This past Wednesday the staff here at MadCap loaded up in two different groups for a dreary hour long ride to the small town of Nashville, MI. What’s in Nashville besides Shirley’s ChuckWagon Café and Good Time Pizza? One of the most ballin dairy farms in the mitten, Mooville Creamery.
With the sky spitting rain on us we pulled up to a long white and blue building topped with the now familiar warm hearted logo of a smiling cow and small child. The Westvale Vu Dairy Farm, where the magic happens, was just to the right up on the hill. Inside the creamery we were greeted with the smell of sugar, crushed cookies and cream from the ice cream parlor that filled our nostrils as we poked around at maple syrups, chocolate mild, cheeses and vegetables grown by 4-Hers. After a short wait we were greeted by Louis Westendorp, who owns and runs Mooville along with her husband Doug and their family, which includes grown kids back from studying agriculture and genetics at Michigan universities. Thus began our tour of their small farm of 96 head of dairy cows.
Where it all begins.
The hallway into the processing area is covered in pictures of their prized show cows (for real, it’s the same deal as a dog show), various newspaper articles and tons of quality related awards.
First stop was the processing room. Huge cooling tanks in the corner hold the milk that has been gravity fed, leaving it as unmolested as possible. From there the non-homogenized milk (the Creamline, which is what we use at the shop) is put through the HSTS pasteurizers where it’s heated to 172 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 seconds. The homogenized milks are first put through the homogenizer where the milk is forced through a small opening breaking down the cream that is naturally occurring so that it cannot rise to the top, permanently mixing it in with the milk. This process isn’t the healthiest but it’s become very much ingrained in our milk-drinking psyche. Ill let Mooville give you the rundown on why…
Studies have shown that when fat molecules are forcibly broken up by mechanical means, an enzyme called Xanthine Oxidase is released and allowed to penetrate the intestinal wall. Once it gets through the intestinal wall, Xanthine Oxidase gets into the bloodstream and is capable of creating scar damage to the heart and arteries, which may in turn cause the body to release cholesterol into the blood as a means of protecting the scarred areas with fatty tissue. This can lead to Arteriosclerosis. When non-homogenized milk is consumed, Xanthine Oxidase is normally excreted from the body without much absorption. Our milk is also free of controversial growth hormones including rBST, and is free of animal byproducts. Cows were meant to eat plants not animals, thus the food they eat here contains no animal byproducts.
And for a lot of people that are lactose intolerant what happens is your body knows that this milk thing has entered it so it goes about attempting to break down the cream that it knows is there, but can’t find it so it searches around for it forever, and you feel sick. With non-homogenized milk it automatically locates it and breaks it down leaving no time to feel queasy.
A sand-bed to sleep on
After the milk is processed and cooled in tanks it is gravity fed into the bottling room, bottled up and shipped out. Or goes into the ice cream and butter making room. Also cool.
After the tour of the processing room and a lowdown on different sorts of cows (Mooville has mostly Holsteins and a few Brown Swiss) we walked up the slope to the dairy farm. We passed by small calves in their individual kennel sort of things, some no older than two weeks and far too shy to get too close, onto the ones that to the untrained eye could easily have been full grown but apparently they were only a year old, then on to the two year old ones, even bigger with names like Bolivia and Hope. Then onto the birthing barn. These were all the prego cows, and they were HUGE. Cows don’t produce any milk until they are with calf and that only happens after they turn two. So they get pregnant, produce milk for 7 months, call it quits for two months, have a calf then start producing again. The next barn was for the not pregnant cows. These ones get milked three times a day; at 6am, 2pm and 10pm. Absent from there large open air barn was any sign of straw. Louis told us that milking cows tend to drip some and straw is much more likely to harbor bacteria, so these cows all chill out on beds of sand. Huge feed bins next to the barn and piled up covered with giant tarps hold the corn grown on the property and various other types of vegetation. The only things the cows eat that is not grown on the farm are pellets of vitamins and minerals that are mixed into the feed. This feed is chomped on for about nine hours a day. The cows will eat some, it’ll be digested into one of their four stomachs, come back up into their mouth and they’ll chew on that cud for a while and swallow it again and digest it a bit more. This happens to 90 lbs of food a day PER COW. So that’s their routine. They get milked, eat, eat some more, mill around, get milked again, eat more, and more and a little more, get milked again, mill around, sleep. If it’s a little too warm for them or drizzling at all though, they prefer to mill around inside the barns moving between sand bed and trough, well protected from the elements.
After the tour we were free to wander and took full advantage of some delicious ice cream and hung out with the animals in the petting zoo, strange looking goats that devoured the ice cream cone full of feed we had in about 8 seconds, a giant pig, some ducks and a bunch of kittens.
She Got Mooville.
So our stomachs stuffed, sugar coursing through our veins and a pound of Mooville butter in the icebox we loaded up and headed back to GR, feeling even more excited about the products we were serving. But seriously next time you come in, ask for a shot of cold Creamline milk.
Laura Feldman
