Have you ever thought about how milk is produced? It doesn’t appear like magic in a grocery store. There are, as of the 2024 Ag census, 15 dairy farms in Niagara County. They milk a combined 9,000 cows.
As with all mammals, cows begin producing milk after they have a calf. They are usually around two years old. They will produce milk for a year or a year and a half. At that point, they have been bred to have another calf and will spend about two months not being milked or what the farmer refers to as a dry period.
When in full production, a cow will give 6-7 gallons of milk a day. Today, cows are usually milked 3 times a day. There are many different configurations for milking parlors. The larger farms have rotary parlors run by robots. The cows walk onto a platform, are milked and walk off when they are done.
To produce that much milk, farmers balance the cows’ feed. It is a blend of forage, such as hay, corn silage, with grains and supplemental vitamins and minerals. A cow eats about 100 pounds of food a day. A cow will drink about 40 gallons of water a day. Cows are ruminants. They have four stomachs and spend a lot of time chewing their cud. Basically, they rechew their food over and over to get all the nutrients from it.
The milk that is produced can be between 3% and 5% butterfat. Whole milk is 3%. What happens with the rest? It is made into butter, ice cream and other products. Some of the milk goes to produce cheese as well. If you’d like to understand how butter is made, purchase a small container of heavy cream. Put it in a jar with a very tight-fitting lid and shake it. It takes a while, but you will see the butter form.
Dairy farmers are paid for milk by volume and by butterfat and protein. So not only do they want to produce a lot of milk, they want it high in butterfat. Various breeds produce different amounts of butterfat. Holsteins, the black and white cows, are known for producing a lot of milk; however, their butterfat is not as high. Colored breeds such as Jersey and Guernsey produce less milk but higher butterfat.
It is important to know that all milk is tested before it is bottled. Someone once asked me if there were antibiotics in milk. Absolutely not. If a cow is sick, she may be treated with antibiotics but that milk is never co-mingled with the rest of the herd’s production. In fact, milk is tested before it is even loaded onto the milk truck.
Farmers care about their animals. When you spend a lot of time with them, you get to know their personalities, their habits. Therefore, farmers spend a lot of time keeping them comfortable. Fans on hot summer days, clean bedding, and space to wander around. Some farms even have machines that will scratch a cow’s back.
We spent many years as dairy farmers. It is a 7-day-a-week, 24-hour-a-day job. Cows need to be milked and cared for every day. There are crops to plant and harvest, manure to spread and many other jobs that go into it. MilkforHealth.org has Videos, FAQs and recipes. Check it out for more information.