Healthy, organic cows produce high-quality, delicious organic milk. One of the key measures of how healthy a cow is and how well-managed the farm on which she was raised is the quality and taste of the milk. Here at Aurora Organic, in addition to our passionate devotion to maintaining the well-being of our animals, we have pioneered a unique milk production system. It enables us to produce the freshest, highest quality organic milk at a reduced cost, while eliminating some of the resource-wasteful production techniques, such as excessive trucking and transport.
Frequent Milking: We milk our cows 3 times per day during lactation, which more closely mimics the amount of time a cow would nurse her calf and reduces stress on the udder. This low-stress, increased productivity helps us to reduce the overall cost of the milk.
On-site Organic Processing: We have an organic milk bottling facility that is located directly adjacent to our Colorado dairy. Most organic milk is produced and shipped to more distant co-packers, introducing significant transport costs to the overall cost. Because our milk comes from next-door we eliminate this extra cost and increase the freshness of our bottled milk.
Organic Processing Integrity: Maintaining our facility means that we retain control of the processing of our milk. This enables us to ensure the organic integrity of our finished product and to closely manage the quality and freshness of our milk, rather than leaving this vital component of organic milk production to a distant co-packer.
Resource Conservation: In addition to eliminating a great deal of the costly and fossil-fuel driven step of trucking and transport, maintaining our own processing facility allows us to manage other elements of sustainability. For example, recycling the plant “first-wash” water back to our dairy farm and composting any solid waste for use in our organic crop fields. We have mandated the purchase of energy-efficient equipment.
Milk Quality: Because we retain control of every element of our organic milk production -– from pasture to feed crops, from animal health to natural reproduction, from milking to bottling -– we are able to ensure excellent quality milk.
Additionally, we maintain an on-site quality control laboratory to keep constant watch over our milk quality. There are 12 flavor parameters used to quantify the flavor characteristics of milk. We regularly test our milk in-house, as well as sending it out to third-party testers, to measure the taste of the milk against these parameters. Additionally, we consistently perform tests about how the milk flavor and quality profile changes over time, as well as testing our milk against other organic milks to compare. We also routinely perform milk quality testing that examines other quality characteristics such as the bacteria count, somantic cell counts, standard plate counts and other various tests.
We consistently test in the top percentiles for milk quality, which is a testimony to the health of our cows and the proper management of our organic dairy.