August 26 to September 1, 2012

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Wednesday, 29 August. Prairie Farms Dairy. Dubque, IA.


      Today on our third day of our tour , the first stop we made was at Prairie Farms Dairy. Prairie Farms Dairy is a fluid milk processing plant. It started out as a family operated dairy , called Swiss Valley, but three years ago they were bought out by Prairie Farms, which is a producer owned cooperative. They are third largest plant of the six Prarie Farm dairies.
      Prairie Farms Dairy processes milk and packages it into cartons and plastic jugs.  They make the plastic jugs on site, which is more efficient than shipping them in.  They also put milk in to a variety of  milk cartons.  Products that come out of the plant are white milk , chocolate milk, strawberry milk,  orange juice and they even make lemonade in the summer time. 40,000 gallons of milk are processed per day which come in on 25-36 trucks.
      The milk processed at this plant only comes from dairy herds which are not given hormones. 275-300 employees are employed at this plant. They each have different jobs, ranging from making the plastic jugs, filling the milk into the jugs,  truck drivers, the people who are in the cooler loading the milk. We all enjoyed out tour of the plant , we got to see how everything works and how the milk is  processed and packaged. Something that we were all shocked off was how much different their price in milk was compared to ours. 1 gallon of milk is around $3 or a little over. To end out tour we got to sample some of their milk.
Clasey Kirkland

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