Why Is Raw Milk So Hard to Buy? A Newcastle Dairy Farmer Explains

Over the past year I’ve visited a lot of farms. Bays Leap Farm, an organic dairy farm in Heddon-on-the-Wall near Newcastle, taught me something I hadn’t thought about before.

I asked a simple question. Is anybody doing a delivery service for raw milk?

Here’s what the farmer told me.

You can’t buy raw milk in a shop

Raw milk can’t be sold in a supermarket or any shop. If you want it, you buy it directly from the farm, or from a milk round.

That’s why farms like this one have a vending machine on site. You turn up, fill a bottle and go home. It’s about as short as a supply chain gets.

It also means that if you don’t live near a farm, raw milk is hard to find. It isn’t hidden. The rules just make it a farm-gate product.

The milk round didn’t die because people stopped caring

I assumed people had simply gone off the milk round. The farmer put me right.

“Everything’s changed. It’s not just people have gone off.”

Think about what a milk round needs to make money. You have to work both sides of a terraced street in Newcastle, and you need most of the houses to be customers. If only a few houses on the street buy from you, the fuel and the time cost more than the milk earns.

Then there’s everything else that’s changed:

• People work different shifts, so nobody is home at the same time.
• Cars are parked down the whole street, and you can’t park a van.
• Fuel is expensive.
• You can’t leave a bottle on a doorstep any more.

On that last point he laughed. If you left a bottle of raw milk on a doorstep in Newcastle today, “they’d think it was gold.”

The day they tried to sell it off the back of a pickup

He told me about the day he loaded milk into the back of a pickup and said to two of the women who work for him, “come on, let’s get down to Newcastle and sell some milk.”

They drove up and down the streets shouting “raw milk for sale!”

One of them flatly refused to get out of the cab. The other put on her uniform and got stuck in. Some people did buy it.

He’s the first to admit it was a slightly mad idea. But I like it, because it shows how much effort a small farm puts into getting good food to the people who want it. His view is that there’s plenty of demand if someone can find the right way to market it in the city.

The customers who come back every week

Then he told me about a group of customers who turn up every Thursday.

They don’t just fill a bottle of raw milk. They buy grass-fed beef, yoghurt, eggs, whatever’s on offer that week.

He only properly met this community a few years ago. He’d been invited to talk to customers and potential customers about the history of raw milk and what he’s doing on the farm, and it opened his eyes to how many people actively look for food like this.

So the demand is already there. The pickup truck was a funny idea, but the people who find the farm keep coming back, week after week.

What a cow eats is the whole point

While we were talking, the conversation turned to feed.

Bays Leap is an organic farm, and he told me he doesn’t buy in feed. The cows eat what they’ve always eaten. That’s also why he couldn’t use the new methane-reducing additives that have been in the news: they aren’t approved for organic farms, and he says he’d have no way of adding them anyway.

He feels strongly that you shouldn’t mess with a cow’s natural feeding system, and that’s a view I’ve heard from other farmers too.

It’s why I keep asking farmers the same question: what do your animals eat? It tells you more about the milk, the meat and the fat than any label.

What this has to do with you

I don’t think this is only about raw milk. A small farm can make a great product and still struggle to reach the people who’d love it, because the systems we built around food favour the big supermarkets.

That’s why I keep coming back to the same few things:

• Find your nearest farm shop or farm vending machine. Buying direct puts your money straight into the farm.
• Ask where your food comes from. The farmers who are proud of their work will talk about it for as long as you’ll listen.
• Tell someone. Small farms don’t have marketing budgets. They rely on word of mouth.

If you’re curious about raw milk, buy it directly from a farm that sells it legally and does it properly, and ask them any questions you have. I’m not making any health claims here. I just think you should know where your milk comes from, and that you can meet the person who produces it.

I’ll be sharing more from my farm visits soon.

Ryan 🐮

Back to blog