Activity: Shatto Milk Company Tour

Location: 9406 N. HWY. 33 Osborn, MO 64474. Phone: 816-930-3862 It's on your right hand side as you are coming up. It's smaller than you think but it's there.

Website: http://www.shattomilk.com/contact.html

Cost: 5 bucks per person for the tour. There is also a Country Store there as well that sells all thier products and give out free cheese. We like free stuff.

Review:
For those that weren't there, this was our family day outing that we have been planning for the last couple of months. We decided to pack everyone, wives included, into the cars and took the trip an hour north of KC to visit the Shatto Dairy Farms. A special thank you to Mr. Rogers who set all this up. He did a great job.

My first impression was that it is smaller than I thought. Given that you see their milk everywhere, I expected it to be huge. It's not. It's family owned with about 250 cows. But that doesn't mean it's not worth to go up there, this was totally worth it.

Your tour begins in basically the bottling room. Our tour was given by Mr. Shatto himself and it seems like he does all of them. He's a charismatic bastard, that one. Anyway, the bottling room is pretty small. We had to crowd in to get everyone in there. They show you where the milk comes from, the machines it gets pasteurized in, and then how they bottle it. They then show you the actually process using water. It was really cool and the kids seemed to enjoy this.

Then they start giving you free samples of milk. Big deal, right? Turns out, this is a big deal. Have you ever had banana flavored milk? What about root beer flavored milk? Not bad, not bad at all. Didn't think it would be, turns out it's pretty cool. They explain the process to you and they seemed to take special pride in their chocolate milk, which was thick and awesome, I'll give the credit where the credit is due. So for the next 20 minutes were spent taking shots of all the different kinds of milk.

The next stop on our tour was to actually milk a cow. We had different successes with different age children. Some were scared which is to be expected but some other's were pulling on that teet like there was no tomorrow. They also had a bunch of calfs that were born within days that the children could touch and pet.

Finally, they took us to the "milking line". At least that is what I assume it was as 12 cows were lined up to be milked. They showed us how they do it and seemed to be really ok with us touching the equipment and cows.

I want to add that the staff was attentive and exceptional. They gladly answered all our questions, we never felt hurried, and they were generally pleasant all day.

After the tour we commenced our Picnic. Papa Scrum had brought his grill and I made some truly awful potato salad. Seriously, it was like toxic starch and I apologize to everyone for that. But the meat was good.

There are only 3 picnic tables available in a field next to the farm but we planned ahead and brought more tables. If you are planning to make a trip out there though and picnic, bring a fly swatter. It was the one thing we needed that we didn't have. The field provided a lot of room for the kids to run around and play in. Different families brought wagons, or balls or numerous other toys for the kids to play with. The parents bought milk from the country store.

They have some really good strawberry milk though, good god that's some good stuff.

We made a whole day of this and I think that everyone had a great time. It was one of those perfect sunny Midwestern days that look like a picture in a brochure.

It's tough to say what the best part of the day was as it was all pretty good. I like it when the wives get together but it unnerves me sometimes to see them talking without us. Are they judging us? Are they asking private questions about my back hair? But it's good to see all of them getting along together.

The kids playing at the picnic might have been the highlight of my day. We had enough space that basically everyone could go crazy without anyone getting hurt or running into eachother.

End recommendation is that his is a good day trip to plan, bring the family and a sack lunch, and go play with some cows. And for god's sake, buy some of that milk, it's that good.

Also a note on our Pictures: Most all the pictures on these blogs are supplied by either Larry Geographic or Father Hitman. Just a thanks for them and their fancy cameras.