Since AB 1735 has been in effect since January, 2008, how have the dairies continued to provide raw milk products to retail outlets?

In early 2008, the raw milk dairies went to court and received a temporary restraining order (TRO) against implementation of the AB 1735 standards. During the TRO period, the coliform test results could not be used to degrade the products, but the CDFA could still collect samples and perform the tests. When the TRO was lifted in late May/early June, the CDFA used the results collected during the TRO period and issued degrade notices to the dairies immediately.

Since June, the dairies have regularly been degraded or just one test away from being degraded. When a dairy is on degrade, business operations are disrupted and thousands of dollars are lost, but consumers often do not notice a significant change in supply because of the large amount of product still on shelves. However, product that has been degraded cannot be delivered to stores, so as the days pass only product with older code dates will be on the shelves. Product that has been degraded will either be dumped or made into other products not beholden to the 10-coliform standard such as cheese.

To reinstate the degraded product, the next batch must now pass the coliform test, which takes only 24 hours to complete. If the product passes, the dairy rushes to get the product to store shelves for consumers. It would take a very sharp consumer to notice that a raw milk product was on degrade and not delivered during a particular week. Usually there is a 4-5 day delay in product delivery, which represents a massive loss of revenue to the dairy. Thousands of dollars are lost in dumped product, extra deliveries, and administration as operations are disrupted during degrades.

It is ironic that one batch of raw dairy product can fail the 10-coliform standard and be deemed safe to sell, yet the very next batch can fail the test and have to be dumped only because it is the 3rd out of 5 batches to have exceeded the coliform limit. In other words, even though there is absolutely no detectable difference in the quality of 2 batches of product that test at 15 coliforms/ml, one batch may be sold and the other batch may have to be dumped.

Perhaps more alarming, the dairies regularly send product samples to independent labs for coliform testing and these results are frequently at odds with those of the CDFA. In some cases, the dairies’ samples will be within the limits while the CDFA’s are not, and in other cases the opposite is true. This phenomenon shows how unreliable and irrelevant the coliform test is at this level of measurement. Or, it opens the possibility that the CDFA may be selective in its reporting of test results and enforcement of the standards regardless of the actual test results it has obtained.