LEOLA, Pa. — A dairy farming couple think they got a raw deal after being shut down for a month when tests found their milk was contaminated.
Delton and Bridgett Good, both grew up on dairy farms and took over Meadowview Jerseys, a 17-year-old Lancaster County raw milk business, almost five years ago.
On Aug. 8, they were informed by milk testing service Lancaster DHIA that samples taken three days earlier were presumptively positive for Shiga toxin-producing E. coli bacteria.
Raw milk sales should be:
November 23, 2024
“Aug. 5 was just a regular pathogen and water test we do twice a year,” Bridgett Good said.
She said DHIA told her the milk had to be retested on a different platform (a PCR or polymerase chain reaction test) to confirm the positive result.
While Lancaster DHIA performs required twice-a-month testing for somatic cell, fat, protein and coliform content, it sends samples to HACCP Assurance Services in Bloomsburg for the required twice-annual culture tests, the Goods said.
Raw milk producers are allowed to contract for required tests with any third-party lab approved by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.
On-farm sales of raw milk and other products complement retail and wholesale distribution across the region.
According to the Goods, they were next contacted by the Ag Department and told they would have to recall Aug. 5’s milk if the test confirmed the positive result.
“This was Thursday afternoon,” Bridgett Good said. “So we had bottled Friday morning, because she had told us only Monday’s milk would be recalled. So we’re bottling and just saying, ‘Well, we’re going to end up recalling the milk if it’s positive.’ And so we did the normal things on Friday, and he went and delivered it.”
While Delton was making deliveries, the test was confirmed positive, and Ag Department staff visited to tell them they had to recall all milk from the previous eight days, Bridgett Good said.
“Then we had to recall Monday’s milk because it was positive,” she said. “And then we had the recall Friday’s milk because they did not tell us that we’re done selling raw milk.”
The Ag Department sent out a press release announcing a contamination warning for Meadowview Jerseys raw milk purchased between Aug. 5 and Aug. 12 with a sell-by date of Aug. 19. The statement said the milk had tested positive for E. coli and listed locations where it was sold.
What followed for the Goods was confusion about the process and a month of not being able to sell raw milk to their customers and vendors because of alternating positive and negative tests that contradicted their own findings.
“We had to dump quite a bit of milk,” Bridgett Good said. “They could have even told us ‘You cannot bottle milk,’ but they did not.”
Delton and Bridgett Good took over Meadowview Jerseys in Leola almost five years ago.
Protocol Confusion
The couple said they talked to an-out-of-state attorney who said the Ag Department may have overstepped by running the press release and publishing (or even asking for) a vendor list.
The attorney also questioned the legality of a recall when no one had reported falling ill, the Goods said.
They also said the recall was supposedly voluntary but that it did not feel that way.
“The process for the consumer advisory press releases is not in the regulations book because that’s something that’s sort of an internal regulation or an internal procedure,” said Brook Duer, a staff attorney at the Penn State Center for Agricultural and Shale Law who served as the Ag Department’s chief counsel for more than seven years.
Duer said producers who are most cooperative providing requested information will probably be back in business sooner.
At the same time, the press releases are probably going to be most detailed when operations are most forthcoming.
“The more cooperative you are with providing information requested, then you may have a fuller press release that actually lists retail locations and where this same milk could have been purchased by others, for example,” he said. “That’s purely a matter of their cooperating to provide that information.”
If a farm doesn’t cooperate, such as by refusing to stop selling raw milk until the issue is resolved, the Ag Department could suspend or revoke the farm’s raw milk permit, and getting it back can be a lengthy process.
“One of the trade-offs for the cooperation is that the process for getting your ability to sell becomes much less complicated,” Duer said.
Duer said he does not recall any instance of a Pennsylvania producer refusing to stop selling milk until a potential contamination issue is resolved. The state has some of the most permissive rules for raw milk sales.
As far as no one getting sick from the milk, he said, that is not a determining factor in a recall.
“The idea is that you are preventing human illness,” he said. “You get out in front of it.”
The Ag Department said its staff handled the Goods’ issue appropriately.
During the time of suspected milk contamination, the Goods even switched back to their old milking parlor in order to rule out possible issues with new equipment.
“When the initial lab result was reported with the presumptive positive finding, supervisors in the Bureau of Food Safety sent their inspectors in the region a reminder of the protocols that must be followed and documented when raw milk samples test positive for harmful pathogens, including this type of E. coli,” said Shannon Powers, the agency’s press secretary.
“The Standard of Practice procedures inspectors are rigorously trained to follow were included in the notification to the inspectors, along with a detailed list of steps that must be taken and documented,” the email continued. “According to everything we know, the inspectors who visited the farm on various occasions followed the proper procedural steps.”
Because much of the suspect milk had already been sold and there was no way to identify purchasers, a press release was the most efficient way to notify consumers, Powers said.
The Goods said inspectors took a heavy-handed approach with the farm’s vendors.
“They were harassing them saying ‘This milk’s going to kill everybody,’ and they were scaring everybody about it,” Bridgett Good said. “And one store, I have heard, they literally watched them throw it into the dumpster.”
Little of the milk from the dates in question was returned and was likely consumed with no reported illness, according to the Goods.
High-Tech Failure?
The contamination issue came at a bad time for the couple.
Two months earlier, they had installed a Lely Astronaut A5 robotic milking parlor and a new freestall barn that will accommodate 98 cows at capacity. They are currently milking 50-60 cows.
The total construction project cost about $1.4 million.
Bridgett Good said that, as far as she knows, she and her husband are the only raw milk producers in North America using milking robots.
The machines were initially suspected as a source of contamination.
A Lelly Austronaut A5 robotic milking system brought high technology to Meadowview Jerseys.
A Lely team at Fisher & Thompson, which installed the equipment, tested the robot rigorously over the month to make sure it was cleaning properly, Bridgett Good said.
The Goods decided to return to their old barn to compare results between the two systems.
“I was 100% sure no manure got into the milk, and they still came back positive,” Bridgett Good said.
What confounded the Goods was test results kept flip-flopping between positive and negative.
Finally, the Goods decided to take and send their own samples to a different lab.
“And theirs came back positive, ours came back negative,” Bridgett Good said. “After that, Delton was 100% convinced that there was never a problem in the first place.”
The Goods are both certified to take milk samples, but state protocol requires a third party do so to rule out the possibility of tampering.
So, they said, they enlisted another third-party sampler — at three times the initial cost — to test their milk.
After two concurrent tests came back negative, they were back in the raw milk business.
The Pennsylvania Ag Department has issued a contamination warning for Meadowview Jerseys brand raw milk.
Not a Personal Reflection
While any contamination issue is unpleasant for a raw milk producer, Duer said it doesn’t necessarily mean the farmer is bad at the job.
“Tensions always run high,” he said. “A lot of people just have a hard time thinking that their milk could contain pathogens.”
“They think it’s a personal reflection on them,” he said. “It does certainly take money out of their pocketbook. But it’s really an unfortunate biological process that sometimes, the best farmer, it happens to them anyway.”
Pathogens can be inside the cow and then transferred or into the milk, he said, and such instances may have nothing to do with the cleanliness of the parlor.
“Consuming any animal-based product, particularly one that is consumed raw — not to mean unpasteurized — but just any raw food is going to have some issues there,” he said.
Labs do make mistakes, he conceded, and science is not exact.
“Because of the slightly unpredictable nature of when pathogens can show up and when they won’t, it may not be all that unusual to have a particular sample that might come clean and then have another one that doesn’t within a very short period of time from the same dairy herd,” he said.
Following her experience, Bridgett Good said she understands why some producers choose to go a different route than obtaining a permit for raw milk sales.
“Because what we could do is slap a pet food label on there, and we would never have to do any testing,” she said. “And I do understand why people would do that because if something does go wrong, (regulators) do not make it easy, and they’re not there to help you. They’re there to shut you down.”
