How many man-hours are needed to get a gallon of milk to the retail store?

Question

How many man-hours are needed to get a gallon of milk to the retail store?

Answer 1

Wow... tough question.  It takes about 7 minutes to milk a cow through a parlor and an average cow can milk about 70 pounds per day or 8.1 gallons.  So it takes about 52 seconds to receive one gallon of milk.  Now the unknown factors are travel time from the farm to the processing plant, processing time, travel time from the plant to the store.  As most milk is handled in volume up to 4,500 gallons +/- in a semi tanker, the actual man-hour per gallon is probably relatively small.  I would offer a guess of 4-5 hours of "actual man hours" per gallon of milk.  With modern transportation and processing equipment the machines can handle large volumes of milk in a very short amount of time and it may depend to some degree whether the milk stays local or is transported longer distances which can add to the amount of time.   Possibly someone can offer time requirements for various parts of this equation.

Answer 2

i do not know!

Answer 3

Milking, processing, and transportation are done in large volumes of milk. I would guess that no more than 15 minutes could be charged to labor for one gallon of milk. Any more and the price paid for a gallon of milk at the retail store would be higher than it is.

Answer 4

This depends on if you mean from the very beginning whereby you reared the cow. If it's just milking, that depends on what you use to do the milking. if milking by hand it can take all of about half an hour if your cows have lots of milk. By machine it's a matter of minutes