Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
It’s always a moo-ving experience at Milky Way Farm
When I attended high school at West Chester East during the ’70s, we wore our hair longer and Chester County was considered rural.
Since then, we’ve lost much of our farmland and open space to development, and my hair is now shorter and gray. All those new homes replacing open land are the cost of being popular and reflect that more people want to live in a fine place.
A throwback to those days of our youth is Milky Way Farm.
Dairy cows are the queens, and several other ancillary businesses are the spokes of the wheel, keeping the 103-acre dairy farm in Uwchlan Township in business.
I recently visited the farm, just north of Exton in Chester Springs, along with more than 3,200 other visitors.
We took a free hayride to the huge pumpkin patch to pick out that perfect pumpkin, and there at the Creamery, devoured homemade ice cream, which is made from the farm’s cow’s milk.
Farmer Sam Matthews throws his doors open to the public during fall weekends. There are free hayrides, farm animals, beautiful views, a corn maze and that homemade ice cream.
Five generations of the Matthews Family have called the 1823 farm house home. I’ve been fascinated with dairy cows since I attended Fugett Middle School. We could look out the classroom windows and see cows chewing their cud in farmer Ira Hicks Farm.
And we often re-filled our returnable glass bottles with Ira’s moo juice at the Goshen Milk Store.
Ira was my school bus driver. In high school, during the shortest days of the year, we’d wait for Hicks to pick us up in the dark.
We knew that Hicks, who regularly wore overalls when driving Bus No. 66, had already been awake for hours milking the cows.
Oh my, how times have changed. Matthews took me in the one and only computerized robotic milking stall at Milky Way Farm.
He said that Hicks had to rise before dawn to milk the cows because otherwise they feel fullness. Matthews said it feels good to cows to be milked.
“Before robots, cows waited until the farmer got out of bed,” Matthews said. “That’s why farmers get up so early – because the cows feel discomfort without being milked.”
At Milky Way Farm, the average cow milks about three time a day, without any human assistance.
I watched as Cow No. 118 entered the stall, deftly moved into position and allowed her udder to be cleaned with spinner brushes like you might find at a car wash.
A laser system then guided four suction devices to each of the teats and we then watched the milk flow. Matthews told me that the robotic machine, made in the Netherlands, is a suction machine and not a squeezing machine.
“It’s not like a vacuum cleaner, it’s more like a straw,” Matthews said.
As a reward, during milking, a mixture of feed, composed of corn and soy products, along with other grains — all vegetables — was fed to Cow No. 118.
About every 10 days feed is delivered in five-ton batches for the farm’s 60 cows and heifers.
The more milk produced, the more feed for the cow.
An electric, waterproof identifier with a computer chip, which Matthews said is little more than a “high priced E-Z pass” keeps track of how many times each day a cow enters the robot and how much milk is produced.
The cows get just two minutes after milking to finish the prepared food. They are free to roam most of the farm and are able to eat as much hay and grass as desired. Most of the farm’s cows are Holsteins and produce about eight to nine gallons each day. Milk is sold by weight — not all milk weighs the same — the weight is based on the amount of cream and proteins. The average gallon of milk weighs 8.6 pounds.
All vitamin D whole milk is 3.25 percent fat and cream. Two percent milk contains about one third less fat and 1 percent milk contains half that amount of fat.
Daughter Carolyn Eaglehouse is the farm’s general manager and runs the Creamery. All the ice cream flavors are named after cows.
Eaglehouse scooped me out a double dip of Carmela’s dulce de leche and Bea’s banana chocolate chunk.
The ice cream is handmade on the farm, with a bit of help from Longacre Dairy where cream and sugar is added and the milk is pasteurized and homogenized. The product is then batch frozen at the farm and more than 50 individual flavors are added.
School group tours and summer camps help finance the farm.
“We’re educating both adults and kids,” Eaglehouse said. “Many don’t think about all those steps behind that grocery store.”
Matthews said that half of the farms in Pennsylvania rely on income from sources other than traditional farming.
Milky Way Farm runs the free hayrides to the pumpkin patch in October, along with operating the Creamery and a vegetable co-op for most of the year.
The profit margin is thin and varies from year to year, Matthew said. Dairy consumption is decreasing.
Cheeses come with a higher cost for processing and storage. One product that wasn’t popular when Matthews was a child has helped revive the industry – pizza.
As my hair continues to turn grayer and those subdivisions keep popping up, let’s hope the Matthews family keeps fighting that valiant fight to keep the farm open.
For more information on the farm, go to www. MilkyWayFarm.com