California Ag TODAY: INNOVATIVE HANFORD DAIRY

Rosa Brothers Milk Company aims to expand the milk-drinking population. Their flavored milks may encourage not only children to drink the milk they need for essential vitamins and minerals, but adults also, and without high fructose corn syrup. And, the company takes sustainability seriously, very seriously.

For 60 years, three generations of the Rosa Family have been building their Hanford, Calif. dairy farm. M.F. Rosa Dairy started in 1953 by the first Rosa generation, the brothers’ grandparents. When their dad, Manuel, returned from service in the Korean Conflict, he and his new wife, Eva, bought the farm from his parents. Then, in 1998, the two brothers, Noel and Rolland, purchased the farm. Additional family members are involved in the business.

Rosa Brothers Milk Company received the People's Choice for Best New Product Award this year at the Fresno Food Expo.

Their milk products include whole, reduced fat, skim, Chocolate, Strawberry and Half and Half Creamer. Newer milks include root beer, which tastes like the bottom of a root beer float, and orange cream, which tastes like the 50/50 popsicle. Eggnog milk will be introduced next month for the holidays.

Ice Cream flavors include the basic vanilla, chocolate, strawberry; standards like chocolate chip, pistachio, rocky road; and more creative types such as banana, coconut and chocolate, and nut and honey.

Just last year, the dairy built a creamery in Tulare where they bottle their milk in glass containers and make their ice cream.

The glass milk bottle keeps cold milk colder, protects the environment through recycling, and while other containers such as paper, plastic or metal transfer flavors to the milk, glass containers do not transfer outside flavors into the milk.

Buying Rosa Brothers milk is unique; first-time buyers pay a $2 deposit for the glass bottle. When consumers return for a refill, they bring back the empty bottle and pay for a new bottle of milk—without the deposit. This easy system helps keep large quantities of plastic out of landfills.

Rosa Brothers are genuinely interested in recycling beyond using glass milk containers. Some of the animal feeds are by-products of human foods such as distiller grains, canola meal and almond hulls. These are very good sources of essential nutrients and are blended in under the supervision of professional nutritionists.

Cow manure is distributed as fertilizer on fields near the dairy for growing hay and grains that, in turn, feed the cows.

The Dairy uses sand for cow bedding; then it is washed and reused.

Water is reused four consecutive times to cool the milk as it comes from the cow; slightly warmer, to wash the cows before they are milked; to pump into concrete “flush lanes” to keep clean the area where the cows stand to eat; and finally, to irrigate and fertilize the crops that feed the cows.

Noel and Rolland Rosa

The creamery was built and continues to be repaired with recycled materials previously used in the oil drilling industry. Old tires hold down cattle feed covers.

Distribution is local and reaches 60 stores currently between Bakersfield and Fresno. The milk is typically delivered from the cow to the fridge within a few days.

Rosa Brothers offers 100 percent accountability in that visitors can tour the dairy where the milk is produced, watch the milk going into the bottle at the creamery (through a glass window), be assured that the milk is never “pooled” with other farms, requiring additional processing to make the milk uniform. Plus, the company throws in family-oriented activities for their visitors.