Finding a New Creamery

We've been looking for a local creamery, but unfortunately had heard some negative reviews about the one nearest to us. So we went looking in a neighboring state, being only a few miles from the border. When we got there, however, and I began poking around and asking questions, since it was only a store-front and bottling plant, I found out that the claims of local on the website no longer held true, as they'd recently lost their two biggest local contracts to Organic Valley and are now trucking all their milk in from Lancaster, PA. That tidbit along with the fact that we didn't actually know who the farmers were never mind getting to see the farms, we decided to investigate our local dairy for ourselves.

So we headed down to South Mountain Creamery, which is open to the public every day. It was too dark to get photos of the machine milking, but the milking parlor was really interesting. While I'd known the cows would be machine milked, the kids had never seen anything like it and had just assumed the cows would be milked by hand like they'd seen me doing with our goat, Latte. They were a bit put out about that and even a bit disgusted—and really, it's kinda hard not to be. Even a small dairy like this is so big that it requires a certain level of mechanization.


Here's a photo of the calf barn, yet another down side to industrialized dairy. While the kids had a lot of fun feeding the calves, I had a really hard time with the idea that the babies are taken away from their mamas and confined to these, oh, maybe 4' x 6' stalls for the early part of their lives. Even many home dairies opt to separate mama from baby and bottle raise the babies exclusively, a practice that didn't sit well with me. At home, we opted to separate mama and baby overnight and take the first morning milk for ourselves, allowing them to range together the rest of the day with on-demand nursing. Latte's kid, Dragon, is still trying to nurse at five months, though she's beginning to wean him naturally. So, until we can get our own Jersey for home milking, small-scale, local industrial milk is the lesser of two evils. There are definite down-sides to this creamery, but I have a hard time imagining that an industrial dairy somewhere else, not open for public inspection, is going to be any cleaner, any more humane, any more in line with our values of sustainability. So, for now, this is our local dairy.