North Carolina Lifts Herdshare Ban

Earlier this year the North Carolina legislature passed a bill containing a provision that ended a 14-year ban on herd share agreements in the state. Herd share agreements are private contractual arrangements in which someone purchases an ownership interest in a dairy animal (or herd of dairy animals) and pays a fee to a farmer for boarding, caring for, and milking the animal(s). The herd share law went into effect on October 1. With the new law, only two states remain that have expressly banned herd shares by either statute or regulation: Maryland and Nevada.

Session Law 2018-113, also known as the North Carolina Farm Act of 2018, contains a clause stating, “nothing…shall prohibit the dispensing of raw milk or raw milk products for personal use or consumption to, or the acquisition of raw milk or raw milk products for personal use or consumption by, an independent or partial owner of a cow, goat, or other lactating animal.”¹

The new herd share law marks the continued move away from earlier attempts to ban raw milk distribution in the state. The sale of raw milk for human consumption has long been illegal in North Carolina. In 2004 an official from the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources was able to successfully engineer a stealth bill banning herd shares through to passage in the final hours of the legislative session. Sales of raw pet milk were still legal at the time but the state Department of Agriculture attempted, in 2008, through rulemaking to require all pet milk to be denatured before sale. Opponents led by then Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF) chapter leader, Ruth Ann Foster, were not only successful in defeating the proposed rule but were able to pass a bill in 2009 that legalized the unlicensed sale of raw pet milk.

North Carolina is the second state to pass raw milk legislation this year; in March, Utah enacted a law allowing the delivery of raw milk by licensed producers and the on-farm sales by unlicensed producers on a limited basis. With the crisis the conventional dairy industry is going through, there will be more opportunity to increase raw milk access around the country; raw milk is a way to survive or escape the commodity system that is throwing so many dairy farmers out of business.

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[1] North Carolina General Assembly, Session Law 2018-113 (Senate Bill 711), Section 15.2, June 27, 2018. Retrieved October 9, 2018 from https://www.ncleg.net/Sessions/2017/Bills/Senate/HTML/S711v8.html