An unmistakable smell swirled in the dusty air during a recent, windy morning on a Lancaster County dairy farm.
Red Knob Farm, a dairy operation a few miles north of the Maryland state line, is home to more than 1,500 cows, so there was that odor to contend with, of course. Workers had recently uncovered a large swath of winter rye that had been pickling under plastic too, but there was something more subtle wafting around, beyond the barns.
It was a brown powder, piled high inside a commodity shed. If you looked close enough, there were flecks of orange and yellow. It smelled sweet, like chocolate: Hershey’s Kit Kat to be specific.
“I think these are some broken-up Reese’s Pieces shells, “ said Jared Galbreath, Red Knob’s dairy manager. “I’d say most of this is Kit Kat, though.”
A not-so-scientific study once found that millions of Americans believed chocolate milk came from brown cows. Here at Red Knob Farm, and every other dairy farm in the world, the milk is white. But thanks to a partnership between Hershey’s and Cargill, a Minnesota-based food corporation, the Holsteins here are taking part in a real circle-of-life scenario with one of the world’s most-prized treats.
The cows are eating everything from Kisses to Milk Duds to Payday bars, all of it from Hershey plants, broken down into a powder, and mixed into Cargill’s feed.
And no, it doesn’t make the milk taste like chocolate.
“It will change the composition of the milk, but many types of formulas will do that, based on the farmer’s preferences,” said Darryl Reiner, a merchant with Cargill’s animal health & nutrition business.
The chocolate is an extra source of protein, fat, and sugar, Reiner said, but the biggest reason for recycling it is cutting back on waste. If not for the cows, the chocolate would be sent to a landfill.
Every day, Hershey plants in Pennsylvania and other states have leftover chocolate. Some of it’s excess from line changes and some could be from color or taste rejections. According to Cargill, the leftovers add up to tens of thousands of pounds of chocolate. They’ve dubbed the mix simply as “candy meal.”
Source: inquirer.com
Photo Credit: gettyimages-vwalakte
Categories: Pennsylvania, Business, Crops, Sugar Beets, Livestock, Dairy Cattle