Benor Farm offers add-ons like ricotta to their herdshare program. (Photo: Christine Zhu/NC Newsline)
One of the biggest topics of 2025 for farmers, consumers and healthcare providers in North Carolina was whether raw milk should be legal to sell for human consumption. The battle, which has been going on for years, could well resurface during the 2026 legislative session.
Raw milk has not undergone pasteurization, which is a process of heating the milk to a high temperature for a certain amount of time to kill pathogens like tuberculosis, which for centuries was frequently caused by drinking milk from cows with tuberculosis…