Monday, May 21, 2012

Maple View Farm Tour




Last week we finally got the opportunity to visit Maple View Farm and do a couple of their educational classes. This is our favorite place to go to get ice cream if we are up in the area of lovely Chapel Hill, NC. It's really nice to sit in the rocking chairs on the front porch of the store and look out at the fields and cows, while eating some top notch all-natural ice cream made from the very same cow's milk. We also occasionally drink their milk, which is available at our local Whole Foods and comes in returnable glass bottles.

Three years ago, this local diary farm opened up a new educational facility for camps and classes. When I was trying to set up a tour at a dairy farm a few years back, I found out that it's not an easy thing to find. There were concerns at the time about the spread of hoof and mouth disease. We did go see a farm called Homeland Creamery, and it was a wonderful outing, but it was also quite a drive (More than an hour west of Cary.). Homeland Creamery is a much smaller operation than Maple View and the tour was mostly a "hay ride" to view the various cow pens. We did, however, get to go inside the milking facility there, and that was pretty neat.

Our tour at Maple View was longer because it also included two half-hour educational classes as well as a look at a small garden and some penned animals before going on the "hay ride" around the premises. Maple View also claims to use organic practices even though they don't have the organic label. I have to say that it all seemed very clean and well run. They grow and process a lot of their own feeds... mostly hay, silage (a fermented mix of corn or sorghum plant leaves and stalks), as well as cotton seed and grains.

Upon arriving we were ushered into a very well stocked classroom for a class on plants. Our group, typical of many homeschool outings, had a wide range of ages. I will say that many of the older kids were rolling their eyes. They knew all of the material already and as a result were a bit bored. It was well presented, even if it was clearly aimed at your typical public school classroom and the younger age group. When I say "aimed at public school classrooms", I mean that they weren't invited to ask many questions or allowed to give a lot of feedback. It was a well planned if relentless stream of information from what a seed is, to the parts of a plant, what plants need to grow, and what some seeds look like.

After this class we went out to look at the small garden plot and some animals they had in pens. There was a goat, a sheep, a cow and calf, a llama, some chickens and some rabbits. This was really more like a restricted petting zoo. I think a few years ago I would have been charmed by this, but after having started my own garden and had the pleasure of some really wonderful experiences on other farms, I felt it was a bit silly. The littler kids loved it though.

After looking at the animals and petting a few, we went back inside to another classroom for a second class on diary cows and how the diary is run. This I actually found very interesting, as there were things that I had not known about how a typical dairy farm works. They pretty much gave us the facts without glossing things over too much, but I still found it a little sad. Holstein cows (in think it was between and ages of 3-7 years) are bred every year for milking. Once they have their calves, the calves are taken away the next day and bottle fed in little huts where they live for about a month (that's the sad part). The moms are meanwhile milked three times a day and can produce about four gallons of milk a day on average. The cows are constantly bred and rotated so that they always have a good number of heifers producing large quantities of milk.


Bottling also occurs on site, as well as butter and ice cream production. We saw the outside of these buildings but didn't get to go in, unfortunately. The butter and ice cream making is done in relatively small batches with machines. Most of what they produce is sold locally.

Overall, I'd say the tour was well run and it's a pretty nice educational building they have created (four classrooms, seating for lunch, a kitchen, nice bathrooms, etc.). My complaint is that it seemed to be aimed at larger school groups and so the tour was lacking in some of the intimacy and charm our family has experienced on smaller tours. There are other classes you can choose from if you want to set up your own tour, but I'm not finding any listings on their website right now. You'll have to call ahead and ask.


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