June 10, 2020   Community News, Home Page

From farm to refrigerator: where does the milk go?

Pictured: A block form is being filled with cheddar cheese curds. Once filled and pressed, the block will weigh about 700 pounds. (Submitted photos)

By Jill Fennema –

Associated Milk Producers Inc. (AMPI) is headquartered in New Ulm, Minn., and owned by 1,500 dairy farm families from Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. AMPI members annually market about 5.7 billion pounds of milk generating $1.7 billion in sales. There are currently 30 AMPI dairy farmer-owners in the southwest Minnesota counties of Rock, Nobles, Pipestone and Murray.

A new employee at the Sanborn, Iowa, plant is Kayla Post. Kayla is the daughter of Ben and Connie Post of rural Chandler.

Kayla went to college at South Dakota State University, graduating in May 2019 with a degree in dairy manufacturing with a minor in food safety, as well as a major in dairy production with a minor in agricultural business.

She is now the whey/receiving supervisor at AMPI Sanborn, so she handles the department that receives the raw milk and the department that processes and sends out the whey.

“I feel at home working in Sanborn because I completed my first internship here back in 2016 and this is the plant that received the milk my family used to produce on our dairy farm. So there are a lot of familiar faces for me.”

Milk from area dairy farms arrives at the Sanborn, Iowa, manufacturing plant each day. Upon arrival, the milk is analyzed and pasteurized before the cheesemaking process begins. Once milk leaves the farm, it can become cheese or butter within 24-48 hours. The product is then cooled and stored for an average of about 14 days before being shipped to customers.

In the production of cheese, milk becomes curds and whey. Curds are separated from the liquid whey before being pressed and formed into blocks. The whey is condensed and sold in its liquid form to customers who then process it into different products.

Prior to 2018, the plant was processing 1.4 million pounds of milk each day from area member farms. This amount of milk translated to daily cheese production of about 140,000 pounds. As farms in the area grew and customer demand for cheese grew, the co-op knew it was time to invest in new processing equipment to meet demand.

In 2018, new equipment and technology installed at the Sanborn plant more than doubled cheese production to meet customer demand. The plant now processes about 3 million pounds of milk each day, producing about 300,000 pounds of cheese.

Sanborn plant employees are now making cheese using eight, state-of-the-art vats located in an expanded facility. The improved cheesemaking technology increased the amount of cheese made from every pound of milk processed. The expanded facility features increased automation to boost efficiencies and upgrades to the plant’s whey processing and storage area.

Cooler space at the plant was recently added to accommodate increased cheese production. The new cooler area is about 15,000 square feet and has the capacity to store more than 7,000, 700-pound blocks of cheese! This represents about 14 days of production at the plant.

The Sanborn cheesemakers produce blocks of American-style cheeses – cheddar, colby and Monterey Jack – weighing nearly 700 pounds.

These state-of-the-art cheese vats are able to make more and better cheese from the same volume of milk.

The cheese is then sold to customers throughout the U.S. and packaged as cubes, slices, shredded cheese, bars, or snack sticks.

For the complete article, please see the June 10th edition of the Edgerton Enterprise. If you do not currently receive the Enterprise, CLICK HERE for information on how to subscribe!