Farmers Experiment with Milk Treated with UV Light Instead of Pasteurization

Several farmers in the United States and other countries are experimenting with treating milk with ultraviolet light instead of pasteurization, for feeding calves on the farm. Pasteurization does not guarantee the destruction of all pathogens, but it does kill beneficial nutrients such as proteins and vitamins. Exposure to UV light does not destroy pathogens but it does prevent them from reproducing, and the technology has been successfully used to purify water.

One dairy farmer in New York has been feeding his calves UV-treated milk. He “wrestles a 3-week-old calf onto a scale. The calf totters about; the scale reads 52 kilograms, a healthy weight. [The farmer] makes a note.”

Another dairy farmer in Minnesota installed a UV milk purifier on his farm a year and a half ago. “We were having a lot of problems with clostridia when we were feeding milk replacer,” he said. “That was all but eliminated after we switched over to feeding UV purified milk.”

Michael Schmidt, the author of The Bovine blog who conducted his own two-calf study comparing the effects of feeding calves raw milk vs. store-bought pasteurized milk, writes of the UV milk experiments: “If it works for calves, why wouldn’t it work for people? Though probably the bar of surety is set higher when we’re dealing with food for humans.”

Draw your own conclusions by reading more about the experiment here:

http://thebovine.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/uv-light-instead-of-pasteurization/

The Campaign for Real Milk is a project of the nutrition education non-profit, The Weston A. Price Foundation. Donate to help fund research into the benefits of nutrient dense foods.  http://www.westonaprice.org/lab