Allgyer-Motion-CoverPageThere are a lot of things I thought I’d see before I saw raw milk being sold in Maryland. Like peace between the Palestinians and Israelis. Or North Korea give up its nuclear weapons. Or the Chicago Cubs win the World Series.

But here it is, October 21, 2015, Back to the Future Day (and the day the Cubs were supposed to win the World Series) and a Maryland dairy producer is legally selling raw milk in the FDA’s home state. You have to understand that Maryland is not just any state, but the home of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the staunchest official opponent of raw milk in the country. And Maryland’s first sanctioned seller is not just any raw milk producer, mind you, but Sally Fallon Morell, one of the country’s most visible proponents of raw milk and leader of the Weston A. Price Foundation.

According to an article on the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund’s web site, “P.A. Bowen Farmstead of Brandywine, has obtained approval to sell raw pet milk from the Maryland Department of Agriculture. P.A. Bowen Farmstead, owned and operated by Weston A. Price Foundation President and FTCLDF board member Sally Fallon Morell along with her husband Geoffrey, has begun selling raw milk at its on-farm store.”

It seems Fallon Morell exploited a little-known rule that allows the Maryland Department of Agriculture to approve the sale of pet food. Just go to the agency’s State Chemist, call the number on the page, and someone will walk you through the process, which is supposed to take a couple weeks. Fallon Morell, though, is understood to have waited several months to obtain her pet food permit, the first for raw milk ever issued in the state. Raw milk sold as pet food is the means for distribution and sales in a number of states, including Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina.

To fully appreciate my difficulty in comprehending this new reality, you have to understand how intensively the FDA has fought against the sale of raw milk in Maryland. The FTCLDF describes part of the battle, when it states: “The sale of raw milk has long been illegal in Maryland. In 2006, the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (MDHMH) issued an emergency regulation banning herdshare contracts; a court challenge to the herdshare ban was unsuccessful.” The FTCLDF also notes that the state’s legislature has beaten back efforts to pass legislation to allow herdshares.

The FTCLDF only tells part of the story, though. The FDA also mounted a major year-long investigation, followed by a two-year enforcement campaign, against a Maryland food club, run by Liz Reitzig, and its Pennsylvania raw milk supplier, Dan Allgyer. As I described at length in my book, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Food Rights”, FDA agents secretly joined the food club in 2010 and ordered raw milk, which they then sent to federal labs for testing in hopes of finding pathogens.

Even though the FDA didn’t find pathogens, it still got the U.S. Justice Department to file suit in federal court seeking a permanent injunction against Allgyer, which was obtained in 2012. Shortly after the FDA obtained the injunction, Allgyer shut down his farm rather than deal further with the agency. (The illustration above shows the cover of one of the legal briefs filed in 2011 against Pennsylvania farmer Daniel Allgyer, to prevent raw milk from being distributed in Maryland; the Justice Department misspelled his name.)

That didn’t stop Reitzig from finding other raw milk sources outside Maryland, and federal and state authorities haven’t interfered further with her food club’s operations. Now, Reitzig wonders if her long-time dream of supplying her food club with Maryland-produced raw milk might be a reality.  “I’ll be eager to see if other raw milk farmers get their permits,” she told me. We’ll learn if the Fallon Morell pet food permit is an aberration that slipped by the MD-FDA raw milk opponents, or whether it marks a real shift in policy.