From Cow to Cart in 2 Days: How Heinrich Farms Milk Gets to Your Local Store
At Heinrich Farms, our cows are milked twice a day, every day—rain, shine, or snowstorm. Each morning at 4 a.m. and evening at 4 p.m., we bring our cows into the barn for milking. They are brought in 3 at a time into our milking parlor. We brush any dirt off their teats and then dip with an iodine solution to clean them, kind of like washing your hands. Then we wipe away the solution and attach the milking unit. Each cow takes about 7 to 10 minutes to let down all of their milk. Then it is cooled and collected in our bulk tank which helps keep it cold at 32 degrees until the milk hauler can come pick it up.
Our milk hauler arrives every single day to pick up our milk and take it to Prairie Farms’ bottling plant in Dubuque along with milk from neighboring farms.
There, it’s homogenized, pasteurized, and bottled—often the very same day it leaves our farm. From there, it makes its way onto the shelves of local stores like Fareway and Hy-Vee.
Here’s the wow factor: the entire journey—from cow to cart—takes just two days. That means when you pick up a gallon of Prairie Farms milk in your local grocery store in Eastern Iowa, there’s a good chance it came straight from our—or from one of our neighboring farm families barn just 48 hours ago.
Prairie Farms isn’t just a brand; it’s a cooperative made up of over 600 family farms across the Midwest. As farmer-owners, we’re proud to be part of a co-op that’s been around since 1938, committed to keeping farms family-owned and dairy local.
So next time you pour a glass of milk or stir some into your coffee, remember: it might’ve come from Heinrich Farms just two days ago.
Welcome to our farm stories!
We are the Heinrich Family (and more!) and we want to share how we are growing our farm one generation at a time. Together as a family we raise corn, soybeans, oats, alfalfa, dairy, beef and more!
Heinrich Farms 