Transcripts

MARK STEIL: The creamery in the town of Granger uses a conveyor line to move the milk cans. A farmer slides the cans from his pickup onto the line, giving each a couple of taps to loosen the lid. The conveyor moves the milk cans through a small opening into the creamery where a worker dumps each one into a holding tank.

LAUREN APPLEN: See, I'm Lauren Applen. And I'm just more or less of a flunky substituting, say, here at the Granger Creamery dumping the milk.

MARK STEIL: Applen weighs each farmer's milk and enters the number on a pad of paper he keeps by his side. The empty cans continue to move on the conveyor through a washing machine where each is steam cleaned.

[STEAM HISSING]

The Granger Creamery has stayed in business by changing to find a market niche. Once it was a full-service business processing milk into butter and other products. Applen says now it's a little more than a holding station. The milk will be trucked South before it's processed.

LAUREN APPLEN: Our milk all goes to Fredericksburg, Iowa, and it's all made into mozzarella. So eat lots of pizza.

[LAUGHS]

MARK STEIL: Why did this creamery survive? The answer is found about 10 miles away in the hills north of Harmony. About 100 Amish families live there. Many of them send their milk to the Granger Creamery, farmers like Jerry Hershberger. In a barn a few miles outside of Harmony, Hershberger, his wife and two sons are ready to begin the evening milking.

[METALLIC CLANGING]

With only a couple of kerosene lanterns lighting the inside of the barn, the Hershbergers are almost invisible as they hand milk the cows. Wearing black coats, pants and broad brimmed hats, they blend into the dark shadows between the Holsteins. Jerry Hershberger would not allow his voice to be recorded, but said the Granger Creamery is important to his economic well-being. The only other place in Minnesota accepting milk in cans is a cheese plant in Lanesboro. A family friend who's not Amish is also in the barn, retired farmer Troy Schrock.

TROY SCHROCK: Very important that they have creameries that still will accept the milk. And they wouldn't milk cows if they couldn't use the milk cans. They wouldn't go to bulk tanks.

MARK STEIL: He says the Amish religion bans the use of most 20th-century technology, including electricity, cars and in the dairy barn, large milk tanks. The Amish use stored ice cut the previous winter from nearby ponds to cool the milk cans in warm weather. The Amish milk must meet the same state standards applied to other farmers.

The Granger Creamery also serves a few non-Amish milk producers, including part-time farmer Kevin Raisler.

[ROOSTER CROWING]

Chickens share the barn this morning with Raisler's small cow herd. He milks morning and night and spends his days working full-time in a nearby town. His farm is the type where the cows are not numbers. Each has a name.

KEVIN RAISLER: OK, this one's Dawn, Sandy, Stephanie, Bree, Betsy, Brenda, Jill and Bunny. There's eight of them I got in here right now.

MARK STEIL: The milk cans Raisler hauls each morning to the Granger Creamery weigh about 100 pounds each of their full. They've caused more than their share of misery through the years. Raisler says the day before, one of the haulers picking up milk at an Amish farm hurt his back, lifting the heavy steel cans.

KEVIN RAISLER: Oh, yeah, it's a little bit of work. My wife can't do it and that kind of stuff. But for myself, it don't bother me any.

I used to throw in hay bales and that kind of stuff. They weigh upwards around 100 pounds too. So it all goes in stride.

MARK STEIL: Raisler is on the board of directors at the Granger Creamery. He says while milk is its main business, the creamery also houses a feed operation which is turning a profit. He says the future looks good. And with the Amish population growing, the number of milk cans delivered to the creamery may even increase. This is Mark Steil, Mainstreet Radio.