Hi kids, my name is Tillie, and I’m going to show you how milk gets from my bovine friends (“bovine” is what we cows are called) to the delicious dairy products you enjoy. Mooove this way…

Like people, cows need a balanced diet to stay healthy. The farmer-owners make sure that my friends and I are fed a high-quality diet. And that’s a BIG job because we cows are big eaters. Each day, I eat about 100 pounds of food! I munch on things like grass, corn, hay and grain. I also drink 40 gallons of water a day. That’s enough to nearly fill a bathtub!

In comparison, the average American adult eats only about four pounds of food a day. I have to eat and drink so much more so I can produce lots of nutritious, delicious milk. I need to drink two gallons of water in order to produce one gallon of milk. With the right diet, I can produce eight or nine gallons of milk a day!

The Dairy Process

If you’ve watched us, you know that we cows spend a lot of our time eating and sleeping. But we also spend a portion of each day getting milked. Let’s visit the milking parlor to see how it works:

Step 1: Cleaned and Milked
Before I’m milked, the farmer washes and cleans my udder. The udder is where cows store their milk. Then he attaches a milking machine to my udder to remove the milk. The gentle squeezing of the milking machine doesn’t hurt. In fact, it’s very similar to a baby sucking its thumb.

Step 2: Shipping
The milk flows into the milking machine and travels into a big milk tank where it cools down and is held until it is picked up by a long, insulated milk truck. The truck then hauls the milk to the creamery.

Step 3: Milk Tested
When the milk arrives, our lab technicians test the milk to make sure that only the highest quality milk is used in our dairy products. After passing the inspection, the milk travels through a heat-exchanging pasteurizer that makes the milk safe to drink by killing any harmful bacteria.

Step 4: Dairy Products Made
Then it is made into a variety of yummy dairy products like butter, cheese, ice cream, sour cream, yogurt and yogurt smoothies.

What is really neat is that human hands never touch the milk once it starts its trip to becoming a dairy product like cheese. It moves through the production process through sanitized (very clean) pipes and tanks. That’s what keeps the dairy product safe from harmful bacteria that could make you sick.

Step 5: Packaged and Shipped to Stores
After the dairy product is made, it’s packaged with all of its nutritional information on the side, like how many calories and how much calcium is in the product. Then it gets put on another truck and is shipped to grocery stores where your mom and dad buy it and bring it home for you to enjoy.

See You in the Dairy Section!
I hope you enjoyed your tour. Now you know how milk gets from me to you! So next time you go to the dairy section in your grocery store, think of me. It just might be my milk in that Tillamook cheese, ice cream or yogurt you’re buying!