Students at Rensselear Polytech are designing a solar-powered pasteurizer that can be used by village farmers in Peru. The sun heats water to boiling, and the hot water is used in a HTST (high temperature short time) pasteurization system. This will allow village farmers to obtain certification to sell their dairy products at market.
Solar power [...]
Posts Tagged ‘dairy farms’
Solar Pasteurizing – Affordably
How others do it
We’ll be milking ten goats this year– more than we’ve ever milked before, but not enough to keep our equipment busy. So we’ve been looking for a cow dairy from which to buy milk for making other varieties of cheese.
This week, we came to an agreement with a dairy out west of us. It’s a huge facility with state of the art equipment– and the owner has a reputation for doing things right.
Here’s a look at how a large but ethical dairy does things.
Solar Dairying
The United Nations FAO offers this analysis of solar-powered dairy projects. Their conclusion: It’s feasible, but not cheap. Note that, in 1981 dollars, a cheese facility of the size we’re building would cost over $150,000. That’s over $355,000 in 2008 dollars.
Using innovation, used equipment, comparison shopping, and just plain Yankee frugality, we’re putting ours together [...]
Dairying in 1784
Dairying has a long and distinguished history. The passage above comes from J. Twaley, Dairying Exemplified, or The Business of Cheesemaking (London, 1784) p. 18, courtesy of Google Books.
Note the assumption that daries were run by women. Historically, milking cows and the associated dairy production was considered “women’s work,” inappropriate for men. Thus well into the [...]
Buying Milk Isn’t Easy
As part of our expansion, we want to buy milk from a local dairy farm. That’s not as easy as it sounds. Almost all the farmers in this area contract with the local dairy co-op, and their contract says they can’t sell to anyone else. So even though they’re losing money because the wholesale milk [...]
Growth: The New Pasteurizer
We’ve been selling our cheese as fast as we can make it (and age it), so it’s pretty clear we could make and sell more. But making it in 8 gallon batches is labor intensive. The yield is about 7 pounds. It takes the same amount of work no matter how big your batch is: 1 [...]
New England Artisan Cheesemakers 4: Jasper Hill Farm
Located outside Greensboro, VT, Jasper Hill Farm not only makes cheese, they operate the largest cheese cave in the region– an amazing underground structure with seven climate-controlled vaults.
New England Artisan Cheesemakers 1: Via Lactea
During a recent trip to New England, I visited several artisan cheesemakers who graciously showed me their operations. Each was different in history, motivation, and operation– so I decided to make a short video profile of each one. This is the first.
