The Amish farmer who ignited outrage over raw milk and rose to MAGA fame along the way

As a follower of the carnivore diet, holistic skincare specialist Danny Neifert largely avoids grains and veggies and subsists almost entirely on meat, which she says makes her feel sated and healthy.

To round out her meals, though, she supplements with dairy — or, more specifically, with unpasteurized milk, cheese and ice cream that she's carefully sourced from an Amish farm more than 1,500 miles away. A styrofoam box loaded with these raw milk products arrives on her Colorado doorstep most months, each package costing her more than $100 in shipping fees. 

It’s worth the price, she says.

Like many customers of Pennsylvania farmer Amos Miller, she believes his dairy is so wholesome that it's a kind of medicine, bearing little resemblance to the nutrient-poor, lifeless foods that dominate American grocery stores. 

And it's delicious, she says. She talks about the “notes” she tastes in Miller's raw milk, as if describing a fine wine. 

“You just feel like there’s this symphony going on,” said Neifert, who said she learned of the Amish farm through her acupuncturist.

Last year, she was worried she’d lose access to these products after state regulators descended on Miller’s farm in Bird-and-Hand. Though the Amish man sells unpasteurized dairy — or dairy that hasn't been heated to kill off dangerous bacteria — he’s refused to get a Pennsylvania raw milk permit and has clashed with federal and state food safety officials repeatedly over the years. 

Authorities lost patience after tracing two cases of E. coli back to Miller's operation. Early last year, they descended on his farm, then asked a judge to stop him from illegally selling food through a buyers club that distributes products to thousands of people across the nation. 

The move provoked outrage from Miller's devoted customers, including Neifert, who views the farmer's lifestyle as an art form passed down across generations and says, "there has to be a way that that can exist in America."

But Miller's customers aren't the only ones who see it as a case of government overreach. Despite hailing from a historically apolitical and publicity-avoidant religious community, the Amish farmer has turned into a kind of folk hero among MAGA Republicans — and a symbol of the political right’s growing thirst for raw milk.

Miller first drew national attention in 2022 after the federal government took action against him for butchering and selling meat without the proper approvals. Then-Fox News personality Tucker Carlson profiled the case on his show, calling it a “shocking” example of how regulators and the food industry are conspiring to keep Americans sick, weak and economically dependent. 

After last year's crackdown, right-wing activists once again praised Miller for standing up against government "tyranny." Before one of Miller's hearings, Republicans crowded the sidewalk in front of the Lancaster County courthouse, blending with Amish locals in a demonstration to support the farmer. 

GOP Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky jumped to Miller’s defense, as did Donald Trump Jr., who said federal authorities should spend their time cracking down on pedophiles and not dairy farmers.

The Pennsylvanian's case came at a ripe political moment, dovetailing neatly with the Make America Healthy Again movement, a MAGA offshoot led by raw milk-drinker Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Food-safety experts discourage drinking raw milk because of the heightened risk of ingesting pathogens such as E. coli, which can cause serious illness and life-threatening kidney damage. Still, Kennedy, Trump's Health and Human Services secretary, supports expanding national access to unprocessed milk, and far-right Republicans, including Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene have latched on.

But why did the GOP become the banner carriers for farm-to-table eating?

“This is a huge shock to me,” marveled Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University and James Beard Award-winning author. “Usually, the raw milk people are on the far left of their politics.”

As a political movement, raw milk is where “the hippies meet the preppers,” said Bill Marler, a Seattle-based attorney who has built his career on food poisoning cases.

It’s a group inherently willing to question scientific and institutional expertise, which are solidly against consumption of unpasteurized milk. Especially since COVID-19, Marler explained, this crowd has collided with anti-vaxxers and anti-government types to form a MAHA voting bloc. 

Liz Reitzig, a Maryland-based advocate for food security and raw milk, said she has seen increasing politicization in the local-food community in recent years, and she’s dismayed that these products have become yet another source of discord in the U.S. 

“In a situation where our country and our households are so divided, it’s refreshing to say, look, we’re going to come sit together at the table, and we’re going to gather around these locally produced products,” she said. “It’s so human.”

Who is Amos Miller?

State and federal regulators say they’ve spent years trying in good faith to work with Miller, whose raw chocolate milk was linked to a 2014 Listeria outbreak that sickened one person in California and another in Florida. Both ended up in the hospital, and the Florida resident died, according to federal health officials. 

The farmer also waged a multi-year legal battle with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, starting during Trump's first term, because he was butchering and selling meat and poultry without federal inspection.

Then, in late 2023, a case of E. coli was traced back to Miller’s raw eggnog. In response, state authorities executed a search warrant at the farm, carrying out samples of his food in blue coolers and putting a detention order on a walk-in freezer full of his milk, butter, granola and pickled vegetables. 

Some of his items later tested positive for Listeria, and an epidemiologist testified to the likelihood that Miller’s equipment was harboring the bacteria.

The state filed a lawsuit to halt Miller's unregulated raw milk operation and fine him for violating food-safety requirements. As the case winds its way through the courts, a judge ruled Miller can continue to ship his products out-of-state to members of his buyers club, though he can't sell them in Pennsylvania. 

Miller has something of a family legacy of defying authorities and landing in legal trouble, according to his lawyer. Decades ago, before the Supreme Court allowed Plain people to stop schooling kids at the eighth grade, Miller’s grandfather was jailed “over the Amish right to educate their children in their own way,” a court brief explained.

The grandson is refusing to secure a state-required raw milk permit, in part because the Amish generally avoid state licensing systems, argues Miller’s legal counsel. (Some Amish farmers do hold raw milk permits in Pennsylvania.)

The permit would also prevent Miller from selling his unpasteurized soft cheese, kefir (a fermented dairy drink) and yogurt, which are not allowed under the Pennsylvania raw milk program, his representatives argued, according to LNP. 

Members of Miller's private buyers club sought him out specifically because of his traditional farming and food preparation methods and have the right to procure these products without government intervention, his legal defense says.

The farmer and his attorney, Robert Barnes — who has previously represented Kyle Rittenhouse and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in a Sandy Hook defamation lawsuit — did not respond to an interview request. 

The case for raw milk

People embrace raw milk for any number of reasons, only some of them related to political worldview.

Food sensitivities start many people on the path, according to hundreds of testimonials that Miller’s customers wrote for his legal defense. A group of them expressed beliefs often associated with leftist politics, citing concerns for animal welfare and environmental stewardship. 

Most of the testimonials attested to the healing properties of his dairy.

Chronically ill customers said Miller's milk, kefir and cheeses were a major source of sustenance to them — that they’d finally found products they could keep down and digest after years of struggling to put on weight. For some who'd long experienced food as a source of stress or discomfort, the farmer's spicy pepper jack cheeses and rich creams had restored the pleasure of eating.

Customers swore Miller’s dairy cured their allergies, bloating, morning sickness, brain fog, insomnia, rashes, depression and restless leg syndrome. One man said it healed his chipped tooth. 

A North Carolina woman wrote that, after a drunken driver smashed into her vehicle on the highway, she was able to calm her rattled nerves by retrieving Miller’s raw butter from her wrecked car and eating it straight from the tub.

These claims are not supported by scientific evidence, which has not found raw milk is significantly more nutritious or easier to digest than pasteurized dairy.

However, raw dairy aficionados are devoted, sometimes traveling hours to pick up Miller’s products. 

His products account for half or even three-quarters of some people's diets. Customers described drinking a gallon of unpasteurized milk each day instead of water or downing a concoction of six eggs blended with nearly a pound of raw butter.

In their view, the quality of dairy from industrial farms can’t compare with milk from Miller’s cows, which he says wander in sunny pastures grazing on herbs and dandelions. Raw milk proponents say his products and the lifestyle attached remind them of simpler times: An Irish relative’s grass-scented barn, drinking fresh milk as a child in Ukraine or a mother's homemade ice cream. 

Jeff and Linda Broadhead, two of Miller's customers, say he has ruined them for other dairy products.

“It’s a very sensual food,” Jeff Broadhead, a Rhode Island resident, said of Miller’s Greek goat yogurt. “The other stuff just tastes like cold mush.”

Barnyard realities

But these romantic visions contrast with the stark realities of the barnyard, experts say.

“You just got people with rose-colored glasses on,” Marler said. “That bacteria can’t exist if it’s a local farmer who feeds their cow grass.” 

Reitzig also says some people have idyllic views about the Amish and can jump to assumptions about their product quality and the values and ethics embedded in their farming practices.

“People are excited about the possibility of that picture-perfect life,” she said. “So they tend not to try to pull the curtain back on that.”

No dairy is pathogen-free, even with the best precautions, said John Lucey, a food science professor who has studied raw milk extensively. Harmful bacteria are in the soil, in the digestive tracts of cows and in the poop they deposit, said Lucey of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

As a result, the federal government has barred interstate sales of raw milk, and many states have enacted broad product bans within their borders.

Pennsylvania is one of about a dozen states that let stores carry unpasteurized dairy, but its program aims to prevent food-borne illness by requiring permit holders to conduct regular water supply and milk tests and to show that a vet has given their cows a clean bill of health.  

Even these steps can’t eliminate the risk that pathogens like E. coli, Listeria or avian flu will make their way into dairy products. In the late 1930s, before pasteurization was the standard, milk was the culprit in about 25% of all food-borne illness outbreaks, compared to 1% today. 

Scientific research does not support the idea that raw milk offers significant nutritional benefits, and since the heightened risks of food poisoning are clear, federal health regulators and medical experts discourage drinking it. Pregnant women, children, older adults and people with underlying health problems are particularly vulnerable.

Marler said he's won tens of millions of dollars for clients who fell gravely ill after drinking unpasteurized dairy and has even led several lawsuits against Mark McAfee, the California producer who could become the Trump administration's chief adviser on raw milk.

However, many of Miller’s customers wrote about their disenfranchisement with agencies meant to protect the food supply, echoing the distrust in institutions the MAGA movement has so effectively harnessed and amplified. 

The Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture let the beef industry dose cattle with antibiotics and hormones so the animals resist disease and grow more quickly. Ingredient lists on grocery store snacks are often an alphabet soup of chemical names, with food makers allowed to incorporate dyes and preservatives banned in other nations, the raw milk proponents said.

By contrast, they felt connected with Miller, who has let customers tour his Lancaster dairy and picks up the phone to answer questions about his farming practices.

“We do not trust the USDA to keep us safe," a California man wrote in one court testimonial. "Rather, we feel safer eating food produced by the Millers Farm, whose traditional and religious practices we trust."

Taking a chance on raw milk

As with most conspiracies, grains of truth are embedded in these sentiments, said Nestle, who has written books on how industry powerbrokers skew food research and bend nutrition policies to their advantage. 

She also acknowledges that raw milk drinkers have a point when they complain about federal regulators restricting unpasteurized dairy but allowing access to other potentially harmful products like alcohol, cigarettes and sugar-laden snacks. 

“What I do think is unreasonable is trivializing a pathogenic E. coli,” she said. “This pathogen is so terrible that people have lifetime problems with the consequences of getting sick from it.”

It’s a chance Miller’s customers say they’re willing to accept, saying they’ve never experienced any ill effects from his raw dairy. Not only do they take responsibility for the consequences of drinking the milk, but some also call it an issue of bodily autonomy and constitutional rights. 

So, despite Trump’s documented taste for McDonald’s Big Macs and Diet Coke, his attacks on institutions and tolerance for health conspiracies have resonated with Kennedy's following of unprocessed food purists.

Staff at one of the most influential raw milk-promoting groups, the Weston A. Price Foundation, celebrated with a glass of kombucha after Kennedy was sworn in as Health and Human Services secretary.

"A toast to Bobby and Make America Healthy Again," the foundation's president, Sally Fallon Morell, said in the video posted online.

Other raw milk devotees are just feeling politically homeless, like Jeff Broadhead, who said he’s voted for Democrats his whole life but feels they’ve “switched to what the Republicans used to be” and vice-versa.

If he lived in Pennsylvania, Broadhead certainly wouldn’t cast a vote for Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, he said.

“Because it was his people that went into this farm,” Jeff Broadhead said.

A business decision

Barnes, the attorney, went so far as to credit Miller's case for helping Trump win Pennsylvania last year. But in a 2024 interview, the farmer declined to say whether he was voting at all, though he spoke approvingly of Kennedy.

Miller has also espoused some fringe theories drawn from the right-wing sovereign citizen movement, arguing that he is not a U.S. citizen and exists outside certain legal requirements. However, in a 2022 interview with Glenn Beck, Miller said he would not call himself anti-government.

"We need government to a certain degree," he told Beck, adding that he does object to regulators "when our members and myself can't make choices of what I think is healthy for my body."

Reitzig said she tried to help Miller several years ago after one of his earlier skirmishes with regulators. However, she said she soon concluded he was having a corrosive influence on local farming, encouraging others to share in his hostility toward the government and potentially shadowing raw milk producers who adhere to safety standards.

“What we're seeing, rather than a small farmer feeding his community and unifying people, is actually a large, potentially greedy company that is dividing people,” she said of Miller's operation.

In her view, state and federal regulators have shown immense patience for Miller over the years he’s battled their mandates.

On the other side, Miller's legal counsel has expressed open derision toward regulators: At one point, Barnes wrote that Pennsylvania's agricultural secretary fancies himself the "Food Pope of the World."

Miller's website talks about how he drew his farming philosophy from the Weston A. Price Foundation, the nonprofit that promotes raw milk consumption and is named for a 1920s dentist who blamed root canals for myriad health problems. Price favored tooth extraction instead.

The group’s current president has spread vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories, including that the COVID-19 pandemic was caused in part by exposure to 5G cell phone towers. Miller has sponsored and attended the foundation’s annual conferences, and Kennedy has delivered a keynote address.

The foundation has also helped fundraise for Miller’s legal defense, identifying him as part of the “extended (Weston A. Price Foundation) family.” 

With all the publicity he's attracted by flouting the government, Miller — like many prominent figures in the MAGA movement — has faced accusations that he's a bit of an opportunist. Far from being a simple farmer, he's actually a shrewd businessman with sprawling assets, his detractors say.

Court documents show that he bought a $1.45 million farm at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, that he co-owns a Virginia farm purchased for $2.5 million and that he has a $200,000 line of credit. 

Reitzig also points out that Miller has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations for his legal costs over the years and argues there’s little transparency about how these dollars have been used. 

So, Miller's critics contend, his battle against food inspections and regulation isn’t about making some principled stand against government overreach. 

They say it's more about money.

Bethany Rodgers is a USA TODAY Network Pennsylvania investigative journalist.