Milk samples are collected from each farm and analyzed to determine milk freshness and purity. A typical Mississippi dairy will milk about 100 to 300 Holstein cows twice a day, seven days a week. It will produce around 5,000-18,000 pounds of milk a day. There are many different breeds of dairy cows, but Holstein is by far the most popular. Of the nearly 10 million milk cows in the United States, about 90 percent of them are the Holstein breed.
Dairymen usually feed their cows grass, chopped corn, hay, mixed feed and water.
Like most dairymen, Boutwell, Pigott and Ladner grow their own corn for silage and mix their own rations. They also graze their cows on fields of ryegrass. Marketing Milk Kenneth Boutwell, Sr. checks the amount of milk in a tank near his milking parlor Milk from the Boutwell and Pigott dairies is contracted with Dairy Farmers of America, a national milk marketing cooperative that has 27,000-plus members in 45 states marketing 44.7 billion pounds of milk annually. During the week, the Boutwell and Pigott milk is shipped to bottling plants in Alabama, Louisiana or Mississippi. On the weekend, the milk goes to DFA's Southeast Area surplus handling facility in Franklinton, Louisiana where it is either loaded onto a long haul truck and taken to Florida or it is made into a product such as powdered milk, cream or butter.