Madison Co. Virginia | gndfarms - 12/6/2017 16:17
Cant beat milk out of the bulk tank!!
A dream of mine is to pump milk from the receiver jar directly into a vat pasteurizer. Cook it at the lowest legal temp, chill it in the vat, and fill jugs. No cream separation, no homogenizing, nothing. The milk would have gone through a total of two pumps. Total time from cow to jug -- 1 hour. Manage the herd to keep butterfat levels over 5%.
Marketing could be interesting. It would take a bit for folks to realize they like the stuff, but I think it would sell good then. It would be priced above conventional milk, probably on par with organic pricing. The marketing points would be local, fresh, and un-tampered with. Find a small bit of shelf space in the dairy case of a local health food store, and once some product is moving, start pushing it to larger supermarkets. Set a maximum delivery radius of about an hour drive.
Ideally, the milk house would be big enough for several pasteurizers and the main bulk tank. The pipeline from the parlor would simply swing between any of them. The pasteurizers would be filled and sealed, and would not be opened after the cooking process has started. The pasteurizers would be pumped to a clean room to be bottled. Hopefully, this would negate the need for extremely clean conditions in the milk house. It's possible the pasteurizers would need to be in a clean room as well, but I'd hope not. Plumbing the milk supply lines would be a lot harder in this case.
The biggest advantage would be matching production very accurately with demand. The ability to call up the stores at closing time Thursday evening, and produce the exact amount needed for the delivery route Friday morning. The milk would be on the shelves 12 hours after it came from the cow. Would plan on a shelf-life of a week, and the small amount of returning milk would go to calves.
The biggest technical challenge would be developing a bottle-blowing apparatus that can reliably and cheaply blow gallon jugs on a "as-needed" schedule. The jugs would be blown, trimmed, and tested within a minute of being filled. Biggest challenge is likely getting it to start and stop without needing a lot of fine tuning and skilled handling. I think something like this could be built, but not sure. Jugs could possibly be shipped in, but I'm pretty sure that shipping would be a killer.
Another possible difficulty is having a milk co-op able to work with you on this. They don't want the truck weights to be fluctuating a lot from day to day, so a small scale pasteurizing operation might fly, but a larger one would not. If operating on a larger scale, you might have to commit to processing a consistent amount within each 48-hour milk pickup period. The co-op might also be concerned about liability issues. They're afraid you might ship bad milk out of your plant, and the media would realize it came from a farm of such-and-such co-op, putting the entire co-op in a bad light.
Edited by kipps 12/6/2017 18:13
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chocolate milk back in schools
