Pure and nutritious Alta Dena milk starts with the healthy cows, clean farms and equipment and refrigerated storage containers at our Alta Dena family farms.

Cows eat 95 pounds of feed a day. Let's see how that food is made into milk. Cows are ruminant animals so their stomachs are divided into four sections. The rumen, reticulum, omasum and abomasum play a specific role in digesting plant fiber in the feed.

Cows can eat a whole day's meal in just minutes, and store it in their rumen or first stomach. In the rumen, the food is made into small balls of food called "cuds." Throughout the day, a cow will burp up a cud of food, chew it and swallow it again, as many as 60 times. Each time the food is digested more.

Cows spend up to eight hours chewing their cud or ruminating. Then the food works its way through the cow's remaining stomachs so the nutrients can be absorbed into the bloodstream, just like in your stomach!

In the cow's udder, small sacs called alveoli, produce milk. The alveoli take the nutrients from the blood and add fat, protein and lactose (a type of sugar) to produce milk.

Cows give milk for about ten months (or about 305 days) after having a calf. They stop milk production during a two-month "dry" period before giving birth and entering another ten-month milk cycle.