From grass to glass
Cows love eating grass – and the more, the better! Thanks to Luxembourg’s many green meadows and pastures, milk production has always played a central role in the country and remains the most important sector of the agricultural industry.
A cow produces milk to feed her calf. This means she only starts producing milk after carrying and giving birth. After the birth, she produces milk for around 340 days. If she did not have another calf after that, she would stop producing milk. That’s why a cow is usually inseminated again or mated with a bull a few weeks after giving birth.
Cows are herbivores and ruminants. Unlike humans, they can digest grass. That is because, instead of having just one stomach like we do, they have four: the rumen, reticulum, omasum and abomasum. Dairy cows not only eat grass but also other plant-based feed, which they convert into milk.
They are milked twice a day – either in a milking parlour, on a milking carousel or using a milking robot (which cows can enter whenever and as often as they like). In the first two systems, the farmer stands about a metre lower than the cows. This makes it easier for the farmer to reach the cows’ teats, clean them and attach the milking equipment. With a milking robot, the teat cleaning and attachment of the milking equipment are done automatically.
After milking, it is important to cool the raw milk as quickly as possible. It is stored in a milk cooling tank, where it is chilled to between 4 and 6 °C. The dairy’s milk collection lorry usually comes every other day to pick it up. Before the milk is pumped into the lorry’s stainless steel tank, a sample is taken to check its quality. Raw milk can contain harmful bacteria and should never be consumed without boiling it first.
At the dairy, the raw milk is tested again in the lab, heated (to kill any pathogens) and purified, and the skimmed milk is then separated from the cream. Depending on whether whole milk, semi-skimmed or skimmed milk is being produced, the appropriate amount of cream is added back to the milk. The dairy uses various processes to produce yoghurt, quark, butter, cheese, cream, kefir, buttermilk and more.