National Milk Day is celebrated on January 11 to commemorate the first time milk was delivered to homes in glass bottles in the United States back in 1878. Since the United States is one of the top exporters of milk and other milk products, we thought celebrating National Milk Day in our schools would be a great way to teach students the importance of this nutrient-rich product.
To help explain the milk’s journey from cow to carton, a local dairy farmer, Johan Heijkoop, and two of his cows visited Chets Creek Elementary for an “UDDERly” spectacular educational experience bringing the farm to the students.
As students gathered under the pavilion, awestruck by the goliath cows grazing before them, many couldn’t contain their excitement and some even commented that they had never seen a real cow in person before, but they all settled down to hear from their special guest.
Johan has lived on a dairy farm all his life. Some would say it’s in his blood, or maybe, he has milk coursing through his veins.
Johan loves being able to share his knowledge and passion for dairy farming and that really shined through as he talked about his 2,000 cows that he milks twice a day. His team milks 17 cows at a time, and it takes roughly 5-7 minutes to milk each cow. In total, it takes about nine hours every day to milk all the cows twice a day – that’s a full-time job! The result of this is that each cow produces 10 gallons of milk per day and five tanker loads of milk in their lifetime. Those are some pretty impressive statistics!
There are five types of dairy cows, and Johan has Holstein cows, which are the most popular breed of dairy cows.
His cows eat 100 pounds of food a day, and to sustain this food intake, Johan’s team makes their own cow feed. He brought bags of the ingredients that go into their feed, including citrus pulp, ground corn, cotton seed, soybean meal, and vitamins and minerals. Johan explained that cows are great recyclers because they eat a lot of byproducts from other crops.
As Johan was winding down his presentation, Avery from the Florida Dairy Council stepped in to explain the importance of milk in a healthy diet. Milk is rich in calcium and vitamin D to make us strong and keep our bones healthy. She said that most of the milk that we get in our schools comes from Florida dairy farmers, so the students could be drinking milk from Johan’s cows!
The students really enjoyed this “legenDAIRY” educational experience and had so many great questions for Johan. The visit was so “aMOOsing” that it even caught the attention of the local news station, Action News Jacksonville, and they did a news segment featuring the event!
