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It's All About The Milk

For a raw milk cheesemaker, the quality and integrity of the milk is essential. As a farmstead cheesemaker we have the luxury of controlling every step of the process. 

 

Our milking parlor is a swing twelve -- twelve cows on each side and a row of milkers down the middle, milkers "swung" from a milked cow to a unmilked one as quickly as she's finished. This lets us milk 140 cows in under an hour — the least time possible on concrete. Because they change fields every 12 hours, the cows come into the parlour very clean, but nevertheless all the cows are pre-dipped and inspected before the machines go on.

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The milking system itself was designed in Ireland to keep good udder health in the cows and maintain high milk quality. The cows' health is monitored closely; we treat only a handful of cows every year, but when there is a problem, we respond to it quickly. If there's any question of quality from a day's milk, the milk is dumped rather than used. 

The result? Our microbiological requirement is a maximum SPC (standard plate count) of 10,000 -- ten times lower than the requirements for pasteurized milk -- and we routinely test lower than half of that. 

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