Tom and Mary Lou Benson sure have made the Campout special for all of us, they did their best to find interesting things for us to do, like shopping, touring different places, finding us good eating places, they personally traveled to each of these places to see if we might be interested in going. we owe them a great big "Thank you" , here's another tour they arranged for us. A farm where they raise and milk cows, some of the milk is used to make yogurt. Several times in the past years we went on a boat on the Mississippi and all of us liked to go to the many gift and antique shops, quilting shops etc.eastern Iowa is so beautiful with its rolling hills and forests and bean and corn fields, it would be wonderful to visit eastern Iowa in the Fall to see the Fall foliage.
A family in rural Fayette County hopes to put a little culture in Northeast Iowa's diet, specifically a creamy, all-natural yogurt from cows free of bovine growth hormone....
We were given a lecture on how they made the yogurt. And we had a taste of the frozen yogurt, which was very tasty, and some sampled the fruit yogurts.
A little history
Dave and Carolee Rapson's Country View Dairy has processed milk from its Holstein cows into yogurt since 2011.
During that time the product line has expanded and the consumer base has grown. They started with original yogurt and added a Greek line. Their newest product is premium frozen yogurt soft-serve mix. They continue to add flavors and are considering other products.
"Things continue to grow," Dave said. "We were very fortunate to get it started. It's taken a lot of effort. Marketing is huge, and you work at it very hard. There's a lot of competition but we've been moving ahead."
Country View sells its yogurt to 12 northeast Iowa public schools plus seven colleges in Minnesota and Iowa. They sell to more than 70 grocery stores and restaurants and through three distributors — including one that serves the Chicago area, another in Minnesota and one that handles only Iowa-made products. They sell at the downtown Cedar Rapids Farmers Market and through the Iowa Food Coop.
Country View Dairy will have a tent at the Field of Dreams reunion this summer in Dyersville and their products have been added to the Farmer's Pick Buffet at the Isle of Capri Casino in Waterloo. Country View products can be purchased at the People's Food Coop in Rochester, Minn.
The Rapsons moved their dairy herd from Michigan to Hawkeye in 2002.
"We don't have a lot of ground, just 60 acres tillable, and after the 2009 dairy crunch, feed prices have been high and we decided we needed to do something else," Dave said. "Ground is very valuable here and we decided to work the other end and value add."
Carolee had been making homemade yogurt for a couple of years, a product that her family enjoyed.
They met with the Hansen family at Hudson who built an on-farm creamery and were bottling milk and making cheese, butter and ice cream.
"We didn't know if we should do milk, cheese or ice cream, and Jay Hansen suggested yogurt and referred us to Sugar River Dairy, a yogurt maker in Wisconsin," Dave said. "We visited Sugar River and he was a big help. We settled on yogurt. No one else in northeast Iowa was doing a farmstead yogurt. We started experimenting and researching and doors kept opening so we kept moving ahead."
The family built its gleaming state-certified yogurt processing plant from the ground up working closely with a milk inspector.
In fall 2011, Country View started making yogurt.
"Our product is all natural and local," Dave said.
The yogurt is cup set. It's liquid when it goes into the cup and yogurt cultures set it up in the incubation room where the product sits for six hours at 108 degrees before it goes into the cooler. All the yogurt is 1 percent milk fat and non-homogenized, making digestion easier.
"We add no thickeners," Dave said. "Our product tastes good because of its simplicity. It tastes the way yogurt should taste."
Country View's original yogurt comes in a variety of flavors in six- and 24-ounce cups and three- and five-pound tubs. Flavors are are plain, vanilla, raspberry, strawberry, blueberry, black cherry, lime and peach.
The farm's line of Greek yogurt, which has nearly double the protein of original yogurt, comes in six-ounce cups with fruit on the bottom in raspberry, strawberry, peach and blueberry. They also make lemon custard. They sell plain in 24-ounce cups and plain and lemon custard in five-pound tubs.
Country View milks cows three times a day in a double-12 parlor. Cows are housed in a free-stall barn with sand bedding.
The Rapsons use about a day's milk each week for yogurt. The rest is shipped to Wapsie Valley Creamery in Independence.
When the Rapsons are processing yogurt, their rBST-free Grade A milk goes straight from the parlor to the processing plant through a pipeline. It is separated, pasteurized and the cultures and flavors are added.
They must test each batch for antibiotics. Pasteurizing and washing are recorded on a chart. Once each month, the state milk inspector comes and takes samples.
"This is very closely regulated," Dave said.
Processing generally takes place Monday through Thursday with Friday as the catch-up day when they box up yogurt cups.
The operation has three employees plus Dave, Carolee and their daughter Ambrea. Sons Jesse and Seth take care of the dairy herd. Carolee and Dave's younger daughters, Courtney and Elly, will be involved as they grow older.
"We wanted a business where we could work the family into it," Dave said.
The front of the processing plant has a retail area that they plan to develop more over time. They sell their yogurt plus products from Hansen's Dairy and WW Homestead Dairy in Waukon, and lettuce from Rolling Hills Greenhouse at West Union. The store attracts a steady steam of customers.
Sales and marketing manager Bob Howard said they are considering new products. Some day they hope to package their frozen yogurt, they're looking at a drinkable yogurt and possibly sour cream. If they make sour cream, they would like to include dried herbs from Rolling Hills Greenhouse.
Dave said Hansen's Farm Fresh Dairy, Sugar River Dairy and Iowa State University Extension have all been a great help in getting the business started. They received a USDA Value Added grant for marketing and getting product lines going.They've also worked with the Iowa Food Hub and with Teresa Wiemerslage through Northeast Iowa Food and Fitness and Farm to School.
