Hi folks,

I wanted to give everyone a snapshot of how our milk gets from the cow to the bottle in the store where you buy it. It actually is a very complicated process compounded with the overwhelming  urgency of a highly perishable product.  Our operation is structured in such a way where we not only have our own farmers that supply milk strictly to us,  but we then process and bottle that milk right here at the plant.  My job here at the Creamery is to work with the farmers and also oversee plant operations, so I see the entire process from udder to bottle.

First, we send our milk trucks out daily to pick up farm dairy milk on a set schedule. We have a “local” route (Amish dairies located right here in Kalona) and a “south” route (Amish/Mennonite Dairies located in Bloomfield, Iowa, northern Missouri, and eastern Illinois). Those trucks have to go out daily, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, rain, snow, ice, or shine, because cows are milked daily and the minute the milk leaves the udder it’s deteriorating. The way the dairy chain works (when it is working well) is that everyone is very aware of the need for the milk to stay cold. Once milk reaches the 41F threshold, bacteria starts to multiply exponentially. It’s the presence of bacteria that causes milk to sour, go bad, get off flavors.  Having said that, summertime is very difficult in the dairy industry, and wintertime is kickback time. We like cold. We don’t like heat.

Our milk trucks load each farmer’s milk into the milk truck. Extreme care is taken in transferring the milk from the bulk farm tank to the milk truck in terms of sanitary procedures.  Typically Amish farms are not necessarily laid out with large milk truck access in mind — more for horse and buggy. Wintertime snows and ice can make it very challenging for our drivers to negotiate the winding narrow lanes and random buildings to be able to pull up to the milk house.

Once the milk truck is full, or the route is completed, the truck heads back to the Creamery and our receiving station. Each truck is carefully backed into our receiving bay — the bay is such that with the larger milk trucks we might have less than 8 inches between the front of the truck and the overhead door and the back of the truck and the wall. Our milk receiver extraordinaire Paul Bender then will go through the procedure of unloading the truck into the plant, where we then shift it around to process and bottle.

One the milk is bottled  it is shrink-wrapped into cases and then “palletized”. We load the milk onto trucks and off they go to either stores or distributors. Due to the nature of our product in terms of processing, our milk is very perishable. We don’t homogenize and our pasteurization temperature is as low as regulations will allow. We do this because we believe the closer to the raw product we can get, the better tasting and the better for you our milk becomes.

Because of this philosophy, our milk cannot sit on store shelves for months at a time.  Our product is not a national product — we can only go out so far in distribution. The farthest out we can go is Atlanta, Georgia, and the only reason we can do that is because we go directly to one store (Dekalb) and that one store orders a full truck load.

The amazing thing about milk is that it must be handled correctly day-in and day-out, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year forever. No screw ups. Keeping it cold. And this includes the you, the customer — you cannot leave our milk out in the warm air and expect the milk to keep.

It amazes me daily to see what we do to ensure the milk we bottle is a high quality product, given the extreme perishability. We could be like the “big boys” and ultra-pasteurize the milk at 200F degrees so that the shelf-life could be in terms of months instead of days. But we believe in what we do and we hope you do, too!! Thanks for checking us out!

In today’s world of nutritional confusion, many of us believe that saturated fats must be completely avoided in order to prevent disease. If we would take a look at ourselves on a microscopic level, however, we would see a completely different picture: approximately half of each of the tiny membranes surrounding your individual cells is made of saturated fat!

Saturated fat is so important to good health that if our bodies are deprived of it in the diet, they will start to manufacture it from carbohydrates. It is still better, though, to obtain saturated fat from whole food sources such as coconut, dairy, grassfed meat, and egg yolks. Requiring your body to make saturated fat from carbohydrates requires the release of insulin to digest the carbohydrates, while fat digestion does not. Over time, excess insulin release may lead to premature aging, weight gain, and blood sugar problems such as hypoglycemia or diabetes.

An average glass of whole milk contains about 8 grams of fat, with slightly over half of that fat as saturated fat1. The term “saturated” refers to the arrangement of carbon and hydrogen in the structure of the fat – a saturated fat is “saturated” with hydrogen because it has a hydrogen molecule at every available location. Saturated fat is an important building block for brain tissue – especially in children – and it also serves as an important ingredient for making hormones. A recent study found that women who choose low-fat dairy products over full-fat dairy products are more likely to experience anovulatory infertility2, which is an inability to become pregnant due to lack of ovulation.

Dairy fat in particular contains two types of saturated fat with amazing health benefits: butyrate and CLA. Butyrate, a specific type of saturated fat found in dairy, serves as the primary food for colon cells3. This fat is made through a fermentation process by the healthy bacteria in the gut. This fat can also be found in abundance in butter and whole milk yogurt. Butyrate has been shown to play a preventive role in formation of colon cancer4. CLA (conjugated linoleic acid) is another important saturated fat found in dairy fat, with approximately five times more CLA in the milk of cows that are fed grass (their natural food) as opposed to grain. CLA is currently the focus of much research for its anti-cancer properties. In fact, a 2005 Swedish study found that “high intakes of high-fat dairy foods and CLA may reduce the risk of colorectal cancer”5. CLA also encourages the body to use calories to build muscle instead of storing them as fat which is especially important in children who are developing rapidly6,7.

With all of this said, it is important to remember that pesticides, artificial hormones, and other harmful substances tend to lodge in the fat portion of a food. So, as you begin to increase the dairy fat content of your diet please be mindful of the source of your food and choose milk from healthy, chemical-free cows.

References:

1. USDA Food Composition Database
2. J.E. Chavarro et al., “A Prospective Study of Dairy Foods Intake and Anovulatory Infertility.” Human Reproduction 2007;22(5):1340-7.
3. E. Hijova et al., “Short Chain Fatty Acids and Colonic Health.” Bratisl Lek Listy 2007;108(8):354-8.
4. J.M. Wong et al., “Colonic Health: Fermentation and Short Chain Fatty Acids.” Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology 2006;40(3):235-43.
5. S.C. Larsson et al., “High-fat Dairy Food and Conjugated Linoleic Acid Intakes in Relation to Colorectal Cancer Incidence in the Swedish Mammography Cohort.” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2005;82(4):894-900.
6. B.A. Corl et al., “Conjugated Linoleic Acid Reduces Body Fat Accretion and Lipogenic Gene Expression in Neonatal Pigs Fed Low- or High-Fat Formulas.” Journal of Nutrition 2008;138(3):449-54.
7. C.S. Berkey et al., “Milk, Dairy Fat, Dietary Calcium, and Weight Gain: A Longitudinal Study of Adolescents.” Archives of Pediatric Adolescent Medicine 2005;159(6):543-50.