Husband and wife, Lisa Heenan and Darren Doherty, and their three children, began Regrarians Ltd with producers and consumers in mind.

Their campaign supports the sale and consumption of raw milk.

They also say there is a need for tighter regulations on how the milk is produced so it can be sold commercially.

The pair say farmers and home-grown agriculture enthusiasts have consumed raw milk without issue for many years.

Regrarians hosted a rally on February 19, which Mr Doherty said was "to help raise awareness of what producers are going through due to irrational and out-of-date government regulations, especially when it comes to raw milk/cheese supply, on-farm processing and other direct farmer to consumer compliance issues."

He said there was an advantage to getting products straight from the source.

Victoria Consumer Affairs Minister Jane Garrett ordered a gag-inducing chemical to be poured into all raw milk sold in stores last month, ensuring no one was able to drink it.

"Despite the fact it is illegal to sell raw milk for human consumption, clearly people were drinking raw milk and people continue to say that they will drink raw milk," Ms Garrett said in January.

"We're making this call on public health grounds. I'm deeply concerned, and I think the community is deeply concerned, about children and vulnerable people like elderly people and pregnant women either deliberately or accidentally consuming raw milk that's in containers like drinkable milk and falling very, very ill."

The legislation was introduced in response to the death of a three-year-old boy last year, which was alleged to have been a result of raw milk consumption.

The connection between the raw milk and the boy's death are subject to a coroners inquest.

Dairy farmers are now threatened with a $60,000 fine for selling the milk for human consumption.

A northern Victoria dairy farmer, who wished to remain anonymous, said raw milk had been illegal for human consumption since the 70s.

He said dairy farms were also threatened with having their dairy licences revoked. 

He said a strong underground movement had developed from people wanting raw milk.

"There are very few operations that are doing solely raw milk," he said.

"Realistically, out of a herd of 120 cows it is about 0.01 per cent."

He said all the milk the dairy produced now went to pasteurisation aside from what he and his family consumed.

The farmer said the raw milk enthusiasts would stop at nothing to get the milk.

"The general public don't know what pasteurisation does to milk," he said.

"It kills all the bad bacteria but it also denatures all the good enzymes in milk."

He said people needed to educate themselves on milk and other fresh produce available in the area.

"Shake the hand that feeds you," he said.

"People need to get to know where their food comes from.

"Consumers shouldn't expect much from what they don't inspect."

Mr Doherty said it was disappointing for the livelihood of many smaller farms to be threatened.

Ms Heenan said branding the raw milk as bath milk allowed consumers to purchase and drink the biologically-active milk prior to the new legislation.

She said only Australia and Canada had legislation deeming raw milk illegal for sale.

Other countries used strict guidelines and regulations for those producing milk allowing others to consume it.

Mr Doherty said there was a significant difference between buying food from the supermarket and straight from the producer.

He said buying raw milk straight from the farmer was a safe process and, if carried out correctly, buying it from a store was also safe practice.

"The amorphism of the supermarket experience is that you have absolutely no idea where anything is coming from, you have no relationship whatsoever with the person who is producing your food, apart from seeing a few placards of farmer X or farmer Y conveniently placed," he said.

"There is a whole chain of custody around something that is biologically active as opposed to a pasteurised product, which has had all the biology taken out of it on purpose.

"In other countries they have very rigorous testing regimes, as they should.

"Where there is regulated raw milk there is also rigorous testing, as there should be because it is a live product.

"That is something that we are looking for here."

Mr Doherty, a fifth-generation Bendigo farmer, designs farms around the world.

He said Regrarians hoped to see a new way of producing and consuming food.

Their activism does not stop short of campaigning for the rights of farmers and consumers of raw milk but for locally grown produce as well.

Polyface Farm's Joel Salatin said the large industries had made it difficult to own and operate a small farm.

"The big picture is they are looking to wipe (small farmers) out," he said.

"This is business. This is the cost of operations.

"This is what is being forced upon a small business owner who owns and operates a farm, period."

Mr Salatin said food safety laws, labeling laws, infrastructure laws and zoning was always prejudicial toward the biggest players against small players.

"The regulations are not scalable," he said.

"They are scalable up very very well but they don’t scale down.

"What happens is every time we have a revamping of food safety laws, of the regulatory structure you always see the small players get inordinate punches on the chin, because the regulations are not scalable.

"That’s what people need to understand.

"That’s one reason why I advocate food choice.

"I think it is an amazing thing in our country now that we collectively believe that it is perfectly safe to feed your kids Twinkles, Cocoa puffs, and Mountain Dew but if you feed raw milk, or compost grown tomatoes or Aunt Matilda’s homemade pickles, those are hazardous substances.

"The health and sickness statistics certainly don’t bear that out and yet that’s where we’ve come to.

"Current industrial-scale food safety regulations applied to neighbour-to-neighbour food commerce prejudice local, integrity food systems and farmers' entrepreneurial creativity.

"Requiring direct farmer-to-consumer food transactions jump through bureaucratic hurdles denies society the best antidote to the fears and hazards of industrial food.

"The antidote is not more regulations, it is unleashing customer-centric farmers on the marketplace to compete fairly with their industrial counterparts."

Gardening Australia host and landscape architect Costa Georgiadis said the Australian food system needed to make a change.

"The future of food is about participation, it's not about a system where one profits above the others," he said.

"Building a local food system requires a new vision and flexibility to protect the buds and shoots of this new direction.

"Small enterprises don't fit the shoes of big corporate regulation.

"Big change starts with small enterprise."