Looking for a delicious way to drink milk? (photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com)
Do you remember watching Saturday morning cartoons as you slurped down the milk left in the bottom of your cereal bowl? Now you can skip the cereal and get right to enjoying that specially flavored milk thanks to the folks at Cow Wow.
This uniquely flavored milk seeks to bring the same smile to your face that slurping up that cereal milk did when you were a kid. But unlike the super sweet cereals that you used to use to make that special milk, the organic, single-serve boxes of deliciously flavored milk only have 6 additional grams of sugar. Like all milk, it contains essential vitamins and nutrients like calcium, protein, and potassium. And, for families on the go, the self-stable milk, which is specially pasteurized so it doesn’t need to be refrigerated, can be the healthy beverage their kids need to stay on the go.
Although it was originally envisioned as a drink for kids, the folks at Cow Wow have come to understand what we have known all along – people of all ages love milk. In order to be even more appealing to the “man-child” market that seems to love their products, the original Cow Wow carton has been “upsized” and the juicebox-like straw has been replaced by a screw top. Cow Wow currently comes in two flavors, Fruity Trudy and Chocolate Chip Cathy with two new flavors, Peanut Butter Bessie and Cinny Minny coming soon.
Here in Arizona, we know the importance of milk to a healthy diet. Cows currently provide 90% of the world’s milk supply and they are an important part of Arizona Agriculture. Our local dairy farmers add more than $400 million dollars to the state’s economy each year just from the milk their cows produce. An average dairy cow is milked 305 days per year and produces about 121 glasses of milk. But Arizona cows average about 160 glasses per day which is 25% higher than the average in many other places.
What a cow eats impacts how much milk it produces, even here in Arizona. Cows that only eat grass produce about 50 glasses of milk a day. However, when cows are fed a mixed diet containing grass, corn, hay, and other feed, that average jumps up to 121.
Another thing that distinguishes Arizona dairy farms from most others in the country is their size. We have almost 200,000 milk-producing cows in Arizona with each of the 100 commercial dairy farms housing about 1500-2000 cows. In most other states, the average herd size is 100-150 cows.
Automation and new technology are an important part of modern dairies and these advances are one of the reasons our dairy farmers can keep such large herds. When farmers must milk a cow by hand, they can milk about 6 cows in an hour but with automated milking machines, 250-400 cows can be milked in the same amount of time.
You can learn more about Cow Wow cereal flavored milk from their website. For more information on the Arizona Dairy Industry, visit the Dairy Council of Arizona or the Arizona Farm Bureau.
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- Producing Milk is More than Producing Cows (fillyourplate.org)