I had to laugh at this report.
Cinnamon Ridge Dairy Farm is ranked number two in the country for milk production and it may be because their cows are fed a different ingredient.
It might sound utterly weird, but the dairy cows at Cinnamon Ridge run on coffee creamer.
“This is an oddball ingredient,” says John Maxwell, farmer and owner of Cinnamon Ridge. “It does sound a little cannibalistic, but that’s not true at all.”
He says it’s the sugar in the creamer that helps his cows produce some of the best milk in the nation.
“This is energy in my hand, energy that produces milk” Maxwell explains. “Sugar and all those carbohydrates produce milk.”
. . .
½ lb. of coffee creamer is fed to each cow every day, which adds up to 4 lbs. of milk per cow daily.
Before feeding the cows creamer they used to feed them chocolate cake mix, but found more benefits from the coffee creamer because of the higher sugar levels.
There's more at the link.
But . . . but . . . if a cow produces cream . . . on a diet of non-dairy creamer . . . is the cow's cream still cream, or is it now a genetically modified substitute? And what about that chocolate cake mix? Did the cows produce chocolate milk?
This reminds me of the advertisement for Cremora coffee creamer that came out in South Africa in the 1980's.
On that diet, I wonder if the cow's "not inside, it's on top" of the barn?
Peter
Snerk- That's a good one, in more ways than one!
ReplyDeleteFrom a former dairy farmer almost everything you feed a cow gets reprocessed in the rumen. There are some proteins "bypass protein" like dried distillers grain that get past. The sugars certainly are reprocessed by the rumen bacteria. I wonder how cost effective this feed is except for an advertising gimmic. It certainly is a snarkey way to get peoples attention.
ReplyDeleteKnew of at least a handful of dairy farmers in South Central PA who mixed their dairy ration to include a fair amount of Hershey's out of spec, but safe to consume, products. They had less trouble getting their milkfat content on target, and the cows were unaffected; they seemed to like the periodic sweet treat.
ReplyDeleteConsidering that the full-bovine* digestive system is one HECKUVA chemical processing plant (turns carbs into not-carbs for use..) i'd say the milk is milk and the cream is cream.
ReplyDelete* Which I am not, thank you.
When I was in FFA, I learned that Brown Swiss cows are where chocolate milk comes from. I thought that was common knowledge!!
ReplyDelete