Get ready to hear from Elsa Meyer, our guest author, as she shares her experience at the Young Nebraska Scientists Exploring Dairy camp. Elsa takes us on a journey through the camp, offering insights and firsthand encounters with the world of dairy products and food science.

The Young Nebraska Scientists Exploring Dairy camp was held at the UNL Innovation Campus. It is geared towards high school students who are interested in food science. Throughout the camp we explored the what, how, and why of milk and dairy products. We started with what the product is, then moved to the making process, and finally how the food is tested, packaged, and sold.

From Farm to Plant

During the camp we took tours of different places involved in the supply chain of dairy products like a dairy farm. Some of this included the pilot plant, as well as taste-testing and food labs at Nebraska Innovation Campus. 

The first tour we took was of a dairy farm about an hour’s drive outside of Lincoln. The farm was family owned and operated and had a 5th generation farmer. Two people from the family and one of their employees took us on a tour of the whole farm from the cows all the way to the milk transport truck. We started by going through the barn and seeing how they do all of the upkeep and feeding of the cows.

They had a system where the sand, water, and fertilizer were reused in a cycle. Fertilizer from the cows went back to the crops to feed them, water used to flush the barn was cycled through a stream and lagoon and used to water crops, and the sand in the barn was filtered out of the flushing water to be dried out, cleaned, and reused.

The Importance of Sample Traceability

From the barn and the fields we went to the facility where they milked the cows. The farm has about 2500 total cows, but only about 1000 are milking cows at any given time. We got to see the machines and how they maneuvered the cows through the process. The milk was collected in smaller containers and was transported through pipes into a bigger container that could be emptied into tanker trucks. Luckily, we were there just in time for the pickup so we got to see the tanker. The driver told us that the tanker gets filled with milk from many different farms before being taken to the bigger plant so it can be pasteurized and then packaged and sold. He showed us how he collected samples and explained how he had to do that at every farm in case one farm’s milk made the whole batch unable to be sold. Through my work with Presage Analytics, I understood the importance of the sample collection and the need to track and identify each farm for any potential issues.

Ensuring Safety and Quality

In the tour of the pilot plant we learned about different safety and quality tests that they and other factories and plants have to use for certain products to ensure that they are safe to use and consume. It’s important to ensure the quality of products so that consumers don’t get sick or harmed. The pilot plant had many different machines that processed food in different ways including freeze dryers, spray dryers, ice cream churners, vats for cheese, and many others. As an intern at Presage Analytics, I found the tour of the pilot plant enlightening. It showcased the various safety and quality tests conducted to ensure the products are safe for consumption. Observing the different machines and processes reinforced the significance of easy data management, which is at the core of what we do at Presage Analytics.

Understanding the Processes

Each day at the Young Nebraska Scientists Exploring Dairy camp we learned about different dairy products. We started with milk, then went to cheese, then ice cream, and finally yogurt. The curriculum included the makeup of all the different products as well as the procedure for making them. We got to try making our own cheese, ice cream, and yogurt in the food science laboratories to better understand the processes. After making our products, we got to taste-test them as well as other versions of the product sold in stores so we could compare and contrast them with our newly-learned context.

Along with the tours, labs, and taste-testings, we also learned about the dairy products classroom style through lectures from professors at the Food Science College of UNL. Overall, the camp was a great overview of dairy products, going in-depth enough that we learned a lot, but not getting so specific that we couldn’t understand. I would recommend it to other high-school students, even if they aren’t necessarily interested in food science and are just avid learners.