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

TA Ep. 161 Mark Mcafee, Raw Farm - Raw Milk Revolution: Debunking Controversies & Discovery Benefits

Leigh Ann: [00:00:00] Well, Mark, welcome

Mark Mcafee: can you hear me now?

Leigh Ann: We were talking off air a bit. We're both in but I'm so excited. I, I just need to say it right off the bat. I'm, I drink your

milk is this any better?

I have proselytized so many of my

Mark Mcafee: any better?

Leigh Ann: Um, so it's really exciting for me to get to chat

Mark Mcafee: Sometimes this works better. My cell phone actually, for some reason, has a better ability to

Leigh Ann: the behind the scenes and

Mark Mcafee: computer.

Leigh Ann: really interesting tidbits about raw milk, the history, all these different things, but.

Welcome.

Mark Mcafee: All right, let's try it.

Leigh Ann: Mm.[00:01:00]

Mark Mcafee: Yeah.

Leigh Ann: Mm. Oh, wow. Yeah. 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

Mark Mcafee: for about 12

Leigh Ann: into the world

Mark Mcafee: 000

Leigh Ann: to be a raw farm CEO one day.

Mark Mcafee: Um,

Leigh Ann: And you even gave us a little bit

Mark Mcafee: raw milk from cows,

Leigh Ann: what was that introduction? What kind of led you to where you're at

Mark Mcafee: camels, all around the world. And the Maasai in [00:02:00] Kenya, uh, they don't have a lactase persistence gene, but they drink raw milk like crazy to direct from their cows. And neither do the Mongolians.

In China, they don't have a lactase persistent gene, no problem at all drinking raw milk from their horses. 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 15, 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.

There were more 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,

Leigh Ann: Oh, wow. Okay.

Mark Mcafee: streams running. In those environments, cows are doing great. But if you take the cow into the city with you, and you [00:03:00] 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. So, it was all about the conditions Of the cows, what was going on with 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 1893, two major principal voices started speaking about this.

Dr. Henry Coit and Dr. and Nathan Strauss. Nathan Strauss said, well, 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 [00:04:00] 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, 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, the National 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, 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 in raw milk that he decided he was going to form something called the

Leigh Ann: Okay.[00:05:00]

Mark Mcafee: AAMMC, 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 Mayo Clinic to heal people. But it was coming from cows and pastures, sunshine, green, uh, green pastures, sunshine, clean water, uh, sanitary conditions where the cows were 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 T Titanic. It was, it was the favored 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. So it lasted. This lasted about 106 years, but remember in the 1940s and fifties. [00:06:00] We were fixing social problems with nuclear bombs and DDT was good for your skin and 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 and antibiotics was curing everything because antibiotics were new and fresh and Bacteria died quickly from antibiotics.

Now we have antibiotic resistant bacteria. So in the last 60 to 70 80 years We really Became kind of dominating the world.

Leigh Ann: Mm hmm.[00:07:00]

Yeah. Gosh. It's so fun. I'm sure you reflect on those origins a lot because you do so many of these conversations, but can you hear me now?

Mark Mcafee: Hey, can you hear me now?

Leigh Ann: Okay. How's that? Can you hear me? Can

Mark Mcafee: Hey,

Leigh Ann: I can hear you? Yeah. If it glitches out again, I'll,

Mark Mcafee: is this any better?

Leigh Ann: [00:08:00] Um,

Mark Mcafee: Is this any better?

Leigh Ann: spot, so let's make sure. Um, what I was saying is, oh

Mark Mcafee: Sometimes this works better. My cell phone actually, for some reason, has a better ability to do this than my, my computer. Unfortunately.

Leigh Ann: out again?

Mark Mcafee: All right, let's try it.

Leigh Ann: Let's see. Yeah, okay. I can see you, I can hear you. It's still a little delayed. Let's see. [00:09:00] Okay, your voice is at least, I think the video is slightly delayed, which is fine, um, but the, your voice is coming through now, so hopefully we're good. Okay, so it was cutting in and out, so sorry. So, what I was saying, because I heard that, the whole story about going to Venice, working with James Stewart, and I just was saying, it's so fun to

Mark Mcafee: Well, for about 12 to 15, 000

Leigh Ann: And to think back to, oh my gosh, we were literally bringing

Mark Mcafee: is consuming raw milk from cows, goats,

Leigh Ann: we are today and in all of

Mark Mcafee: reindeer,

Leigh Ann: all of the amazing

Mark Mcafee: all around the world.

Leigh Ann: you know, it seems expanded

Mark Mcafee: Maasai in Kenya, uh, they don't have a lactase

Leigh Ann: butter, your raw cheese, all the things.

Mark Mcafee: And neither do the

Leigh Ann: that said though, I think something that is

Mark Mcafee: China, they don't have a lactase persistent

Leigh Ann: a lot of people

Mark Mcafee: at all drinking raw milk from their[00:10:00]

Leigh Ann: It all used

Mark Mcafee: So raw milk has been universally accepted by the physiology

Leigh Ann: actually many of us, it

Mark Mcafee: uh, as a mammalian co

Leigh Ann: so many of

Mark Mcafee: domesticated partner

Leigh Ann: in a time

Mark Mcafee: for a long, long time, 10 15,

Leigh Ann: always been whatever it's been, the pasteurized

Mark Mcafee: there was a dark period in 1880s,

Leigh Ann: So can we spend some time on the history here?

Mark Mcafee: that's 130 years ago now, where people were taking their cows into town with them. were more 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. In 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, [00:11:00] and you started seeing 45 percent of people that drank that milk would die.

It was disgusting. So, it was all about the conditions Of the cows, what was going on with 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 1893, two major principal voices started speaking about this.

Dr. Henry Coit and Dr. and Nathan Strauss. Nathan Strauss said, well, 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, a lot fewer people died. So it was basically an excuse, a technical excuse, a technical way [00:12:00] to get rid of the problem with the filth that they had. And the quote that Dr. Bruce German has at UC Davis, the National 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, 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 in raw milk that he decided he was going to form something called the AAMMC, 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 [00:13:00] was going to the Mayo Clinic to heal people. But it was coming from cows and pastures, sunshine, green, uh, green pastures, sunshine, clean water, uh, sanitary conditions where the cows were 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 T Titanic. It was, it was the favored 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. So it lasted. This lasted about 106 years, but remember in the 1940s and fifties. We were fixing social problems with nuclear bombs and DDT was good for your skin and 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 and [00:14:00] antibiotics was curing everything because antibiotics were new and fresh and Bacteria died quickly from antibiotics.

Now we have antibiotic resistant bacteria. So in the last 60 to 70 80 years We really Became kind of dominating the world.

Leigh Ann: Wow. Wow.

Mm hmm.[00:15:00]

Uh oh, your screen, your screen went dark.

Your phone might have fallen asleep or maybe even died.[00:16:00]

What is going on?

Mark Mcafee: Okay.

I'm going to get rid of this.

Almost.[00:17:00]

Let's just go forward. We can do it.

Yes.

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 gut microbiome and the microbiota in your gut the biodiversity of bacteria the food that feeds that bacteria and the intestinal structures the mucosal lining and so on So forth So when you look at that people start to be aware that raw milk

Leigh Ann: Oh man, I am so sorry. I've

Mark Mcafee: microbiome Building food because it's the first food of life Think about it, baby's born, [00:18:00] 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, um, this is from a study. done by the National Dairy Council, the processing

Leigh Ann: Dana point.

Mark Mcafee: post COVID,

Leigh Ann: Yeah. Yeah. I do these

Mark Mcafee: this is very, very

Leigh Ann: a week and don't normally have issues. I,

Mark Mcafee: that they are very interested post COVID because consumers

Leigh Ann: on.

Mark Mcafee: recognize the bioactives

Leigh Ann: do recommend opening the

Mark Mcafee: very, very strong for the immune

Leigh Ann: Google Chrome.

Mark Mcafee: want to go into raw

Leigh Ann: Although I don't see, you know, people don't do that all the time and there's still

Mark Mcafee: food they

Leigh Ann: but that's the only other thing I can think of.

Mark Mcafee: So this is Fanta. This just makes me chuckle. This is just powerful stuff. Well, these bioactives are destroyed by pasteurization, and so they recognize that when you make a pasteurized dairy [00:19:00] product, you no longer have these bioactives available.

These bioactives include things like lacto alba, um, lacto

Leigh Ann: I'm so sorry. What a horrible first experience

Mark Mcafee: uh, immunoglobulins, lactoferrin growth factors, uh, fat globulin membrane, uh, oligosaccharides or 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. Brace yourself. Here they are. Anti hypertensive effects, anti tumor effects, anti inflammatory effects, anti microbial effects.

Leigh Ann: And then it'll probably take you to that like

Mark Mcafee: effects. Think COVID, think flu, think viruses, think colds. Anti carcinogenic effects. Wow. [00:20:00] 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: Okay, there we go. I'm gonna,

Mark Mcafee: I'm sorry.

Leigh Ann: close the other one.

Mark Mcafee: This came from Cornell University, foremost researchers in the world on dairy products, Dr. Lin and his whole crew, funded by the National Dairy Council. So if that's not revealing nothing

Leigh Ann: We're gonna power ahead. We're gonna get as much as we can out of

Mark Mcafee: the children that drink raw milk their asthma goes away They're

Leigh Ann: you were talking

Mark Mcafee: fewer

Leigh Ann: gut microbiome. 18th century solution, 18th

Mark Mcafee: Uh, and that's a whole other complement of studies.

And by the way, all of this is on pub med pub [00:21:00] med 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. So this is the truth and the bottom, this is 2021, 2021, two and a half years ago. 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 mean to you? Because in this study, they said that bioactives go far beyond nutrients.

Leigh Ann: Yeah.

Mark Mcafee: We're not talking about,

it's not only that in the end, bioactivity has to do with bioavailable [00:22:00] bioavailability is like, okay, you may have taken a particular pill or supplement or a 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. Nurses completely directs, there's genetic information, mRNA and other things that direct the cell functions and what to do. The 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 Best feeding does it very very well raw milk does it pretty well because obviously it's not coming from mother It's not the exact link, but it's very very close. It has been for 15, 000 years So when you think about those [00:23:00] 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 phosphates, which is very anti 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,

Leigh Ann: hmm.

Mark Mcafee: I'm sorry, not correct. That's not correct. That is not correct. It's highly misleading and incorrect. And I won't use the word lie or the word. It's that [00:24:00] 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

Leigh Ann: you want to talk about, like, that's

Mark Mcafee: 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, because it's the truth. Yes. [00:25:00] Uh, raw milk. I think the quote is.

Leigh Ann: And it's recent.

Mark Mcafee: food of the ages.

Leigh Ann: from 30, 40 years ago. Yeah.

Mark Mcafee: 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

Leigh Ann: Well, right. Because

Mark Mcafee: optimal survival

Leigh Ann: it's utilized. And when it doesn't have those bioactive

Mark Mcafee: thrive, just like you said.

Leigh Ann: um, we can't use it in the same way. Our

Mark Mcafee: of life are. The definition of it, incredibly infinite. You think about all the interactions of 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, [00:26:00] where 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 ICUs left at night. You've lost the gut microbiome. And so getting back to those roots, those blueprints of life are literally 911 saving.

9 1 1 life saving. 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?[00:27:00]

Yeah, so correct. So it leads with taste, but then it follows with digestibility, lactose intolerance, maldigestion, and allergenicity. 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

Leigh Ann: Yeah.

Mark Mcafee: responsive,

Leigh Ann: Right. And your sources are, Hmm.

Mark Mcafee: And that's in your gut. That's your gut.

Leigh Ann: Yeah. Yeah.[00:28:00]

Mark Mcafee: Yes, it is.

Leigh Ann: Yeah. Well, yeah. And you just

Mark Mcafee: Well, let me start off with

Leigh Ann: why would it be so nutrient dense? This makes so much sense ancestrally, evolutionarily, because it's basically

Mark Mcafee: fear that

Leigh Ann: these new things are coming into the earth, these new

Mark Mcafee: And raw milk has a very dark

Leigh Ann: cows, deer, sheep, goats, or humans.

Mark Mcafee: tell

Leigh Ann: And biologically,

Mark Mcafee: Cause that got killed off in the 1940s and fifties to commercialize

Leigh Ann: To be as successful as possible, to

Mark Mcafee: But let's talk about a little story I have,

Leigh Ann: grow into, to be prepared

Mark Mcafee: but I'm standing at

Leigh Ann: going to face. And so it makes so much sense.

Mark Mcafee: Down in LA and Santa Monica. And we're sitting at the table, they're selling our rum out and mostly teaching it.

We don't sell much of it ever. We just teach it and whoever wants [00:29:00] it gets it. But here comes this mom with a hard Ukrainian accent

Leigh Ann: Yeah.

Mark Mcafee: and she's five foot nine, beautiful, straight teeth, shiny hair, not overweight in 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. Okay. And you can tell she's statuesque. She's healthy. She's in great shape. 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 a 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 [00:30:00] 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. Cause 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 all the other things that are happening in her life using the American standard American diet, the sad diet, which is highly preserved, you know, food that's highly processed that doesn't feed the gut microbiome at all.

In fact, it

Leigh Ann: Oh, yeah. I mean, there's nothing.

Mark Mcafee: polarities, two stories right in

Leigh Ann: Even just organic whole

Mark Mcafee: that really drives to the bottom line. Why are we

Leigh Ann: fine. But raw milk, there's

Mark Mcafee: part of our theory is based on the fact that there was some dark story there, but that dark [00:31:00] 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 some data here that 82 people have died according to the CDC consuming pasteurized dairy products, mostly from

Leigh Ann: And there's so many, I do want to in a bit get to some more of those

Mark Mcafee: thousands of people become sick. But that's

Leigh Ann: lactose intolerance, some of the asthma stuff. But I do want to

Mark Mcafee: it's a guarantee of

Leigh Ann: sit with this piece of,

Mark Mcafee: because of

Leigh Ann: like a no

Mark Mcafee: they call the standards.

Leigh Ann: would we not all be drinking raw milk?

And

Mark Mcafee: standards are we talking about?

Leigh Ann: I think a lot of

Mark Mcafee: Well, Dr. Bruce German said

Leigh Ann: it. And so I want to sit with

Mark Mcafee: an 18th century

Leigh Ann: does that come from? What is some of the common conventional

Mark Mcafee: did was create a perpetual excuse for 18th century problems. [00:32:00] So you take

Leigh Ann: more

Mark Mcafee: 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.

Leigh Ann: Mm

Mark Mcafee: 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. That kind of raw milk absolutely should be feared in terms of consumption. Absolutely by right. I agree 100 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 [00:33:00] 10 coliforms versus a thousand coliforms And we're running one or two coliforms in our mouth 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 the 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 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.

Leigh Ann: Mm.

Mark Mcafee: Just five years ago, it would take three days to be able to detect a pathogen in our

Leigh Ann: Yeah. Mm

Mark Mcafee: [00:34:00] Now we have an on farm lab from Thermo Fisher that gives me data in 20 hours. So in just five 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 two years, that technology would probably be 10 hours. Yes. [00:35:00] And I think that what you're finding is, Raw milk is a whipping boy. You can't beat the real victim. You beat the whipping boy. So, raw milk is that um, designated target to shoot at because [00:36:00] it's so convenient. 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 and we're going to lose 10 percent this year.

That is serving pasteurization, which is having dollar voting

Leigh Ann: Mm hmm.

Mark Mcafee: 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, because of the triggering effect of all the dead bacteria and the loss of the bioactives, which your body goes, wait a minute, get mucous, 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 get that trigger up along 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 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.

They're using very high [00:37:00] 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 reframe fear a little bit, reframe 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? Where we don't have an immune system to be able to resist those things naturally found in nature? That lettuce you consume, those leafy greens that are so good for us, they have a high in 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, [00:38:00] 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

Leigh Ann: Two things I want to point out in what you just shared. One is, yeah, to

Mark Mcafee: where safety takes on a

Leigh Ann: we've, not we,

Mark Mcafee: Wrap your brain around

Leigh Ann: the powers that be have

Mark Mcafee: is safer?

Leigh Ann: sick

Mark Mcafee: the weakest of us from

Leigh Ann: And when you think about this, they're, they're being

Mark Mcafee: very sick because we're immunocompromised,

Leigh Ann: a diet filled

Mark Mcafee: food diets.

Or

Leigh Ann: all these chemicals

Mark Mcafee: we get an occasional illness of one or two,

Leigh Ann: So they're not producing milk

Mark Mcafee: but everybody thrives because we have strong immune systems and we are able to resist those things which come at us all the

Leigh Ann: even if all of those farms decided to go raw, we wouldn't want their raw milk because it would be really, really an

Mark Mcafee: of everybody

Leigh Ann: To your point, that's not how you guys are raising

Mark Mcafee: than it is to have an occasional person who might get sick.

From God knows whatever, including raw

Leigh Ann: cows. The second point I want to

Mark Mcafee: what we're doing here at raw farm, [00:39:00] which I'm extremely proud of our team and my son, Aaron and Josh and Kaylee and

Leigh Ann: 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

Mark Mcafee: ever grow in your gut.

Because

Leigh Ann: And yet with

Mark Mcafee: in our lab

Leigh Ann: thing where it's like, if, if, if something

Mark Mcafee: for 20 hours to get it to grow before it's actually done a PC measured in PCR and the thresholds are so low you can never get sick. So this is all FDA AOC approved stuff. So we've taken biodiversity to our customers without the pathogens. 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 to build back your immune system.

[00:40:00] 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 the pioneering. Mindset of a farmer who's committed and connected to consumers wanting to do better Well said well said and you

Leigh Ann: Yeah.

Mark Mcafee: 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? because Yes, and we've also said shelf life is more important than gut life. [00:41:00] We've said we'd like to 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 and that

Leigh Ann: Mm

Mark Mcafee: 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: Mm hmm. Yeah.

Mark Mcafee: The industrial paradigm of [00:42:00] processing has become literally a juggernaut. a battleship, which 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 could 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,

Leigh Ann: Mm hmm.

Mark Mcafee: which is the 80, 000 pounds per square inch. They use for fresh juices, right? It's a pasteurization step. 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 then we try new things.

Let's talk about this juggernaut for a

Leigh Ann: Yeah.

Mark Mcafee: All of the pasteurization industrial companies get together once a year at a place called the NC IMS, 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 and all of them have [00:43:00] consensus of what they're going to do.

Our 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.

Leigh Ann: Mm

Mark Mcafee: 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 because we know it works when you do it once, do it twice or three times. So when you think about that, I asked the president of horizon back in 2003, if he would ever

Leigh Ann: Mm hmm.

Mark Mcafee: doing raw milk and he goes, what, what's a raw milk.

He'd never heard of it. And this was at a international milk, uh, meeting. And I was presenting to them about raw milk. This is 20 years ago. [00:44:00] And he said, you know, let me get back to you. Let me talk about operations people, because nobody knew what I was

Leigh Ann: Yeah. To your point, I'll say it quickly and we won't go too far down this path because

Mark Mcafee: do raw milk.

And

Leigh Ann: 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

Mark Mcafee: quality if you do that.

Leigh Ann: That's all we need to say there.

Mark Mcafee: pay our farmers ten 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

Leigh Ann: outsourced our immune system is what we're

Mark Mcafee: about ultra high temperature processing. So you can't do the operations 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 being connected to people versus a processor because I serve a different champion.

[00:45:00] 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

Leigh Ann: yes, yes, yes.

Mark Mcafee: my shirt says.

Leigh Ann: With that said, very quick question

Mark Mcafee: We do it

Leigh Ann: Cause in some ways it's sort of like, this seems

Mark Mcafee: care of our cow. We look at the

Leigh Ann: Why is

Mark Mcafee: way our milk.

Leigh Ann: their heels in so deeply as it, and is it 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?[00:46:00]

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 Rommelk Institute standards, the risk for Rommelk are not zero, but they're very close to zero.

With tremendous benefit, uh, studies done by Dr. Katrina Berg in Belgium. Dr. Whitehead out of British Columbia used our raw milk institute standards and the standards yet done in Germany at the Fort Souk standards. And so you 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 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 [00:47:00] That's what's happening in america right now.

The 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 that 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

Leigh Ann: my gosh.

Mark Mcafee: 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 cultured.

Uh, ice, uh, cheeses have had 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 [00:48:00] 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, three years.

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 than 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 opposite. It's safer. And 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 [00:49:00] bright scientists that work there, give us 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

Leigh Ann: I love it. I think something just worth sitting on because,

Mark Mcafee: the examples are horrendous. Back in 1980s, when Jack in the Box

Leigh Ann: it's glitching out a little bit again. Um, I think it's worth sitting with because, The average individual may not understand some of the nuance of, wait a second, why is this not

Mark Mcafee: degrees. They didn't do so for 10 years. Jack of the box

Leigh Ann: actually sometimes like a smear

Mark Mcafee: whether you like it or not.

Leigh Ann: milk? And when we understand some of the

Mark Mcafee: because they didn't want sick

Leigh Ann: not so subtle things going

Mark Mcafee: never leaves. They follow

Leigh Ann: helps us

Mark Mcafee: to 20 years.

Leigh Ann: maybe take some of those

Mark Mcafee: don't follow the FDA recommendations. That's a good way to

Leigh Ann: do our own research and understand the

Mark Mcafee: your own investigation, follow those that have good 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, [00:50:00] I have heart stop tomorrow morning at six 30. So we got all night. All

right, go for it. [00:51:00] You're absolutely right. 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, uh, that are giving life in, in things that we can barely understand. And there's 2, 500 different kinds of proteins found in raw milk and in breast milk. And each one of those proteins has a protease or a peptidase enzyme accompanying them that [00:52:00] are destroyed in pasteurization.

There's 700 different kinds of bacteria found in raw milk, breast milk as well. Same thing. It's just, there's a reason why they're here. there's a reason why we're here today, because they're not here. You don't understand why we're falling apart as a species because of what we're eating. And we're saying it's fuel for the body.

Is not fuel for the body and fuel for a microphone. I think it's worth a go for sure to experiment. And when you do raw milk, take [00:53:00] 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 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 blended 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. And when somebody has a little bit of that and comes in and go, Oh my God, that's delicious.

Leigh Ann: yeah, so many things. I want to take a quick sec. Do you have time to go over just a little bit or do you have a hard stop?

Mark Mcafee: better. You're going to feel like you feel better because of the

Leigh Ann: Okay.

Mark Mcafee: and dopamine link between the gut

Leigh Ann: Great. Grab a, grab some dinner. We'll be

Mark Mcafee: The bioactives are there. They're [00:54:00] not damaged.

Leigh Ann: okay. I will. I'm not going to take us too far over cause I want to

Mark Mcafee: They've got all their friends around them. They've got all their good food to feed the

Leigh Ann: Something I think is very interesting. So I have my own, I have my own practice. I actually

Mark Mcafee: proteins, all this stuff's all there.

So you start out with a raw milk, uh, smoothie with,

Leigh Ann: but we also

Mark Mcafee: is pre digested by the way,

Leigh Ann: And this is basically scanning what your body's responding well to or not responding

Mark Mcafee: You let yourself start a little bit there. And then you give yourself a few

Leigh Ann: All the time. And I think

Mark Mcafee: a Dixie cup of raw milk.

Leigh Ann: to make a note of

Mark Mcafee: I'm talking about the highly reluctant. I know people that break a half gallon on their first sitting and said, I need another half

Leigh Ann: I think they need to differentiate

Mark Mcafee: not talking about those kinds of people.

I'm talking about those highly reluctant that may have some

Leigh Ann: to your point,

Mark Mcafee: off baby

Leigh Ann: bodies are having really bad

Mark Mcafee: it where it's at. Take some time to go

Leigh Ann: milk. I see that

Mark Mcafee: off that path and slowly. It only takes a few

Leigh Ann: the responses to the

Mark Mcafee: cup or two or three and give yourself some time to introduce yourself to the new sheriff in town, right?

Instead of having a [00:55:00] 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. Correct.

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 very important to understand the Maasai in Kenya have no problem drinking raw milk, the Manchurian, Mongolians, no problem with raw milk, and 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 lactobacillus, bifidobacteria, and other bacteria, coliform bacteria.

This creates the [00:56:00] 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 an enzyme for them. So remember, you have

Leigh Ann: Yeah, to that point, and we've already done it a little bit, but let's do

Mark Mcafee: lactose sugar needs lactase

Leigh Ann: milk versus pasteurized milk in terms of not just

Mark Mcafee: bacterial

Leigh Ann: bioavailability,

Mark Mcafee: So bacterial action comes from lactobacillus and all the

Leigh Ann: and why people who maybe are now avoiding milk because they're having all these negative

Mark Mcafee: 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 complementary 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 genomics.

Uh, the enzymatics [00:57:00] of what's going on. The proteomics, lipids, lipase. That's all the lipids. The enzyme lipase is there to help digest the fats that's missing in pasteurized milk. So you have this broad effect on the 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 kilo or God knows you're not going to have those things for you. And so this is foundational food 101 whole food nutrition.

Raw milk is a whole food is all there with all this complimentary, uh, ancillary components, which are put there by nature.[00:58:00]

Leigh Ann: Which is why it might be a better place to start. Yeah.

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 that.

The outer environment, you're in a

Leigh Ann: it's a good note though, because for someone who [00:59:00] maybe has been

Mark Mcafee: fully embracing your environment. You're in.

Leigh Ann: years, some of the natural enzymes within our own gut aren't there anymore to digest it. So just starting slow to introduce that to be able to kind of build that back up. Mm hmm.

Mark Mcafee: Are you ready for breaking news?

Leigh Ann: No, not yet.

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

They're taking 40 and 50 percent, 40 and 50 percent margins on our product. And that's not fair. And we want the ability to serve our people, farm direct, cold, delicious, fresh, raw milk. And we want to know our [01:00:00] 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 and bringing them to our store to buy the product literally.

Almost, well, 40 percent less and 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. So these stores are going to have all the product out showing right there. Plus we're doing ground beef and we're doing other things, uh, that will be farm direct. So what better thing to have a place you go in and you'll see a huge six foot TD monitor showing live streaming from the [01:01:00] 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.

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 that doesn't mean we're not gonna have products in all the other stores, but we do not want to be held captive where these stores are Just

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 mast cells, this is really top of mind for me right now because I'm dealing with

Mark Mcafee: So that's happening.

Leigh Ann: have done a couple

Mark Mcafee: first one's going to be down in the San Clemente

Leigh Ann: heavily with mold, but something they're seeing there is this mast cell activation syndrome, where it's just the immune system is now firing at everything.

It's completely haywire and frazzled and And just

Mark Mcafee: what a beautiful [01:02:00] 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

Leigh Ann: large because,

Mark Mcafee: Uh, if anybody has any concerns or questions, boom, they're right there.

Leigh Ann: Um, that was just a quick thought that it

Mark Mcafee: Getting to know your

Leigh Ann: particularly because I'm going to have a couple mold episodes coming out

Mark Mcafee: 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 our raw farm person, Hey, this is a great idea. 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?

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 radar or be, you know, [01:03:00] bouncing in our chairs for that might be coming?

Mark Mcafee: 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. Uh, at least more affordable. It's not cheap, but, uh, 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, the on farm lab's huge. Our creamery, our building, our brand new creamery, 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.

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 [01:04:00] platform for people to come in and watch it all happen. So we fully expect to have a 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 are really committed to growing this thing. 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, yeah.

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, has a multi ingredient product, and they have what's called a standard of identity. The standard of identity says that it must [01:05:00] be pasteurized if you're going to call it ice cream.

Okay. Well, guess what? Here's what you do. Instead at the raw farm store, 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

Leigh Ann: No way!

Mark Mcafee: in 10 minutes. So you can actually come in

Leigh Ann: Oh my

Mark Mcafee: you bought from the farmer's

Leigh Ann: five minutes from

Mark Mcafee: Or maybe we

Leigh Ann: I'm gonna be there opening day.

Mark Mcafee: 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, um, smoothies, we intend on having that there as well. So it'd be kind of the community, the immunity community, [01:06:00] uh, the immunity community of, of what the, 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 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: Mmm.

Mark Mcafee: 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 have said they can't. [01:07:00] 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 may not be possible But I tell you what

Leigh Ann: Oh my gosh!

Mark Mcafee: 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 [01:08:00] down in Arizona, in Phoenix. He's one of our 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 dairymen have said, I'm going to connect myself to people versus a processor.

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? Oh. Oh, wow. Huh.

Mark Mcafee: You are doing exactly what you should do and what you do very well. And that's to [01:09:00] 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'd be more than happy to continue. They may have the guns and the money.

I got the truth and the moms and I'll tell you what, I'll take the truth and 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 and 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

Leigh Ann: Yeah.

Mark Mcafee: You just declare victory. You've won. Uh, 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, [01:10:00] 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 everybody eventually connected to everybody. And you've won. And so I've always believed instead of

Leigh Ann: Oh, I love it. You get, you get fancy with it and that's what we got to do. But

Mark Mcafee: when you build your

Leigh Ann: so exciting about individuals like

Mark Mcafee: support of your customers, you've

Leigh Ann: a lot of people who go, Oh, I guess we can't. And then there's the people who go,

Mark Mcafee: Then eventually

Leigh Ann: to be out there. We are going to

Mark Mcafee: because that is the market is, is reality.

Leigh Ann: Mm

Mark Mcafee: Yes. We have about 550 state, uh, [01:11:00] 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 small delivery, uh, that go all the way to Chico in Northern California, cause it's too far to drive, but, um, raw farm USA.

com has a store locator. Which is pretty current and that 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 raw Uh raw milk institute. org 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. org and that's all the pub med stuff now at raw milk history We don't talk about raw farm raw farms listed, but we talk about all the farms You And we, it's a generic thing about promoting all raw milk, not just a brand of raw milk. And the science is very powerful there [01:12:00] about what we do differently.

Leigh Ann: Well, Mark, you guys are just such pioneers. Not

Mark Mcafee: try raw milk

Leigh Ann: it's that ripple

Mark Mcafee: because I know a lot of

Leigh Ann: point, the non profits you're

Mark Mcafee: that's America today.

Leigh Ann: farmers,

Mark Mcafee: that's the CBD immune system. Try

Leigh Ann: that's something that I feel like as a consumer, I have to say thank you for, for not giving up, for continuing

Mark Mcafee: two to six months.

You really, really

Leigh Ann: 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

Mark Mcafee: you so much for inviting me. And it's a privilege for me

Leigh Ann: else can

Mark Mcafee: associated with an awesome teacher, influencer, and

Leigh Ann: you guys

Mark Mcafee: to you. And that's, that's important because that means we trust each other. And I think that's beautiful. Thank you.[01:13:00]

Leigh Ann: Ooh, yes.

Mm

hmm.

Yeah.[01:14:00]

Mm hmm.

Yeah. 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?[01:15:00]

Mm.

Right. Yeah.

Yeah.[01:16:00]

Mm hmm.

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