Keep in mind that I know only enough on this topic to be dangerous. You should definitely do your own research and don't take my word for it.
Having said that, illness from raw milk is relatively rare. It's only high in comparison to pasteurised milk. The CDC in the US says there is about 1000x greater chance of illness from raw milk products than pasteurised milk products and I'm inclined to believe they are correct. However, the chance is not particularly high. I don't have real numbers on hand, so this is only my recollection (again, do your own research!). IIRC there are about 2 million people who regularly (I assume daily) consume raw milk products. Among those there is, on average, less than one death per year. It goes in batches, though. So you'll have several years without deaths and then you'll have a year with 10 deaths. That's because serious problems are rare, but when you have them you have them.
Death is not the only thing you have to worry about. You can also get serious illness (for example, losing the use of your kidneys) that will make the rest of your life potentially miserable. This happens to several people per year. In terms of hospitalisations, there are 10s of people per year and in terms of illness that doesn't lead to hospitalisation, there are perhaps 100 people or so per year. The last one may be very much under-reported, though, so estimates vary wildly. Again, I have to stress that these are not real numbers. They are just what I remember from looking into it a few times. Do your own research!
With these kinds of numbers, you can see that the odds of you getting fairly seriously ill are something like 1:100,000 or so. So that means that if you drink raw milk every day for 100,000 years, you can expect to get seriously ill once. This is why people who drink raw milk report that they never get ill and that they don't know anyone who has ever gotten ill. It's unusual to get ill. However, you can understand the CDC's position that raw milk is dangerous because if you had 300 million people drinking it every day, then you would have 3000 people a year getting very seriously ill and you would have years where hundreds of people would die. It's still a very low risk for an individual, but as a society it's a certainty that people will die.
One thing that I think is a dangerous myth is that only people with compromised immune systems will fall ill. There seems to be no data to support that idea. I think that most people think that since they never get ill and nobody they know gets ill that only people who are already ill will be at risk. That appears to be completely false. You have pretty much the same risk no matter how healthy your are.
Another fairly dangerous apparent myth is that only farms with really bad hygiene practices will produce raw milk that is at risk. Let me qualify this... It is possible to produce milk in cows in such a way as there is *no* bacteria in the milk (I saw a paper on that fairly recently -- I wish I kept links... :-P ). It is completely unreasonable to do this at commercial scale :-) On the other hand, you can obviously just throw feces into the milk and make sure that it's teaming with bacteria. More care obviously results in a safer product. In the US (and other similar countries), the level of hygiene with standard practices is high enough that raw milk is relatively safe from a personal standpoint. There is an upper bound to the amount of hygiene to can have and still be commercially viable. You aren't going to milk cows in hazmat suits, disinfect every surface or do other crazy things when you are raising cows. Within the range of hygiene that is reasonable in the US (and other similar countries), the risk appears to be similar from farm to farm. Looking at the case of outbreaks, it does *not* appear to be the case that farms with bad hygiene track records are at higher risk than farms with good hygiene records. In fact, many farms with outbreaks have literally won awards for the hygiene of their farms.
If I am correct (again, I'm just a guy on the internet with enough spare time to make myself dangerous), looking for a "good" producer on this basis is meaningless. All you really want to do is to pick a milk that has the properties that you want. If it tastes good to you (including the taste of the clabber) and it performs well for making cheese, then it's a "good" milk.
