Dairy Lab Report

Dairy Lab Report

Prompt: After the 1850’s, several advancements occurred and the commercial milk-processing industry began to evolve. Select a development you think is the most important and justify why you feel this way. In addition, discuss what you feel is the most important aspect of dairy production (examples: nutrition, reproduction, labor, health of dairy herd, milk quality/safety, etc.)? Make an argument as to why you believe this. Name two things your learned or found interesting during your tour of the OSU Dairy.

The advancement most important to me is pasteurization to milk, which occurred first in the late 1800’s. This is most important to me because it kills off all the pathogens that can be found in raw milk. There are positive and negative standpoints to pasteurization. I personally believe it has saved milk drinkers greatly because during the pasteurization process the milk is heated to a specific temperature where it kills off the pathogens. Even though I feel like this is a great contribution to the world some of the negative effects may be that it also kills off the good bacteria located in the milk, it can lower or extinguish the nutrients that are found in milk.

Which is why I feel as though the milk quality and safety is most important. Milk quality and safety is very important for a number of reasons including, the safety of those ingesting it. There are a number of quality checks that milk must pass in order to make it to the table. Every farm is inspected and certified before it can produce milk. Which I believe is very important because we don’t want people just producing as much milk as possible to make a profit when it may not be safe to ingest. Which is why I love that they make them buy it back if the milk tested from their farm is bad.

Two things that I found to be interesting from our tour to the dairy was that they have a very specific way of ordering the cows (ex. youngest to oldest with babies). Another factor I found interesting was the trials they are running with the cattle on the grass and complicated it could make it if they escaped the hot wire.