This was an interesting day trip from our stay at Seaside, Ore. There is a self guided tour and we were able to observe workers on the assembly line cutting and packing cheese for shipment. Virtually all the dairy farmers in this area provide milk to produce Tillimook cheese and Tillimook ice cream. Most farmers in this area date back to 1909 and the farms are passed from generation to generation. This facility produces 167,000 pounds of cheese daily, 7 days per week. The cheese is produced into 40 pound blocks and cut into resale sizes from 8 ounces to 32 ounces. I also noticed 40 pound packages being prepared for shipment. They make 16 varieties of cheese and we were able to sample six of them for free. There were no free samples of ice cream though and judging from the tourists visiting today, they really enjoyed the ice cream. I did purchase some cheese to take on the road, (something with jalapenos in it).
A few other factoids: A newborn cow is 69 pounds, after one year it weighs in at 600 pounds and after 5 years weighs about 1300 pounds. A cow drinks a bathtub of water daily and the cost to feed and maintain the cows costs 50% of total income from milk production. Cows are milked twice daily and there is no rest for the farmer. His day starts at 3:30AM, milks the cows from 4 to7AM, eats breakfast, then cleans and sanitizes milking equipment, mends fences, breaks for lunch and at 4 to 7PM milks the cows again. It is no wonder they have so many kids, someone has to do all this work.
After this tour, I tasted some wine at a separate wine and cheese tasting retail establishment. They had farm animals here which included goats, an ostrich, miniature donkeys, alpaca's, chickens and more. I did purchase three yummy bottles of wine. None of them had grapes in them. One was cranberry, one cherry, and one rhubarb. We also stopped at a wholesale beef jerky factory. I purchased four pepperoni sticks.
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