Sunday, October 7, 2012

Country Girl Creamery 1st Annual Dairy Festival

I have been wanting to go to this place for quite sometime now. When our daughter came into the kitchen yesterday announcing they were going to have their 1st annual dairy festival today I was more than ready to go. They had a wonderful turn out and was excited to see such a very large crowd there that they didn’t expect.

We’ve been buying their milk for awhile now from a few little stores around that sells it. It’s un-homogenized milk and also pasteurized at the lowest possible temperature to maintain more calcium and protein. It’s like 12% higher in calcium and 8% in protein higher than regular milk.

We had to take a few pix of all the ladies as they call them. I keep wanting to say girls but it’s the same I guess. (wink)

Here are the ladies coming in to get milked.

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They have quite a herd of ladies. They said they are in between grasses now and are having to be fed some food and some hay they have in bales out in the pasture. They wrap the bales in white plastic stuff and it makes them like look giant marshmallows. But normally they are just grass fed from all the pastures they have.

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Grabbing a drink of water before they go in to be milked.

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They look a little skinny right now but I guess it’s because they are in between grasses. They only eat the grains when they are being milked and the bales of hay aren’t as good as the green grass.

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I can’t remember what she told us this was. They also make cheeses to so this could be something to do with the cheese making. They have to heat the milk up to make the cheese. They let us taste all the different kinds of cheese and oh man it was yummy! Needless to say I had to bring some home with me along WITH some of their milk and their butter.

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This is the pasteurizer. They fill each gallon of milk by hand from this thing. WOW That’s A LOT of milk filling by hand!

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Sorry but this pic is a little blurry. You can see the milk coming in from the cows being milked in the little clear glass bottle on the wall. As it got about 3/4 way full it would run out into one of those pipes.

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This is the milking area. He was telling us all about how they milk and how they clean their bags and disinfect them etc. See all those glass bottles toward the bottom of the pic? All the milk was going into those. They had just gotten started milking that batch in this pic. Then there is this clear pipe that is about 3 inches around that is above them. It would go into that pipe and then into the room with all the stainless steel containers to be pasteurized.

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Close up of the containers the milk goes into from the cows. The things hanging above the one to the right that are silver and black is what they attach to the cows bag if you’ve never seen them.

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Here they are attached to the cows bag.

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Then here’s one of the ladies waiting to go into the stall to be milked. She was watching us.

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Here is the clear pipe in the middle of the pic. It carries the milk from the cows to the other room.

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See this one stealing more food? She has already been turned out from milking and she came back for some more food. See the other two behind her looking at her like now what are YOU doing?

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Look at that tongue! lol She’s telling me, yummy, see how good this stuff is. The other two are STILL watching her. I bet they are wondering IF they could get away with doing that to.

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All these are waiting to be milked. Some of them got tired of waiting I guess and decided to lay down. (wink) They can only milk like 3 at a time since we were standing in one of the areas they usually milk them in.

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Cindy, our daughter petting one of the babies. They had several babies for the children to feed if they wanted to. They were letting them feed them with the bottles.

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And she’s petting another one here. Looks like a little deer without spots. I just love the jersey cows better than the others for some reason. I guess it’s just the color of them.

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They even had these fake cows sit up for the children to milk. Some of them were getting milk out to.

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What fun, even corn to get down and play in like sand. The kids were having a blast in that as well as the bigger kids to. This thing was huge and filled with corn.

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They even had hay for them to play in as well.

 

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Sorry but this one is a little blurry to. Painting the wax on their blocks of cheese.

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I even found some muscadines to take a pic of.

 

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Another cute little baby. Isn’t it precious?

 

Now I think I am going to pop us some popcorn and use some of our Country Girl butter on it as we watch a movie. Winking smile

 

Rose

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