About Hayes Valley Farms

Once one of our cows has calved, we will begin to milk her immediately. We do not separate calves from their dams (mothers). Some of our cows, may have to be milked twice a day, even with a calf, as they may be very high producers. 

After a week or two, most of the cows can be milked once a day.  We milk one cow at a time, so we can focus on properly cleaning and sanitizing each cow prior to milking. 

We clean our cows with a dairy udder wash and an iodine udder-wash and dip. We use spray bottles to apply the wash, and use 1 clean rag per quarter (teat). This not only maintains sanitized udder and teats, it eliminates the spread of any contaminates from cow to milk, or cow to cow.

Raw milk isn't unsafe to drink, it's how the cow and milk is handled is how raw milk can become unsafe.

1. Our cows are disease free and tested each year for BVD (Bovine Viral Diarrhea), BLV (Bovine Leukemia Virus), Johne's Disease, Brucellosis, and Tuberculosis. Though these are only cattle diseases and not harmful to humans, we like to err on the side of caution.

2. Milking practices, such as udder and teat prep, milking equipment cleanliness, and milk storage are all equally important. 

3. Our milking machine is cleaned before and after each milking. We use a dairy CIP (clean in place) wash as well as a milk-stone remover to clean all the lines of any milk residue.

Our milk machine can handle up to 25 gallons at once. Once we have filled our tank(s), we stop milking, and begin bottling.  We have a dairy in-line filter.  The milk is bottled in half gallons jugs vs gallon jugs and cooled down immediately, and then placed in our on-farm farm-store in less than 35 minutes from bottling.  

We do not separate the cream, so all of our milk bottles are full fat with 100% of the cream.

We test our milk daily, using a cow side milk tester to detect any abnormalities in the milk.  This is done with each cow, to each quarter (cows have 4 quarters), prior to the cow being connected to the milk machine.