Most people think milk starts at the cow, but it actually starts in a field, months earlier. What a cow eats is what ends up in the bottle, so if our name is going on the glass, we have to be as particular about the crops as we are about the creamery.
Right now our crews are chopping non-GMO corn for silage. It’s one of the biggest weeks of our year, and none of it is visible to the person who opens their cooler tomorrow morning.
Silage is not the corn you’re picturing
No dry stalks, no combine, no grain pouring into a truck. It all gets chopped and packed tight into our bunkers and ag bags. Packing it tight is the whole trick: squeeze the oxygen out and the plant ferments instead of spoiling, like sauerkraut on a scale measured in tons.
“We’re not harvesting corn for grain. We take the whole green plant, stalk, leaves, cob and developing kernels, before it fully matures. Once it’s sealed up, it keeps. That’s what feeds the herd through the winter.”
— Ben Sowers, Co-Owner of South Mountain Creamery
The rest of what we grow
Triticale: A cross between wheat and rye. We cut it in spring in the boot stage, right before the seed head emerges, when protein and digestibility peak. Wait too long and the stems go tough. It’s a narrow window.
Alfalfa: Not a grass at all, but a legume, a cousin of peas and clover. It pulls nitrogen from the air into the soil and brings protein that grasses can’t match. We harvest it up to six times a season.
Sorghum-sudan: Our summer workhorse. A tall, fast-growing grass that thrives in heat and regrows after cutting, so we get several harvests a year.
Orchard grass: The steady one. A cool-season grass we cut for hay up to four times a year.
Pasture: Our cows graze whenever the weather, grass growth and field conditions allow.
Why we preserve all of it
Cows eat every day. Fields don’t grow every day. That’s the problem farming has to solve, and it’s why we put up silage and hay, so a cow in February eats close to what a cow in June eats. We mix those forages with grains we also grow here.
“Knowing what to grow, when to cut it and how much to feed is its own science. Our nutritionist is here every week, testing our feeds, looking at the cows and adjusting the ration.”
— Ben Sowers, Co-Owner of South Mountain Creamery
Field to Bottle
Planting, growing, grazing, harvesting, preserving, testing, feeding. All before a drop of milk goes into a bottle.
We grow the feed. We care for the animals. We milk the cows. We bottle the milk. And on our home delivery routes, we bring it to your door ourselves.
That’s what Field to Bottle means to us.
Find out if your in our delivery area here or find the nearest grocery store near you!
