Myths About Milk

[Chappers]

I was watching "How It's made" on the Quest channel last night and was fascinated by the butter making process and the way that nothing is wasted as once the solids are removed from the milk, it's then sold as skimmed milk and then the buttermilk is used for making ice cream etc...

This morning, a family member mentioned how "when she was a girl" that farmers would pour skimmed milk down the drain as nobody wanted it, that must have been in the 1960's.

But I have a problem with that. Firstly, we as a nation did not throw anything away (ration book mentality) so I find it hard to believe that a farmer would trhow milk away unless he simply had too much of the stuff.

Secondly, it's not usually the farmer who makes the butter or removes the cream is it? The farmer usually milks the cows and sends the milk to the dairy for pasturisation/processing right?

The idea that a farmer in the 1960's would milk his cows, remove the fats for cream or butter on site and then discard the skimmed milk just sounds unlikely to me and much more likely that they would pour it down the drain only as a last resort.

What do you guys think?

[Mosaic]

It depends on local prices at the time and the way the farm was running. Not all milk was processed i dairies - our milkie was delivering their own home-bottled unpasteurised milk right into the 1980s, when some health scare or other made them shift to pasteurised.

So given that at different times and places farmers have ploughed crops back into the fields (soft fruit this year), burned excess grain etc I can see it being the course of least resistance and least loss by the 1960s that unwanted milk products were chucked down the drain.

[beso]

Many farms including the old one where I live now were cream dairies. The cream was separated, put in big cans and sold. No refrigeration, they just put in in water in a small shed until the cream truck arrived and it was taken away to make butter.

In the case of the farm I'm on they sent the skim milk straight to their piggery but farms without pigs would have poured it on the fields.

[Whickerman]

a creamery near here has a major baby food factory next door and they useall their Whey.

[boxtops]

In the 1960s farmers certainly made their own, and often sold it at the farm gate.

[NOX]

Quite true no-one would have touched skimmed milk in the 60's and certainly my grandparents farm when I was a kid ( I was born 1960) used to make it's own butter and sell it, so I think your relative was probably right.