A Look at Raw Milk in Virginia

A story that got killed!

Apr 25, 2025

Oh hey! I bet you didn’t expect to hear from this little newsletter after its many week silence. To be honest, I’m not sure what the fate of this newsletter will be! It shuffles down to the bottom of the priority list every week, and I’ve had a hard time figuring out what exactly its purpose is.

But this week, its purpose feels clear to me — to share a story I wrote that got killed by its would-be publishers.

Back in the spring of 2024, I pitched a story about raw milk to a local publication. The idea was to show the many ways raw milk can be experienced here in Virginia — herd shares, cheese, even ice cream. The editor greenlit the story, and I got to work. But when I submitted the story a few months later, the response was quick and unexpected: They couldn’t run it, at least, not the way it was written. The climate (as in, the political climate) had changed, and it was no longer a fit for that publication’s readership. Ok! I reworked the story, dropped political references of any kind, included other producers in an effort to make it more well-rounded. My editor seemed happy, but eventually she shared that the publisher, under advice from their legal team, was going to kill the story, saying:

“We've made the decision not to publish your dairy farm story. As always, it was well-researched and well-written, but our publisher has decided that a focus on dairy farms that produce raw milk is too controversial at this particular moment in time. This was also advised by our legal counsel, and the last thing any of us want is to create a litigious and time-consuming dust-up.“

That’s the first time something like this has happened to me! It was weird! I half-heartedly pitched it elsewhere but didn’t get any bites. It was then that I remembered this very newsletter — the place where I can publish whatever I want. So, here it is, a look at raw milk in Virginia. Because I’m self-publishing, this version is a combination of all of my drafts in an attempt to present as much of the full picture as I can.

For the record, I get my milk from Creambrook Farm. I love the creamy top and the fresh taste. I like the proximity between my house and the farm itself, which at least theoretically reduces the associated carbon footprint. I appreciate the fact that I can ride my bike to pick up my weekly herdshare at the local co-op, and it feels good knowing that the cows are well cared for and the operators of the farm are a sweet young family. That’s what led to my decision to switch from Horizon to raw milk. These days, I feel like I should hide the fact that I drink raw milk, as it’s become aligned with a weird MAGA subset to which I have no other affiliation (and a vehement aversion), but the truth is, I drink raw milk because it feels like the most responsible choice that I, a dairy lover, can make.

Meet Your Milk: Four Raw Dairy Farms in Virginia

When you think about Virginia’s most celebrated libations, you might imagine the award-winning wines of the Shenandoah Valley or perhaps the moonshine that once flowed in Floyd County, but neither holds the title of Virginia’s state beverage. That honor goes to good old fashioned cow’s milk, which was recognized as the official state beverage in 1982. Fast forward a little over forty years, and in 2023, Virginia was producing 170 million gallons of the stuff from its over 300 dairy farms, which range in size from 300-head operations to small family-run farms with a few dozen dairy cows. For some dairy farms, milk is the final product, while for others it’s just the beginning.

Creambrook Farm

Creambrook Farm falls somewhere in the middle of Virginia’s dairy spectrum, with 104 cows on 240 bucolic acres in Middlebrook. The family-owned dairy farm specializes in raw, lab-tested grassfed milk and also offers kefir, heavy cream, and butter. Owner Ben Beichler says his mission is to provide access to “good, high quality raw milk,” which he does by selling herd shares.

Selling raw milk is prohibited by Virginia law, but drinking raw milk from a cow you own is perfectly legal, so farmers like Creambrook owner Ben Beichler offer something called a herd share. With this arrangement, customers become co-owners of Creambrook’s herd, enabling them to receive weekly deliveries of milk from their own cows.

“Each culture kind of has their own special relationship with milk, and you definitely see that as you talk to your customers and learn their cultural, personal, and family history with milk.” says Beichler, who notes that Creambrook customers include homeschooling parents, busy professionals, military personnel looking for a ‘performance edge,’ the Russian and Ukrainian communities in Harrisonburg, and the Indian community in Richmond, to name a few.

A gallon of milk from Creambrook Farm differs noticeably from the whole milk you can buy at the grocery store. Through its translucent plastic carton, you can clearly see the division between milk and cream. Beichler says the Jersey cows like the ones at Creambrook are known for having milk with a higher butterfat content than the more typical Holstein breed. “So naturally, our milk is considerably more nutrient dense, just on a fat protein basis, than what you buy from the store, because we don't skim the fat off the milk.” Creambrook’s butterfat content ranges between 4.2 to 5.5%, while conventional pasteurized milk taps out at 3.25%.

Another important difference is in the lifestyle of the cows. These cows graze outdoors 365 days a year. “That changes the fat, acid profile, and nutrients that are available in the milk," says Beichler. “And since it’s not pasteurized, all the nutrients remain intact because they haven’t been killed or compromised during the pasteurization process.”

Beichler is well aware of the often heated dialogue around raw milk, but, he says, it doesn’t concern him. “I think it's a very personal decision,” says Beichler. “We want to support people who are trying to make healthy choices in their life, and if raw milk isn't a fit for them, I'm fine with that.” He bristles, however, at rhetoric that labels raw milk as dirty and dangerous.

The CDC recommends against consuming raw milk because it can cause serious illness, due to the possible presence of germs like E. coli, Listeria, and Salmonella. And according to a systematic review by The National Library of Medicine, of the thirty-two disease outbreaks linked to dairy consumption between 2007 and 2020, 20 involved unpasteurized products, which led to 449 confirmed cases of illness, 124 hospitalizations, and five deaths. During the same time period, outbreaks involving pasteurized dairy products, which account for 99% of the market, resulted in 174 confirmed cases of illness, 134 hospitalizations, and 17 deaths.

“Raw milk, if it’s not handled well, can have potential risks to it, and you’re ignorant if you’re in the raw milk business and you don’t acknowledge that.” But, he says, if you’re working with a producer who is meticulous about food safety and testing, you should feel “very confident” consuming the milk. “As long as the producer has procedures and policies in place that are monitoring their quality,” Beichler says, “you can safely produce raw milk at scale fairly easily. But if it's not being done responsibly, then you're kind of just leaving it up to chance, and that's never a good policy.”

Sweetland Farm

Robby Lisenby started his farm, Sweet Land, in 2011. He lacked a background in farming, but after interning at an organic dairy farm in Vermont during college, he began to view cattle as a tool for environmental stewardship. For Lisenby, cows are a means to an end, and milk is the byproduct.

“When you’re using management-intensive grazing [essentially, moving cattle between pastures in alternating periods of grazing and rest], you can heal the land; you can sequester carbon; your water infiltration is better,” Lisenby explains. “Using cattle to graze in an appropriate manner heals the land better than any tool that exists.”

“Our farm produces raw milk and that is great for the folks consuming it, but milk production is only one part of our goal at Sweet Land Farm,” Lisenby writes on the Sweet Land blog. “We graze with the goal of demonstrating that you can make a living at grazing cows while healing the world at the same time. You can make food and do good for the land at the same time.”

Sweet Land’s core consumer, Lisenby says, are families with young children — folks who have issues digesting cow’s milk who aren’t interested in plant milks. “They’re looking for an alternative that their kids can digest well,” Lisenby explains. “It's not that they have something against pasteurized milk, necessarily. It's just that they feel poorly when they drink it.” For them, Sweet Land’s raw, grassfed, A2-A2 milk (milk that comes from cows that only produce the A2 beta-casein protein, making it easier for some to digest) solves those issues.

According to the Raw Milk Institute, a non-profit dedicated to promoting raw milk, “Pasteurization inactivates enzymes and also denatures proteins, and consequently pasteurized milk induces digestive discomfort in many people. Lactase is the enzyme responsible for breaking down lactose into digestible form. Raw milk facilitates the production of lactase enzymes in the intestinal tract, and thus it makes sense that so many people have reported improvements in lactose intolerance from drinking raw milk.”

The FDA pushes back on this, stating: “All milk, raw or pasteurized, contains lactose and can cause lactose intolerance in sensitive individuals. There is no indigenous lactase in milk,” going on to note that raw milk lacks probiotics, which, when added to dairy products like kefir, may help ease lactose intolerance.

Over the past 13 years, Lisenby has painstakingly grown Sweet Land from 7 to 74 cows, and he’s built the Sweet Land brand around his message of environmental stewardship, opting for the more labor intensive and costly glass bottles over plastic—a major differentiator between Sweet Land and its competitors. “We feel better about the product in glass,” says Lisenby. “When it gets broken down, we're talking about sand. We're not talking about something that may or may not be just sitting in the earth for however many hundreds of years, until it finally breaks down into something else.”

After struggling to make ends meet in the farm’s early years, Lisenby realized he would have to scale up his business to survive. He grew Sweet Land by absorbing other small homesteads that struggled financially. Now the farm runs with the help of nine employees, including a third generation dairyman who manages the daily milking. Lisenby says scaling up has been met with skepticism from some of his customers, who have a more idealistic view of what a small family farm should be. “We need to understand that scaling isn't the worst thing in the world,” notes Lisenby. “I know that the quality of product we offer now is much better because there are more eyes on it, and everyone who works for us cares passionately for the product that they produce.”

Meadow Creek Dairy Farm

For Meadow Creek Dairy, like Sweet Land, milk is a means to an end, but in this case the end is delicious, award-winning cheese. The small, family-run dairy in Galax makes some of the best cheese in the world, including their best known and first offering—Appalachian, a nutty, mushroomy cheese in the style of European tommes, that was created by owner Helen Feete in 1998 to showcase the farm’s rich raw milk. In 2023 the signature cheese won a Super Gold medal at the 35th Annual World Cheese Awards in Norway—one of many awards in Meadow Creek’s trophy case.

The dairy produces just four cheeses—Appalachian, Grayson, Mountaineer, and Galax—each a tribute to the dairy’s unique location and terroir. Here, seasonality is more than a buzzword; it’s a way of life. The operation differs from conventional dairies, opting for a seasonal approach that lets the cows calve together in the spring, graze and milk through the summer and fall, and then ‘dry off’ in the winter, affording the whole farm a well-needed rest.

Meadow Creek Appalachian at the American Cheese Society Competition, 2019

“For us there is a noticeable change in the milk depending on the season it’s made,” says Kat Feete, the farm’s general manager and the daughter of founders, Rick and Helen Feete. “Grayson made in spring, for example, is much lighter in flavor and silkier in texture, while what we make in the fall is earthier, stronger, and almost fudgy.”

Meadow Creek’s cheeses are all made exclusively using milk from their own 150-cow herd. Like Sweet Land, Meadow Creek uses management-intensive grazing, moving cows from one grassy pasture to the next. That grass, one could argue, is the lynchpin of the whole operation, and it includes a mix of clover, chicory, ryegrass, plantain, and brassicas in an ever-evolving combination that reflects its ever-changing ecosystem.

Brookfield Dairy Farm

Greg and Sue Harrison moved back to Greg’s nearly 200-year-old family farm in 2020. There, just ten miles South of Leesburg, the couple raises a small herd of Brown Swiss Cattle—show cows that are known for being more docile than your average Holstein. Those mild-tempered cows make the farm a great place to welcome tourists and school groups, and they also provide milk that the Harrisons sell in herdshares directly from the farm.

But after selling milk, cream, and butter for a few years, Sue answered the call from her neighbors to introduce something a little sweeter—ice cream. “Because everybody loves ice cream,” she laughs. “That was kind of the one thing that people kept asking me for.” Harrison had fond memories of Greg’s mother’s homemade ice cream and took to the internet to learn how to make her own. Now, Brookfield Farm operates a seasonal ice cream trailer from which they serve their ‘cow-to-cone’ ice cream made from raw milk from Brown Swiss Cows.

The ice cream works a bit like bait to attract folks to Brookfield Farm, where, Harrison says, she hopes to provide an education to the public about what a working dairy farm can be. Harrison describes Brookfield as a sort of companion farm to the Loudon Heritage Farm Museum, of which Greg’s dad, Bill Harrison, was one of the founding farmers. Now, the farm brings their baby calves to the museum regularly to connect with the public and help them understand their way of life.

“The ice cream helps bring awareness to the farm,” says Harrison. “Just to get people interested in trying to understand where their food comes from, and that there are more options out there.”

Of the Commonwealth’s roughly 300 dairy farms, only about ten percent offer herd shares. Farms like Creambrook, Sweet Land, and Brookfield represent an interesting paradox—an older, smaller way of farming that’s been in decline for years but one with a devout and vocal following that’s bringing a lot of attention to the subject of raw milk. For these farmers, raising cattle offers an opportunity to act as stewards of the land while providing access to raw milk for their neighbors.