Published in the June 24 – July 9, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Mike Monroe
Mike Monroe
California is still one of the largest milk producing states with the vast majority of large dairies now in the Central Valley. Years ago, the Santa Clara Valley was the home of numerous dairies run by immigrant families of Italian and Portuguese descent. Today, there is only one certified dairy remaining in Santa Clara County and it is located right in our backyard.
Jeff Whalen has been in the dairy business a long time. He has a large ranch in Texas, too, but his passion of late has been to actually retail raw milk from a dairy that is close to the dairy farm where his mom grew up.
The operation is small with about 30 Holsteins and 20 Jersey cows being milked twice a day, every day. The milk is not pasteurized which means that no heat is applied to the milk, preserving all the good enzymes and nutrients. And the milk is not homogenized, which means the cream floats to the top of every container.
The story of the dairy business in South County is part of the fabric of our community. Back in the day, if you did not live in town, more than likely you had a cow in your pasture. I remember reading about the Thomas family on their Oak Flat Ranch running Milking Shorthorn cattle that produced both large quantities of milk and later in their life were sold for their beef quality and quantity. In the dairy business, the ranchers are always considering how much milk is produced per cow, the milking lifespan of a cow, how healthy the cows are and the ease of birth of their calves, the protein-to-fat ration of the milk and a whole host of other aspects which most of us do not think about when we buy a gallon from the store.
Before 1900, dairies in California were relatively small enterprises with all parts of production integrated into the farm, including growing the feed for the cows, the milking operation, skimming the cream, churning the butter and making cheese done all in one location.
The Cochrane family had a beautiful dairy along Coyote Creek where Anderson Reservoir is now located. Their cheese and butter were highly prized by locals who were putting roots down in the emerging communities of Morgan Hill and south San Jose. In Gilroy, one of the most historic buildings in town is the old Live Oak Creamery which at one time was a very large cheese purveyor for the Bay Area, making nearly a million pounds of cheese annually and a thousand pounds of butter per week in the early 1900s.
The creamery and dairy business took off because of technological innovation. In 1899, a mechanical tool for separating cream from raw milk in large batches was introduced in California.
The Challenge Cream and Butter Association developed the first industrial metal churn and founded the first lab in California to sample and test for quality control.
Technology changed the face of the dairying business so rapidly that many dairies began leaving the area. Refrigeration, transportation, marketing techniques led the formation of diary cooperatives. Large scale dairy operations were starting in the Central Valley where land was cheap and the flat lands of the Santa Clara Valley were given over to orchards and much later to ever expanding cities.
Whalen at one time sold his milk to Berkeley Farms, which is a cooperative organization, but now he has struck out on his own, sort of a blast from the past.
Please join me late in the day on Saturday June 27 when the weather is hopefully cool and the cows are being milked. I have to admit that I may have taken my research a bit too far for this article as I have an old hand-crank ice cream maker which also churns butter that I am trying out. I promise to avoid any surplus manure in my presentation. And remember that happy cows come from San Martin, California.
Keep on sauntering!
Mike Monroe is a business owner and naturalist. He is a docent for Santa Clara County Parks.
