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t’s the middle of the night on the Allen Family farm. While some teenagers may be just coming in from a night out with friends, the Allen sisters are just getting up — to go to work. Every morning at 3 a.m., the Allen girls take turns going out to the barn to milk their cows. (And then, 12 hours later at 3 p.m., they do it all over again.) It’s something they have done nearly every day for the past seven years since their family took over a dairy business from a retiring farmer. It was a leap of faith, but it was one that Megan, Maddy and Kyla, along with parents Mary and Rich Allen, took together. “We got sold on the idea for our health to drink raw milk and we found a dairy farm in Eskridge and joined a group of other families who would go and get milk from them,” Mary said, stirring fresh cream into a mug of piping hot coffee. “He decided to take the winter off in 2011,
It was around that time the man from Eskridge decided he no longer wanted to keep his dairy going. The Allens purchased his equipment, his cows and inherited a group of customers just waiting for the chance to bring home a gallon of fresh, raw milk. “We would hear these stories from people about how they had always been lactose intolerant until they started to drink raw milk,” Megan said. “They were lactose intolerant for, like, 30 years and then, all of a sudden, they were able to drink milk again.” Mary said that’s part of the magic of raw milk. Raw — or unpasteurized — is milk that has not been processed. It contains all of the natural fats and its own natural anti-microbial system that protects from dangerous pathogens. The enzymes present in raw milk, Mary said, helps people with sensitive digestive systems process the milk.
and we were like, ‘Where are we going to get our milk? We have to have our raw milk.’ So I found a dairy in another town, but it just wasn’t the same quality. Then, Rich said, ‘Well, I’ve always wanted some milk cows.’” It was something that Rich, who has always worked various jobs in agriculture, had brought up several times over the years. He often worked with cattle on other ranches, but never had any of his own. Mary said she had been hesitant to take the leap, knowing they would be giving up the freedom of taking their girls on road trips and campouts. Still, their farm, located about halfway between Dunlap and Council Grove in rural Morris County, tucked away in the meandering of the Flint Hills, was perfectly suited for it. “We already had the land and the barn,” Mary said. “We were mostly focused on horses back then, and we raised border collies as stock dogs. We never had cows.”
The Allens say that some of the biggest misconceptions about raw milk is that people think it is unclean or dangerous. Part of that misconception, Mary said, is based around a misunderstanding of why milk is pasteurized today. “The reason they started pasteurizing milk is, in the 19th century Louis Pasteur was working with wine and it wasn’t used for milk,” Mary said. “But with the urbanization of America, everybody's moving to these big cities and there's no small farmer down the road that will sell you his milk. So, they started moving these big feedlot type dairies to the edges of cities. And they also were making — they had these alcohol distilleries in the big cities and so they were feeding the animals the byproduct of those distilleries, and they called them ‘distillery dairies.’” Those cows were getting sick because of a poor diet, and in turn, their milk became unsafe to drink raw. As long as
“We've seen from our customers so many amazing testimonials ... that is the impetus for us to keep doing it.
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you keep your dairy producers healthy, Mary said, the milk will be high-quality and nutritious. “They just fed these cows all this junk,” she said. “That’s how it became so widespread.” When cows are kept healthy and happy, they produce milk with which it is safe to drink and cook. And, in some cases, can even be consumed by those with certain milk intolerances. “The reason for that is really interesting because with raw milk, all the enzymes are still present that will help break down all the lactose,” she said. “Whereas, when it's pasteurized, it kills off those enzymes that help the body digest lactose. So, for some people that need that lactase enzyme to digest, those aren't getting killed off.” What people are getting with pasteurized milk is a lot of “dead bacteria” which trigger allergic responses. Seeing how the milk benefited their own family made the decision to jump into the dairy business fairly easy to make. Today, the Allens have one of the only locally-owned dairies in Kansas, providing raw cow’s and goat’s milk to a steadily growing customer base from all over the Flint Hills. It’s not an overly lucrative business — the Allens strive to break even each year — but it’s something about which they are all passioniate. “We've seen from our customers so many amazing testimonials of what it's done for them — that is the impetus for us to keep doing it,” Mary said. “Even if it's not making us rich, because it's definitely a small profit margin as far as the work that goes into it.” The Allens have four milk cows: Maggie, a Guernsey; and Josie, Connie and Sassy, all Jerseys. Mary said they typically have three girls milking at a time, with a fourth on a rotating maternity leave. Their bull, Romo, is a Hereford who helps with the maternity rotation, to help keep the girls healthy and producing milk safely. “I think what helps is that we are small and everything comes from healthy milking cows who are being fed a healthy diet,” Mary said. “We had all of these families that were all, ‘We want in!’ and we were actually closer for a lot of them, so it was really a win-win situation,” Mary said.