Summary
In this podcast update from Prairie’s Edge Organic Dairy, Carol announces the arrival of a new bulk tank for their farm, which will streamline their milk processing. The tank is currently being set up, and once it’s operational, it will eliminate the need for their current coolers and save time during milking.
Carol also discusses their current herd, upcoming calvings, and their plans to potentially sell crossbred calves. She mentions that spring has arrived, and they are preparing to move the cows to pasture.
Carol shares her recent experiments with Clabbered milk and offers to provide samples and guidance on making Clabbered cottage cheese and Clabbered Sour Cream.
She highlights the importance of the new bulk tank in managing milk sales and expresses her willingness to offer samples of cheese curds and cheddar cheese. Carol concludes by mentioning upcoming developments and wishes everyone a happy dairy farming experience.
The Prairies Edge Farm podcast provides updates on their organic dairy farm west of Willmar, Minnesota.
Their products include certified organic whole raw milk, farm fresh cream and skim milk, grassfed, grass finished highland beef, and soy-free pork.
UPDATE: The new bulk milk tank is now in full operation.
#PrairiesEdgeFarmPodcast #OrganicFarmingUpdates #ClabberedMilkExperiment
Timestamps
- [00:00:00] New Bulk Tank Installation.
- [00:02:06] “Clabbered Milk Experiment”
Links Mentioned
Transcript
Intro
Welcome to the Prairies Edge Farm website and podcast. You can find us online at PrairiesEdgeFarm.com and on social media at facebook.com/prairiesedairy. If you are in the Willmar, Minnesota area and would like to try some certified organic whole raw milk, farm fresh cream or skim milk, be sure to check out our website’s contact page for contact information. We also sell grassfed, grass, finished highland beef and soy free pork. Here is Carol’s latest update.
Carol
Hi. This is Carol with Prairie’s Edge Organic Dairy. And this is the Small Dairy Podcast Farm update for the first week in May, 1 big news is that we got ourselves a new bulk tank. It’s a milk plan, 90 gallon cooling tank that actually is manufactured in Greece. I ordered it right around Easter time and it took about three weeks for it to get here. We have it actually set up in our milk room and it is not we can’t use it quite yet because we do need to do some adjustments to our pipeline. So it dumps into a bulk tank just like it did when we used to milk for Organic Valley. So for right now it’s just sitting there waiting. We’re going to get ourselves some pipeline which is working on that. And once we have that set up, we are going to be utilizing that machine and that’s going to eliminate most of my coolers that I have. I don’t have to have my freezers full of frozen water bottles. It’s going to make room in my freezers for me. It’s going to save me time because I don’t have to bottle milk as I’m milking the cows in the morning. So it will make my milking time much shorter. So that will be a real advantage to us. I’ll have a little bit more time on my hands, which if you farm, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Sometimes time is just there’s just not enough of it. That’s the most exciting thing that’s happened this past week. As we’ve gotten that in, we’ve got Richard’s got it set up and we just have to get the proper things to get that pipeline to drop into the tank and once we have that, we’ll be on our way to using the machine. I’m talking about the milk room. So we’ll just go on to what I’m doing. I’m actually milking 16 cows right now. We do have several cows that we’re waiting on. Spring calving. We have Elaine Thistle. Let’s see. Shasta cranberry. Cranberry is actually going to calve here at the end of May, beginning of June and then she is leaving. She’s going to be going to my friend Kelsey’s farm to be her second milk cow. And she didn’t want the calf. And so we decided that we would keep cranberry here and have her calf get her through the colostrum stage. And about a week after milking, and then kelsey will come and pick her up and add her to her crew. Cranberry is carrying a Jersey calf and she is a Jersey. The rest has been sired by a fleckvay. So we will have some crosses out here. I don’t really like the fleck vey breed because they’re a little bit on the large side for our parlor once they’re adults. So I’m not sure if I’m going to be keeping these calves or we are going to be selling them. But they do make excellent beef, I will tell you that. But we’ll see where it goes. Spring is here in Minnesota and our grasses are starting to wake up, the pastures are starting to wake up, but we are probably three weeks out yet before we can put the cows out on pasture. And Rich might do it a little bit early so that we don’t have a pasture that gets too mature and then the cows don’t want to eat the grass on there. So sometimes we start them a little bit earlier when maybe the pasture isn’t quite ready. But we need to get them started so that we can keep up with the spring grasses because when they start, all of a sudden all the pastures are ready at the same time and we don’t have enough cows to graze all of them at the same time. So that’s what we’re kind of waiting on there. The new thing I’m trying as far as using our dairy products is I’ve been studying Clabbered milk. Both my friend Kelsey and my friend Jamie are Clabbering Milk and making cottage cheese and Clabbered Sour Cream from that product. And so I tried that this past week. It worked out really, really well. And I will probably go into detail on it in a different segment here. But if you’re interested in finding out what Clabbered cottage cheese tastes like or Clabbered Sour Cream, let me know when you come to pick up your milk and I will get you samples of either both. If you want to try both of them, I can’t sell it, but I certainly can teach you how to make it. You might as well sample it so you know, if you like it or not. I will certainly give you samples of it. That’s not a problem. And I will walk you through how to make it. And I think that is probably about it. I’m not really doing a whole lot. I’m just trying to keep up with milk sales right now. We have a lot of milk sales and so that’s why the bulk tank is so important to us because we really need the bulk tank to ease up the load of jars. My dishwasher right now runs sometimes three times a day to get all the dairy dishes and our own house dishes done. So it takes up a lot of my time. The bulk tank is going to just free some of that up so then maybe I can play around with the milk a little bit more and if you ever want any samples of cheese curds or you want samples of cheddar cheese, those are the cheeses I’m working on right now. Oh, yeah, I did fried cheese curds. Oh, my goodness. You guys, they are so good. We ate them for, like, three days in a row because they are so good. So let me know. I am more than happy to give you samples and walk you through the process of making any of these things and gosh. I think that’s about it. There’s not a whole lot going on right now. When spring calving starts, there’ll be a little bit more interesting stuff. Once we get the bulk tank running, that’ll be a big thing, too. Happy, daring. Bye.
Outro