March is Minnesota month and our state beverage is milk! There’s a good reason for that. Minnesota ranks 8th in the nation in milk production, contributing almost 5% of the country’s total at 9,868,000,000 pounds per year. We got our start in the 1870’s, when farm diversification in Minnesota began to move our state away from wheat production to a broader array of farm products. Before that, most Minnesota farms had a cow or two for home use but when farmers started adding dairy cattle, the “milk check” improved farm cash flow and dairying was seen as a good replacement for wheat. Minnesota saw its first cheese factory in Owatonna in 1868, but Wisconsin was capturing the cheese market. The butter market was wide open, though, and farmers wanted the butter by-product, skim milk, for calf and hog feed.
Consequently, the late 1870’s saw Minnesota’s first creameries. By 1898, the state had 664! A few inventions helped spur that number. Wendelin Grimm emigrated from Germany, bringing a bag of alfalfa seeds called “everlasting clover,” with him. In 1858 he planted them and, when much of the crop froze out, kept the seeds of the survivors and developed a winter-hardy alfalfa that could feed dairy cattle. In 1871, Pasteur invented pasteurization. In 1878 the Minnesota Dairyman’s Association was formed followed by the Minnesota Butter and Cheese Association in 1882. In 1880, the Warren Milk Bottle was patented with this slogan “Nothing But Glass in Contact With the Milk.” In 1884, a hand-cranked centrifugal cream separator was introduced and in 1890 S.M. Babcock developed a test for butterfat in milk. In 1889 the first silos were built, and that allowed farmers to preserve green fodder for their dairy herds. Minnesota farmers began to form cooperative creameries (replacing the privately owned ones) in the 1890’s, and dairy marketing expanded exponentially.
In 1891 the University of Minnesota established a dairy school under T.L. Haecker who is considered the father of Minnesota Dairying. In 1895, the USDA established a dairy division and in 1905 the first milking machine was marketed, though most milking continued to be done by hand. By 1910, Minnesota was considered a premier dairy state along with Wisconsin, New York and California. Although much of the dairying took place in southern and central Minnesota, in 1910 there were approximately 5,500 dairy cows in St. Louis County. As late as 1993, northern Minnesota still had 685 dairy farms with an average size of 45 cows. The number of American dairy farms dropped 93% from 1970-2018 and Minnesota was no exception. Factory farms and giant milk producers took over.
So it’s actually pretty cool that we still have four dairy farms left in St. Louis County! Dahl’s Sunrise Dairy buys from each of them, to the tune of 16,000 pounds of milk each week. Burnett Dairy of Wisconsin owns the collection vehicles and takes whatever Dahl’s can’t use to make cheese (hmmm, what if we had a cheese factory here?). Dahl’s processes the raw milk at its plant in Babbitt where the milk is stored in bulk tanks for a couple of hours while the machines gear up. First, a centrifuge separates the skim and cream. Then the skim is put into the system, pasteurized and homogenized, with cream added back in to make the 1%, 2% and whole milk varieties. Finally the milk is bottled in sustainable re-usable glass bottles at a rate of 3,000 bottles each week: 500 cases of local milk. One delivery driver brings the milk to 300 homes and A.J. Arntz, owner with his brother Nick, delivers to 13 Super One stores, Whole Foods, Natural Harvest, and restaurants and bakeries across the Range.
And, of course, the rest of that cream goes into making Dahl’s award-winning (Minnesota State Fair) butter. Here’s how it’s described on their website. “Rich, sweet and creamy, with a higher butterfat content (85%) versus regular butter (80%) and an extremely low moisture level made by churning cream slower and longer in an age-old tradition of fine European butters. It has a creamier taste and a silkier texture. Low-moisture, high butterfat and only 1% salt content makes this a ‘chefs’ choice. We make our butter weekly in our old-fashioned 1950’s butter churn.” Next month, Dahl’s butter will make its debut in a new cardboard carton, doing away with the plastic containers, a good move for sustainability. Another move toward sustainability is re-using and upscaling expired milk into soap and candles. Jackie Haigh of Goodland takes Dahl’s expired milk and makes Dahl’s Sunrise Dairy Hand-crafted Milk Soap. And they’ve just found a candlemaker to turn it into candles with local beeswax---coming soon!
A.J. and Nick Arntz bought the dairy from Wayne Dahl about six years ago. Wayne started the dairy in 1994, running it out of his house at first, then building the processing facility in Babbitt shortly thereafter. It grew with the acquisition of Blue Valley Dairy, Sipola Dairy, Midwest Dairy retail routes, Ely Dairy, Velvet Freeze Ice Cream and Calvin Johnson Dairy. A.J. and Nick have recently been working with graphic designer Matthew Jankila on updating the logo and packaging to market the products as locally-made. And they take pride in using only milk from cows not treated with the rBST growth hormone.
The Iron Range doesn’t have many food processors. There’s a need for more value-added processors to take what we can grow and produce here and make it marketable. Dahl’s is a good example of one such successful enterprise.