese keeps for about 1 month and the whey for about 6 months.