The milkman cometh

Shortly after we moved to Seattle, I spotted a white refrigerated truck turning down our street. Its shiny side panels sported a red cartoon cow, and the name Smith Brothers Farms. I assumed the truck had just made a delivery to a local store. Then I noticed the motto stenciled beneath the name: “Fresh from our cows to you.” And below that, a sign of the times, this URL: www. smithbrothersfarms.com.

Home milk delivery at the end of the 20th century? The idea struck me as charmingly quaint. I loved the nostalgic image of a uniformed milkman delivering glass bottles of milk along our street of early 20th-century houses.

And yet, during the tech boom of the late ’90s, web-based home-delivery services for groceries were springing up to serve the armies of computer-savvy tech workers in Silicon Valley and Seattle who had more money to spend than time to shop. While Paul worked in high-tech, we tried a couple of deliveries from one of those services (the one with the peach on its trucks), but decided that we preferred the five minute walk to our local grocery store.

While I was contemplating eating locally this month, I thought of that Smith Brothers Farms truck. A little online research revealed that the dairy was founded in 1920, in the Green River Valley near Kent, WA. Five years ago, Smith Brothers moved most of its herd to land near Royal City in Grant County, WA. While Kent is only 20 miles from our house, Royal City is 138 miles from Seattle. For now, this is local enough. I know that there are still dairy herds in the Green River Valley, but I haven’t had the time to scout out any farms there that might sell their milk locally, rather than to a larger distributor.

Although this is a family-owned local business, Smith Brothers is the third largest dairy in Washington state, and the largest that produces all of the milk that it bottles and distributes. They moved their 3000 head of cattle to Grant County because they had run out of room to grow in their old location. This is large-scale local production, rather than the smaller-scale family farming that would be my first choice.

And what about the milk itself? We’ve been buying organic milk for a few years now, and I needed to know that buying from this local producer would not mean we’d be drinking antibiotics and growth hormones in our milk. The FAQ on Smith Brothers’ web site assured me we would not:

Q. Do you give your cows antibiotics?
A. Our milk has no added antibiotics. We do not give antibiotics to healthy cows. Our cows receive regular checkups and treatment from veterinarians. When one of our cows gets sick, the cow is removed from production where a veterinarian may give it antibiotics to help it get better. Once the cow is deemed healthy by the veterinarian, the cow is not returned to production until tests indicate it is free of the antibiotics it was given.

Q. Is Smith Brothers milk considered organic?
A. No, our milk is not considered organic because we do not grow our own feed. We feed our cows Grade A grains and grasses which we purchase from local farmers. We also do not in any way use irradiation, sewage sludge or genetically modified organisms in the production of our products.

Smith Brothers Farms may not be the small, entirely local, organic, family dairy farm of my wildest dreams. They don’t even use glass bottles any more, though their paper cartons are recyclable in Seattle. But they do sell milk from their own cows, and those cows aren’t all that far from where we live. I like knowing that, within a few hours, I could drive over the Cascades and see the farm from which our milk comes.

So, a couple of weeks ago, a shiny white, insulated Smith Brothers Farms milk box joined our rocking chairs and hammock on the front porch. As well as having the dairy’s URL on its front, the box is marked on the side with the URL of its supplier: www.milkboxes.net. Both the cute red cow, and the idea of a website for milk boxes, make me smile.

On Thursday mornings, our milkman John – how those three words amuse me! – delivers a couple of half gallons of 1% milk and a half pint of cream to our box. The paper cartons look like those you’d buy at any grocery store. Although the milk is good, and very fresh, I don’t notice much difference from the organic milk we’d been buying. There are two things worth noting about the cream; the first is that Lyra, who has previously expressed no interest in dairy products, crawled up onto my lap trying to get at some that I had whipped, and licked a large (in human terms) dollop off my finger. And the second thing? I’m saving that for another post.

Technorati tags: Eat Local + Eat Local Challenge