How many kilograms of milk are used to make a kilogram of cheese?

Question

The average cheese is good enough for an estimate of the amount of milk needed to make cheese.

Answer 1

Given the chance, cows nurture their young and form lifelong friendships with one another. They play games, have a wide range of emotions, and demonstrate personality traits, such as vanity. But most cows raised for the dairy-products industry are intensively confined, leaving them unable to fulfill their most basic desires, such as nursing their calves, even for a single day. They are treated like milk-producing machines and are genetically manipulated and pumped full of antibiotics and hormones that cause them to produce more milk. While cows suffer in animal factories, humans who drink their milk increase their chances of developing heart disease, diabetes, several types of cancer, and many other ailments. Cows produce milk for the same reason that humans do—to nourish their young—but calves on dairy farms are taken away from their mothers when they are just 1 day old. They are fed milk replacers (including cattle blood) so that their mothers’ milk can be sold to humans. Female cows are artificially inseminated shortly after their first birthdays. After giving birth, they lactate for 10 months and are then inseminated again, continuing the cycle. Some spend their entire lives standing on concrete floors; others are confined to massive, crowded lots, where they are forced to live amid their own waste. Cows have a natural lifespan of about 25 years and can produce milk for eight or nine years. However, the stress caused by the conditions in animal factories leads to disease, lameness, and reproductive problems that render cows worthless to the dairy-products industry by the time that they’re 4 or 5 years old, at which time they are sent to be slaughtered. On any given day, there are more than 8 million cows on U.S. dairy farms—about 14 million fewer than there were in 1950. Yet milk production has continued to increase, from 116 billion pounds of milk per year in 1950 to 170 billion pounds in 2004. Normally, these animals would produce only enough milk to meet the needs of their calves (around 16 pounds per day), but genetic manipulation, antibiotics, and hormones are used to force each cow to produce more than 18,000 pounds of milk each year (an average of 50 pounds per day). Cows are also fed unnatural, high-protein diets—which include dead chickens, pigs, and other animals—because their natural diet of grass would not provide the nutrients that they need to produce such massive amounts of milk. Painful inflammation of the mammary glands, or mastitis, is common among cows raised for their milk and is one of dairy farms’ most frequently cited reasons for sending cows to slaughter. There are about 150 bacteria that can cause the disease, one of which is E. coli. Symptoms are not always visible, so milk’s somatic cell count (SCC) is checked to determine whether the milk is infected. Somatic cells include white blood cells and skin cells that are normally shed from the lining of the udder. As in humans, white blood cells—also known as “pus”—are produced as a means of combating infection. The SCC of healthy milk is below 100,000 cells per milliliter; however, the dairy-products industry is allowed to combine milk from the teats of all the cows in a herd in order to arrive at a “bulk tank” somatic cell count (BTSCC); milk with a maximum BTSCC of 750,000 cells per milliliter is allowed to be sold. A BTSCC of 700,000 or more generally indicates that two-thirds of the cows in the herd are suffering from udder infections. Studies have shown that providing cows with cleaner housing, more space, and better diets, bedding, and care lowers their milk’s SCC as well as their incidence of mastitis. A Danish study of cows subjected to automated milking systems found “acutely elevated cell counts during the first year compared with the previous year with conventional milking. The increase came suddenly and was synchronized with the onset of automatic milking.” Instead of improving conditions in animal factories or easing cows’ production burden, the dairy-products industry is exploring the use of cloned cattle who have been genetically manipulated to be resistant to mastitis. If you drink milk, you’re subsidizing the veal industry. While female calves are slaughtered or kept alive to produce milk, male calves are often taken away from their mothers when they are as young as 1 day old and are chained in tiny stalls for three to 18 weeks to be raised for veal. Calves raised for veal are fed a milk substitute that is designed to make them gain at least 2 pounds per day, and their diet is purposely low in iron so that their flesh stays pale as a result of anemia. An enzyme from their stomachs is used to produce rennet, an ingredient used in many cheeses. In addition to suffering from diarrhea, pneumonia, and lameness, calves raised for veal are terrified and desperate for their mothers. Large dairy farms have an enormously detrimental effect on the environment. In California, America’s top milk-producing state, manure from dairy farms has poisoned hundreds of square miles of groundwater, rivers, and streams. Each of the more than 1 million cows on the state’s dairy farms excretes 120 pounds of waste daily.

Answer 2

Cheese yield can vary from 9.861 - 10.119 kg of cheese / 100kg milk in a plant processing 20 million kg milk/year.

It takes about 10 pounds of milk to make only 1 pound of cheese, so 10 kilograms of milk are used to make 1 kilogram of cheese.

Here's a great website about the making of cheese.

http://www.loletacheese.com/cheesemaking...

Answer 3

In the book I have most of the recipes call for 2 gallons for 2 lbs a hard cheese, such a cheddar

in some of the soft cheeses 1 lb will yield 2 lbs. most of the byproduct is whey that can also be made into cheese. a batch of 2 gal whey will yield 1 lb of whey cheese.

so 2 gallons (about 18 lbs) will yield 2 lbs of cheddar. and nearly 1lb of why cheese.

This may sound wasteful but remover most of the waist is just water, and the cheese keeps longer than the milk.

Answer 4

... For Parmigiano Reggiano we need 550 lt of milk to produce one wheel, which is approx. 38kg... So mainly it takes 16 lt of milk for one kg of Pamigiano Reggiano :)

Answer 5

depends on the type of cheese.  Hard cheeses yield less per kilo of milk than the softer cheeses.  I would expect about 0.2 kilos of cheese per kilo of milk for many of the soft cheeses.