This post was sponsored by Indiana Family of Farmers. All opinions are my own. You can learn more about my disclosure policy here. If you are a business interested in sponsoring a post, contact me at [email protected]
Aside from on my cereal, I didn’t grow up a big milk drinker. My husband is lactose intolerant, so he didn’t drink much either. And yet somehow I am raising two strapping young men who LOVE milk. Chocolate milk, strawberry milk, coffee milk, or just good old fashioned white, they love it all. Personally, I prefer cheese and ice cream, but I will not turn my nose up at a cold bottle of premixed chocolate milk (why does it always taste so much better when they mix it in the factory as opposed to mixing it myself at home? Is it the convenience? Is it magic? According to Prairie Farms, it’s homogenization. Basically all the molecules end up the same size so everything floats evenly, meaning no chocolate sinking to the bottom. Every sip is the perfect delicious combination of milk, chocolate, and maybe a little cream). When my boys found out I got to go on a grown-up dairy field trip, their reaction was, “bring us home some milk!!” I did, though I was really hoping to bring home one of the sweet cows instead (there wasn’t room on the bus).
The promised milk
At 8:00 on a Wednesday morning, my friends and I loaded on a bus and headed to Fort Wayne where we got to visit the Prairie Farms dairy processing plant and Kuehnert Dairy Farm. We visited Prairie Farms first, but I’m going to go in the opposite order here and tell you about the Kuehnert’s farm first. Mostly because, umm, that’s how the milk works.
The Kuehnert Dairy Farm is a sixth generation dairy farm. Now, I don’t know about you, but I imagine dairy farms in one of two ways: either a herd of maybe fifty cows that live on a pasture and are milked by milkmaids, or some scary, dark warehouse with tens of thousands of animals smooshed together and miserable. Yes, I read too many muckraking books. The Kuehnert farm was neither of these. Altogether they have a bit less than five hundred cows, and the first thing you notice about them is that they are friendly, curious, and seem happy. Most do live together in one large barn, where they are free to roam. They have music to listen to (seriously!) and it is very temperature controlled to keep them comfortable.
and I milked a cow for the first time! Photo by http://chaosisbliss.com
The Kuehnerts have some really cool technology at their farm. We were all enthralled with Harvey the Robot. Harvey is like a cross between a Roomba and R2D2, and his job is to make sure the feed stays close enough that the cows can eat all they want, when they want (they have a tendency to push it out of their reach, he pushes it back in). And the most amazing piece of technology is a milking robot. This thing is pretty awesome! The cows mosey up to it whenever they feel like being milked, a sensor finds the teats, grabs on and does the milking. When the cow is done, the machine lets go and cleans it up. The milk goes straight into the tank that it will then be collected from by Prairie Farms, meaning that human hands never touch the milk itself.
Speaking of Prairie Farms, I learned SO MUCH while I was there. First, Prairie Farms is a cooperative. That’s right, it is owned by the dairy farmers who are members. Second, safety is their absolute, number one concern. That starts from the minute they go pick up milk from the Kuehnerts’ (or other farmers’) tank. Before loading it on the truck, the driver takes a milk sample. This sample will be tested for many things, including antibiotics and age. Usually, one truck will contain milk from a few different dairies. A sample is taken at each one, then another sample will be taken of the whole truckload. If anything is not up to their standard (which means if there is even a trace of antibiotics in the milk), the whole truck is dumped. Since each individual dairy’s milk has been tested, they know where the problem came from and that farm will be penalized and forced to pay for the entire truck of wasted milk. Needless to say, it is definitely in the farm’s best interest to make sure the milk they provide is the best quality.
The Prairie Farms plant is hardcore. They follow very strict health and safety regulations to ensure the best environment for their product. We weren’t allowed to take phones or cameras in with us or wear any jewelry, per regulations, and in order to tour the factory we had to gear up in lab coats, hair nets, and little booties to cover our shoes. And, I’m not sure I have ever seen anywhere so CLEAN! Like, see your reflection in everything clean. If a machine was not currently in use, it was in the cleaning process.
I was going to take you step-by-step through the whole milk making process, but Lulu from Indy with Kids beat me to it, so I’m going to let her take it from here:
Also, if you have littles, check out Crystal from Mom for Less’s early childhood homeschool lesson, Magical Milk!
