Milk begins its journey to your refrigerator at the dairy farms where cows are raised. The main breeds of dairy cows are Holstein, Guernsey, jersey, Brown Swiss, and Ayrshire. A cow eats about ninety pounds of food each day. And she drinks 25-50 gallons of water a day. It takes her about 6 1/2 hours to do this. The milk cow changes the grass and grain she eats into something delicious for you to eat - milk.

There are about eleven million milk cows in America. They will make about 57 1/2 billion quarts of milk this year. A good cow can give about 100 glasses (25 quarts) of milk a day.It used to take a person one hour to milk six cows by hand. Today a person can milk 100 cows in an hour with modern machines.Cows are milked at least twice each day. Each time cows are milked, the dairy farmers wash the cows and the milking machines. They do this to keep the milk clean, making milk one of the safest foods you can eat.

Milk is taken from the farm to Arps Dairy in a tank truck. The tank is built like a giant Thermos© bottle to keep the milk cold. Machines at Arps keep your milk clean and safe. No hands touch the milk from the cow to your carton. In 1856, Dr. Louis Pasteur discovered that heat kills bad germs. Today your milk is pasteurized-heated. Arps uses the industry standard pasteurization procedures-high temperature, short time pasteurization, or htst for short. After the milk is treated to ensure your safety, it is held in finished product tanks until it is bottled. Arps Dairy uses state-of-the-art bottling techniques.

The gallon and half gallon milk jugs that you by at the super market are bottled in Arps' new filler. This machine processes 60 gallon or half gallon bottles of milk per minute. The entire process is automated, guaranteeing that you milk is bottled to exact specifications. Arps Dairy also packages 1/2 pint paper cartons for use in many Defiance area schools. These cartons are run through the filler at a rate of 200 per minute. After machines automatically case the milk jugs, they are loaded on trucks to be delivered to your favorite supermarket.