Dairy

OXFORD, Pa. -- A glass bottle is the only vessel Joseph Beckenstrater ever has deemed worthy of the creamy yield from his family farm.The half-gallon jugs catch the eye of shoppers in the gourmet and health food stores of Baltimore, where Chrome Dairy dominates the specialty milk market. And clear glass reveals something else that sets Chrome apart -- the milk is not homogenized, so the cream sits on top. You have to shake this stuff before you pour, or you'll get a rich clump in the first serving.

Carol Frey from Baltimore was looking for a recipe she has lost for making a ricotta cheesecake. Thomas Scavuzzo from Rosedale shared an old family recipe from the Renna Dairy Co. in Rosedale, Pa. His grandparents owned the dairy, which closed in 1965. The instructions that came with his recipe were very basic. While cheesecakes are not difficult to make, there are a few golden rules one should try and follow when making them. Start by making sure all your ingredients are at room temperature; take care not to overbeat them; and because cheesecake is essentially custard, it is best to bake it in a water bath.

Lest anyone wonder why the United States faces a $4 trillion debt and Americans don't trust the federal government with their money, look no further than Gambrills, home of the U.S. Naval Academy dairy farm.This farm has cost taxpayers millions of dollars over the years.According to the most recent information, the Naval Academy could save up to $340,000 annually by contracting with a private dairy to provide milk and milk products to midshipmen. The price of milk at private dairies ranges from $1.74 to $1.99 per gallon; the academy's dairy milk costs $2.30 a gallon.

The four black orbs — dark-tinted security cameras — watch silently overhead in a room filled with stainless-steel pipes. The pipes carry raw milk from four large holding tanks outside the building into two large metal cabinets that look like oversized car radiators. This is one of the critical points in Cloverland Dairy's production process, where raw milk is pasteurized — heated well above 161 degrees Fahrenheit — and then pumped through pipes into other parts of the Baltimore plant for processing and packaging.

Donald R. Barbary, a retired dairy executive active in fund raising for Fort McHenry, died of cancer Feb. 8 at his home in York, S.C. The former Columbia resident was 76. Born in Chilhowie, Va., he moved to Baltimore in 1943 and worked at the old Western Maryland Dairy, later Sealtest. After earning a business degree from the University of Baltimore, he worked as a manager at Sealtest operations in Chambersburg, Pa., Philadelphia and New York City in areas involving milk and cottage cheese.

The Maryland Dairy Industry Association will hold its annual meeting Nov. 29 at Wilhelm Ltd. Caterers in Westminster. Association officials will outline a dairy production management plan designed to assure dairy producers of "Thriving in 2002 and Beyond," the theme of the meeting. Dairy veterinarian Dr. Jerome K. Harness will present the keynote address about guidelines for increasing economic returns in the modern dairy operation. Seminars will include a farm labor management plan, a farm investment management guide, a reproduction plan and timetable, and bio-security measures to protect and maintain herd health.

Elizabeth Denison Pindell, a homemaker and former co-owner of a dairy business, died of respiratory failure Saturday at Mercy Ridge Retirement Community, where she had lived since 2003. She was 88. Elizabeth Hammond Cromwell Denison was born in Baltimore and raised at her family's Hill House Farm on York Road in Timonium. She was a 1936 graduate of Notre Dame Preparatory School and made her debut at the Bachelors Cotillon that year. She owned a horse, Play 'Em, which she rode years ago to visit friends.

Maude V. Weibe, a retired custodian who had worked at a Baltimore dairy, died of heart failure Thursday at a hospital in Clyde, N.C. The former Mount Washington resident was 91. She was born Maude Viola Shade in Baltimore and was raised in Mount Washington. She attended city public schools until leaving to help support her family. Mrs. Weibe worked for 30 years at the Koontz Dairy, where she was a custodian at the company's Reisterstown Road corporate headquarters. She retired in 1974.

MIDDLETOWN -- Randy Sowers and his family are turning back the pages of history in an attempt to save their 200-acre dairy farm a few miles outside this Frederick County town. In a throwback to what some would call the good old days, a time when country folk never locked their doors, the Sowers family offers farm-fresh milk delivered to the doorsteps of about 1,600 homes in six Maryland counties, Washington and parts of Virginia and West Virginia. According to Ted Elkin, chief of the division of milk control at the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the Sowerses' South Mountain Creamery is the only licensed dairy operation in the state providing home delivery of milk.

In a major shift, Baltimore's only milk processor has joined the ranks of the opponents of legislation aimed at stabilizing Maryland's rapidly declining milk industry.In a surprise move yesterday during a hearing before the Senate Economic and Environmental Affairs Committee, opponents of the Fairness in Milk Marketing Act of 1997 introduced a letter from Cloverland Green Spring Dairy's general manager, Lawrence C. Webster, telling a customer that it could count the dairy as being opposed to the legislation.

Laws are like fine nets, catching the common fish even as the biggest push their way through. Or so you might think on learning of how federal prosecutors keep nabbing small and medium-size businesspeople who violate an obscure law relating to bank paperwork, even as the best-known violator of the law so far (a certain well-connected politico named Eliot Spitzer) walks free. Last month, the feds swooped down on a successful Maryland dairy business, South Mountain Creamery, seizing $70,000 in its bank accounts and formally charging its owners, Randy and Karen Sowers, with the offense of bank "structuring.

— Many farmers in this rural Kent County community were left shaken after a father and his two teenage sons were found dead early Thursday in a pond full of liquid manure on a local dairy farm. The deaths appear to be accidental, but investigators will wait for autopsy results before ruling out foul play, said Greg Shipley, Maryland State Police spokesman. The bodies, tentatively identified as those of Glen W. Nolt, 48, and his two sons, Kelvin R. Nolt, 18, and Cleason S. Nolt, 14, all of Peach Bottom, Pa., had taken hours to find, submerged in a 20-foot-deep, 2-million-gallon manure pit on Centerdel Farm, state police said.

The Taneytown History Museum is featuring two small, but vivid, exhibits that focus on very different aspects of north Carroll County history: Its brush with the Civil War, and its 200-year heritage of dairy farming. The exhibit "Got Milk: A Brief History of Carroll County Dairy Farming, 1800-1930" takes up only one room in the museum on East Baltimore Street, yet offers a glimpse into dairy farming's economic and cultural importance in Carroll during earlier times. The displays are comprised of an eclectic assortment of photographs, paintings and articles describing several diary industry tools that were invented in Carroll County and marketed nationally.

John Y. Crow, a retired salesman of dairy products and a decorated World War II veteran, died of complications from pneumonia April 8 at Charlotte Hall Veterans Home in Southern Maryland. He was 89 and had lived in North Baltimore. Born in Uniontown, Pa., and raised in Towson, he was a 1941 graduate of Towson High School. He earned an animal husbandry degree at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he also attended a Reserve Officers' Training Corps program. He went into military service in the Army.

Six people were infected with Campylobacter by raw milk from the Family Cow dairy store in Chambersburg, Pa., including three in Maryland, the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said Friday. The bacteria causes diarrhea, nausea and vomiting and can progress into a more serious bloodstream infection, usually two to five days after exposure. The state agency and the health department in Pennsylvania are advising consumers to discard any product bought from this farm since Jan. 1. The implicated milk comes in plastic gallon, half gallon and pint containers and is sold directly to consumers on the farm and at drop off points and retail stores in Pennsylvania.

Andy and Mary Laudenklos each spend more than 70 hours a week caring for their 600 cows, delivering calves and overseeing the milking at their Carroll County dairy farm - and they're also raising three young sons. The couple and their three-year-old business, East West Farm outside Union Bridge in Carroll County, are struggling. They have doubled the size of their herd and hope to one day procure a robotic milker, all to turn the operation profitable. They are just breaking even now. Dairy farmers are an increasingly rare breed in Maryland, where such operations are disappearing at a rate twice the national average.

TULARE, Calif. - To understand how serious the utility crisis has become in California, consider the case of the Land O' Lakes Inc. Western Region factory here, the largest milk processing plant in the United States. Every day, 34 refrigerated tankers make several round trips from 200 dairies across the state to a six-block compound here. These trucks bring in a total of 230 tanker loads, or 11 million to 12 million pounds of milk, every 24 hours, 365 days a year. To keep the production line from dairy to processing plant flowing smoothly, Land O' Lakes runs a tight operation: Tankers come in, unload their milk and go. If a plant were shut down, the milk trucks would be delayed, the dairies' operations would get backed up and their perishable product would have to be dumped.

Embassy Dairy Inc., one of only five remaining commercial dairies in Maryland, announced yesterday that it will close in early April and lay off the last of its 150 workers.The 66-year-old Waldorf company's decision will eliminate one of the top employers in Charles County and could result in consumers' paying more for milk at grocery stores across the state, according to a company executive.Embassy has struggled in recent years and filed for bankruptcy-law protection last May. Factory workers had hoped that a new owner and wage concessions of nearly $6,000 a year would be enough to save their jobs.

It's been 25 years since the federal government bought out a substantial number of dairy farmers in Harford County. Despite the federal buyout program and the suburbanization of a large swath of the county, dairy farming remains a way of life on 21 Harford farms. It's a far cry from when dairy farming was number one in Harford County. And a substantial portion of the milk produced locally isn't a product that can be traced directly from the grocery store to a field in Darlington or Jarrettsville because most local producers sell through large milk cooperatives.

David Crowl, a dairy farmer from Street, was among more than 65 Dairy Farmers of America Inc. board members and young cooperators who visited Capitol Hill last month to discuss issues affecting the dairy industry. DFA members and staff convened in Washington, D.C., for the cooperative's annual D.C. Board Meeting and Hill Visits, where they conducted more than 175 visits with legislators. Crowl met Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, who represents northern Harford County, and his staff and the staffs of Maryland Sens.