Great article. We have a few dairy goats that I milk to make yogurt, butter, cheese and love having organic milk that is free of hormones and antibiotics and filled with all the good nutrients. The organic milk in the store has no good vitamins or minerals left in it because they heat it to over 300 degrees. This is called ultra pasteurized and by law they have to label it as such but you'll have to break out your magnifying glass to read the small print. They cook it at such high temps it kills everything, both good and bad pathogens so They have to put vitamins and minerals back in it. Crazy! And it has an expiration date several months out.......by definition that is not milk. Milk does not last for three months!

My goat milk doesn't have that genetically modified lysozyme, but I still think its an incredibly healthy whole food. And we don't keep any bucks so our milk does not have that funky taste that the goat milk you buy at the store has. Just taste like plain ole whole milk. But I give the does different supplements if I want to change the flavor for cheese making. For instance.....if I feed the does sunflower seeds as a supplement for a few weeks, the milk has a very nutty flavor to it and make an incredible Brie. Also supplementing with lavender makes a wonderful floral chèvre.

The fat / cream is where most of your glucose is stored. We have a cream separator which we use to get skim milk for drinking and use the cream to make the best ice cream, cheese cakes, sour cream, butter, and 1/2 & 1/2 in the world!!!!!

Sorry for going on and on, but us dairy farmers take our milk very seriously!

I would never feed or drink raw milk from someone else's farm. The worry being worms or bad bacteria in the milk. I keep my barn pristine clean, muck out the stalls every day and have my vet come out every year and draw blood and run tests. He says I have the healthiest goats he's ever seen and we've never had any disease or parasites. We vaccinate every year and do a 21 day withdrawal on the milk before using for consumption. Because of all this, we do use our own raw milk and I could go on forever about the health benefits which you have probably already read about. I do pasteurize my milk for cheese making because I want the purity of the culture I'm using to taste like the cheese I'm making. Also, making yogurt means you heat the milk to 185 degrees and that is pasteurization in and of itself. (Pasteurizing raw milk is simply heating it to 162 degrees in a double boiler and then rapid cooling in a sink of ice then straight into the fridge) I prefer glass containers for sterilization purposes.

As for taste, you would probably not like that goat milk from the store - it's pretty gamey - tastes like the bucks smell. (We don't keep a buck in order to prevent that- and our milk tastes incredibly fresh). I'm very proud of my dairy.....if you couldn't tell.
Atlas, Sophie, Luba and Marc all LOVE it!