I work with a couple different farming families. One has 3 stalls, in a kind of faux-swing system. 30ish cows. He has 3 wash containers, 1 for each stall, filled with a kind of natural surfactant. He will wash a cow, then re-use the same rag and washwater, for all the cows passing through this particular stall. So the dirt and accumulated-whatever for 10ish cows, is used and re-used, throughout the milking session.
He's been doing this a long time, and has a devoted following. I appreciate him and his family, very much, but made the tough decision to stop working with him. I believe he's going to get someone seriously ill one day. Beyond that, I think it a kind of hubris, to almost invite an issue that doesn't need the invite.
Contrast it with another family, friends, really, who take every precaution - still without iodophor or any other sanitizer - to keep the process clean as possible. A great deal of care, to ensure the milk they deliver is not only raw and natural, but safe and clean.
I see it as an ownership of responsibility. As milk providers, as cheese providers, whatever sanitation paradigm we embrace, we owe it to our customers to do the best job we can, to deliver healthful food. Both these guys believe, nature tends to offer a better answer, usually; that our microbe-terrified world has made for itself almost a self-fulfilling prophecy by a flawed "germ theory" of food protocols. But the latter fellas abide by this principle, with common sense and a sense of duty.
I see religion in the pasteurized milk folks, I see it in the raw milk folks. I think any of it, that devolves to a religious stance, is a red flag.
