As a left-leaning and “crunchy-granola” school, it comes as no surprise that campus is host to several different food co-operatives. Yet, while both the Fruit and Veggie Co-Op and the brand new Cheese co-op have received much student interest, the Raw Milk Co-op may be the only group of students on campus committed to visiting the cows who produce their wares.

The co-op began several years ago in a quest to bring raw milk to campus and connect students to the farms and animals that produce the milk they drink. This year, 30 different students and Middletown residents have signed up to receive milk once a week in various quantities. Members of the co-op take turns driving to Deerfield Farm each week to pick up the total of 15 gallons of milk.

“For me it’s being able to go to the farm and being able to see the whole process,” said Rory Stamp ’12, one of the organizers of the co-op. “You can’t do that with a lot of your food. It’s also a lot cheaper than the organic milk at Weshop.”

The co-op was formed to help save money on gas and to provide greater access to local milk.

“I ran it because it supports local agriculture and it’s delicious,” said Jake Litke ’10, the coordinator of the co-op last year. “And why start a co-op? You save on gas, you pay less for getting it from Durham to Middletown. It’s a service to the Middletown community because you don’t have to drive every day.”

Deerfield Farm is a small farm located in the rolling hills of Durham, Connecticut, about 15 minutes from campus. The farm, which opened full time in 2005, has a herd of about 40 Jersey cows that are fed hay that is grown in the hills around the farm. While Deerfield Farm originally sent all of their milk to a large scale processing plant, they decided to start bottling their own milk and selling it on the farm. Deerfield also sells homemade yogurt, chocolate milk, and soft cheese in a farm stand right next to their barn.

While many students insist that raw milk tastes better than store-bought homogenized milk, the nutritious benefit of unpasteurized milk is another motivating factor behind drinking raw milk.

“For me, it’s about personal preference and taste,” said Aaron Forbath ’12, the other organizer of the co-op this year. “It makes me feel healthier. Because raw milk is unpasteurized it has more vitamins and probiotics, the kinds that are found in all raw foods. Because it’s not homogenized, your body is better able to absorb the fats in it.”

Raw or “real” milk as some call it, is milk that has not been pasteurized or homogenized.

Pasteurization was first used in the 1890s when people thought that highly contagious bovine diseases were transmitted through milk. With the great improvement of farm sanitation and testing for diseases, there are now many other ways to make sure that milk is safe. Yet the Department of Health and Human Services still strongly urges consumers not to drink raw milk.

Each state has a different law about the regulation of the sales of raw milk. Eleven states currently prohibit sales of raw milk. While raw milk may be sold legally in Connecticut, farms must obtain permits before they are permitted to do so. With a permit, raw milk can be sold either on the farm or in stores. A bill in the Connecticut legislature, which would have banned the retail sales of raw milk, died in committee last year.

“They tried to recently shut it down in Connecticut because a lot of people said that there was a valid reason why we pasteurize milk,” Stamp said. “It does prevent the spread of disease but that is mainly an issue on large farms where you don’t have control over all of your animals. On a small farm you’re in contact with your animals everyday and you know when they are sick.”

On large-scale industrial farms where much of the countries milk comes from, most animals are given antibiotics to help prevent disease.

“If you give cows grain everyday they may produce more milk but it’s not as healthy for them as grass,” Forbath said. “On a large farm, cows are being fed grain and are given antibiotics– the cows just aren’t as healthy.”

The “Raw Milk Issue” is gaining recent traction in the public eye, with bills facing state legislatures across the country. With dismally low milk prices across the country, struggling farmers are turning towards the sale of raw milk as a way to cut out the middleman in the homogenization process in order to increase profits. Whereas the average price of a gallon of pasteurized milk is $1.11, a gallon of organic raw milk can be sold to the burgeoning “locavore” crowd at prices up to $6.

The Wesleyan Raw Milk Co-op is mainly focused on making local raw milk available to students who are interested, rather than working on political campaigning for the issue.

“I’m not a scientist or a nutritionist and I’m not trying to make anyone drink [raw milk] if they’re not comfortable with the idea,” Forbath said. “I just felt strongly that I wanted to drink raw milk so I decided to do it. This summer I worked on a farm and part of my chores was milking once a day so we were drinking all raw milk all the time.”