Equipment breakdown delays curd deliveries

AgriNews will follow Ken Ropp throughout the entire year. Each month, look for updates about the farmer and the decisions he makes on his farm.

NORMAL, Ill. — There are good days and bad days — and Wednesday was the latter at Ropp Jersey Cheese.

“What we have here is a failure on the pasteurizer. It had nothing to do with the guys or anything like that. It’s things that happen, and I joke around and say, some days you step in it and some days you don’t,” said Ken Ropp.

“Our plate chiller, the exchanger, got plugged up somehow. We’re going to figure that out, and in the process the milk couldn’t flow through it after heating up, so it just sat there and boiled. And when it boiled, it curded up in the pasteurizer. It looks like fine cottage cheese, but that’s the way that today is.

“The plate heat exchanger is something that none of us really know how to work on.”

John Wamsley of Darlington Dairy Supply in Wisconsin planned to travel to Ropp’s on May 1 to repair the exchanger so Ropp and his staff could start making cheese curds for restaurant deliveries over the weekend.

Those deliveries would typically be done before the weekend begins.

“It sets us back and the guys have been good about the fact that not every day’s perfect and it’s the way it goes sometimes,” Ropp said.

“I still haven’t told my wife, so the weekend plans might be a little bit on hold. But definitely on Saturday and Sunday we’re going to be making some deliveries to make up for the lost time here on Wednesday and Thursday.

“I jokingly said it seems like, in some weeks, every day is a Monday, and so you tell me is it Wednesday or Monday?

“The hard part is we’re just starting to pick back up on milk a little bit. Everything is in demand. I’ve always said, as soon as you start mowing the yards, that’s when people start wanting to buy product. This could have happened at a much easier time, like January or February, but it’s the end of April, so here it is.”

Planting Progress

Planting season on the Ropp farm has gone well.

“We were done rapidly. The weather was perfect for us. Right now on April 30 we’ve got 100% of the beans in the ground, about 225 acres. And next week, as long as the weather’s still fit, we’ll get all the corn in,” about 200 acres, he said. “We might even do the hay ground in between times for the first hay cut.”