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Knowing your food sources!

Posted at 3:30 PM on July 11, 2008 by Scott Swendsen (3 Comments)

As you probably have heard and read many times, you have to know your food sources. This has been my mantra since January - where is my food coming from?

Being a locavore to me means not only being more careful about the food I eat, but ensuring that the food I do eat is being produced in an ethical, sustainable and natural manner. To ensure this, I have been trying to make it a practice to go out to the food producer's site to see how they create the food I am consuming. Definitely this is time consuming, but being a food consumer, you have to make time for this type of research.

And as such, I have been promising to blog about my visit to Cloverleaf Dairy several months ago. The milk from this small dairy, located in Buhl, Idaho (about 120 miles from Boise), has been a staple in my locavore diet since they first started selling their milk products at the Boise Co-op this past spring. Giving up soda pop (and most of my Oregon/Washington beers!) in January left me with a depletion in my liquid reservoir. I have always been a big milk drinker but this has really increased since starting to drink milk in clear glass bottles - wow, is this great milk or what!

Not only does it taste good, but they do not use rBST and they are so natural that its almost organic! I mean, when the cows are this friendly, do you think that they are 'hop'd" up on drugs??

They actually take great pride in their dairy and creamery processing standards. Starting with these lovely looking beauties, their dairy/farm is located on 40 acres of which 30 acres are grass pasture. They rotate their small herd of 60 milking Holsteins through a series of paddocks that allow time for a natural re-growth of the grass.

Growing up on a small farm in northern Minnesota, I know that there is nothing more satisfying to a cow than to lie around chewing your cud - this is something that you don't see in most large dairy farms these days!

So how does the milk get from the cow to me? Cloverleaf has a very small milking area with ten milking stations. And for me, this is where the first possible contamination can occur. I am not sure if you have seen that show on cable TV where the guy has to work at a dirty job but on one of his shows, he works at this huge dairy where the cows get up on this moving "roundtable" that slow spins. The worker uses a paper towel to wipe down several cow's udders and teats and then hooks up the suction device and away they go!

Well, if you stop and think about this, a paper towel doesn't really remove much of any thing that might be on the poor cow's teats (and you know what normally is located on that part of the animal!). This is where Cloverleaf Dairy really steps up - they first use an iodine treatment dip and then they use a separate special towel for each cow.

At this point, they hook up the milking suction devices but again, they take special precautions to ensure that the suction is not sucking up a bunch of fecal matter. Let me tell you, I did not see this action on the TV show! In fact, they left the unused suction devices hanging sucking in every thing in sight.

At this point, the milk is completely in a "closed" system. From the cow's teat to the holding tanks at the creamery, the raw milk does not see the light of day nor the air of the world.

As it comes into the creamery, they separate out the cream from the milk and then store the milk in large tanks until they start bottling.

Before they bottle the milk, they have to pasteurize it. Here is probably the main reason that this milk tastes so good - they only heat the milk to the lowest legal temperature for the shortest time allowed before cooling it back down. 162 degrees for 27 seconds before cooling it back to 37 degrees! Did you know that a lot of our pasteurized milk is treated at around 150 degrees for over 30 minutes - that is basically cooking it! No wonder it doesn't taste all that good.

Here is a picture of their bottling equipment - talk about low volume! It takes them 7 hours to bottle 5,800 pounds of milk. I forgot to ask them how many bottles this was, but if you figure that a half gallon of milk probably weighs a couple of pounds, this probably means that they go through several thousand bottles during a bottling run.

Slow, steady and a top quality output! I could go on for another 10,000 words (and 20 more images) but let's just say that Cloverleaf Dairy in Buhl, Idaho is top-notch when it comes to a local food source for Boise locavores! Now we just need them to start bringing their butter and ice cream up this far north!!

Thanks Bill & Eric for a wonderful tour! This was an outstanding introduction to why it is important to know where your food is coming from!

Enjoy!

Scott

Comments (3)

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Scott,
Is this the dairy that produces the ice cream you mentioned back in May?

Those cows do look happy.
Paulette

Posted by P. Thompson | July 12, 2008 1:42 PM

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Thank you! I've been wanting to tour the creamery ever since I started buying their milk. My daughter has a very sensitive corn allergy and it's one of the few milks that will not keep her up all night sick. Please add my vote to wishing they would sell their butter and ice cream in Boise as well!

Posted by Rose | July 13, 2008 11:36 PM

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Thanks Paulette & Rose for your postings - yes, Cloverleaf Dairy & Creamery is the one I visited back in May - I just have been too busy to write up my blog on that visit.

And that is such great news Rose to hear that your daughter is able to drink Cloverleaf milk - it is awfully good! I bought some half & half the other day and thought I went to heaven (of course that could have been from mixing it with Kahlua!). But it sure tasted good! I bet that their butter will be divine as well...

Posted by Scott | July 20, 2008 3:14 PM