Camelot Cattle Company - Raw Dairy Tour

In the Milking Room

We get a lot of questions about our milking process. We don't allow visitors in our milking room during milking hours for sanitary reasons and to keep our dairy animals from getting stressed so this page is to provide a virtual tour of our milking parlor.

We milk in a flat barn and we milk every 12 hours. We are set up to milk three cows and two goats simultaneously, although we bring six goats in at a time. Everything is done as sanitary as possible and the cows and the goats are all milked by machine. The milkers are sanitized before and after each milking. The goats have a milk stand with a ramp to provide us with easy access while the cows just walk straight into their stanchion.

The girls all know the routine well and come in the barn in the same order every milking. They go to their stanchion and stand eating during the milking process. Their udders and teats are carefully washed with warm soapy water and then dried. We strip a few squirts of milk out of each teat and then the freshly sanitized milkers are put on the cow/goat. Once the girls are milked out the milker is removed and each teat is sprayed with Fight Bac, a disinfectant teat spray that helps close the orifice and prevent mastitis. Then any special attention she needs is administered such as lotion for dry skin, manuka honey salve to prevent chapped teats, soothing peppermint oil massage for any edema, etc, and then she is released from the stanchion to go back outside. As each cow is milked out the milk is transferred by stainless steel pipeline into a stainless steel milk tank that filters and immediately chills the milk. The Jersey milk is then bottled directly from that tank and put into the cooler ready for customer pick up. The goats are milked into a separate bucket and the milk is then immediately filtered, bottled, and chilled.

Here you can see the barn in full use with six goats and three cows in stanchions. In the background three cows are being milked while in the foreground you can see two goats have already been milked and the next two on the stand are being milked. Once this group is all milked, they go out to a pen with fresh water and alfalfa hay until everyone is milked and their loafing barn is cleaned and then they are turned back out.

You can also see the stainless steel pipeline where the milk goes directly from the cows into the tank and bottling room.

Here are close ups of three cows in the barn ready to be milked and then with their milkers on.

Here is the tank and bottling room. You can see the stainless steel pipeline where the milk comes in the room and into the tank during milking.

All of the floors are washed down after each milking, both in the bottling room and in the milking area. Anyone handling the animals and milk are always wearing disposable gloves.

On the opposite side of the milking parlor are the tie stalls for the cows in inclement weather where they each have top of the line stall mats with clean bedding, individual automatic water bowls and unlimited access to hay. They are outside on pasture unless there is a good reason for them not to be but when they can't be outside, their comfort is still top priority.

1 Peter 4:10 (NIV): Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms.

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Marionville, MO 65705

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417-860-1412 (text)

417-466-5436 (call)