Fahrwalde steam dairy
The steam dairy in Fahrwalde was a steam dairy that existed until 1988 in Fahrenwalde in what is now the district of Vorpommern-Greifswald in the east of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania .
It was founded in 1892 as a milk processing company, in which the raw milk supplied by the peasantry was further processed by a technical system consisting of at least a centrifuge and a heater and powered by a steam engine. In general, butter was processed in the same house , and sometimes cheese was also made .
Since an insight into the history of the dairy industry always takes place using specific, typical examples, the development of the steam dairy in Fahrenwalde is presented here under technological and cultural-historical aspects.
Imperial times
In 1892 eight large farmers and farmers in the village of Fahrenwalde founded a cooperative to jointly set up a steam dairy and took out a loan of 8,000 marks from the New Brandenburg Credit Institute through mortgage bonds (3%). The members of the cooperative were liable for this loan with the entire assets of their farms, which totaled 27 Hufen . The financing and voting shares were different and lay between 5 and 1 Hufen. In order to cover the operating costs, it was decided that 1 ² / ³ pfennig could be withheld from every liter of milk delivered to the dairy. The founding members committed themselves to deliver their entire milk volume to this dairy. The fat content of the milk delivered should be checked weekly and should not drop below 3% between October and May at least. An average daily milk volume of six liters per cow was assumed; if the annual statement shows that someone has delivered less, he has to pay the value for the missing amount (a majority of decisions are made about special circumstances).
After the cooperative was founded in March 1892 and the conversions - from an old stables made of field stones - took shape in the dairy, a further 24 farmers of the village joined in October, albeit without their own contribution or participation. It was agreed that the same price per liter and an operating cost allocation should be paid. For each dairy cow , the new entrants had to deliver 2200 liters annually and any remaining sums had to be financially compensated. All milk suppliers also undertook not to deliver any milk from sick or freshly milked cows before the 5th day.
The property was leased for 100 Reichsmarks annually, converted and equipped with a steam engine and other necessary equipment. This also included the milk centrifuge, because this invention practically revolutionized butter production. Before then, the farmers their milk in shallow pans (possibly in a joint icehouse ) up and wait for it to separate the necessary for butter production after days cream came and they could beat this in small barrels to butter. A parallel revolution was the steam locomotive , which also enabled butter or milk to be transported quickly to the big cities and made it lucrative for the peasantry.
The newly founded cooperative contractually appointed a dairy administrator. Among other things, he was responsible for receiving and serving milk, making butter and possibly cheese, and all technical equipment. Until 1909 there were three different administrators in Fahrenwalde alone; It happened, among other things, that a defective cheese production of the cooperative resulted in damage of over 2000 marks. So an administrator always had to provide a deposit . He was granted an annual salary of 1,000 marks and was allowed to live in the company apartment above the dairy. The family received one liter of whole milk a day , three liters of skimmed milk , 1.5 pounds of butter a week and the permission to feed a pig a year .
The 36-meter-deep water point on the property, where water was pumped up through a long pipe that was joined together, was also important for the dairy operation. Around 1900, the 3 HP steam engine had a relatively small, walled-in boiler system with a metal pipe chimney protruding about three meters from the roof. Next to the boiler room, on the other side, there was a roofed coal bunker with corresponding wall openings. The coal bunker had to be so large that it could hold more than the load of a complete railway wagon of coal (i.e. more than 25 tons). Depending on the weather, one charge was enough for several months. Whenever a wagon of coal arrived, the clamping service provided by the farmers had to do a whole day to bring the coal to the dairy, otherwise stall fees had to be paid.
In winter, all farmers were also allowed to do tension work, cutting pieces of ice from nearby ponds and taking them to the ice cellar next to the dairy. A pit two meters deep and several meters wide, well insulated with brick and peat , with a reed roof over it, contained enough ice that it would be enough to cool the supplies until the next winter.
The farmers of the village delivered up to 3000 liters of milk a day, depending on the season, so they usually buttered every day, including Sundays ; in summer even twice with a large amount of milk. Immediately in front of the dairy there was a large wooden ramp, the horse and dog carts stopped here and the farmers could unload and load their milk cans there. The acceptance room was connected inside; the milk was sieved, checked for contamination, weighed and the amount recorded in a book. At the same time, the returned skimmed milk, butter, buttermilk, etc .; the administrator's wife was usually responsible for this too. The weight was determined with a balance beam , behind which there was a metal tub as a collecting container. Since the acceptance took place in the morning and evening at fixed times and at these times all other people could buy fresh drinking milk, among other things, this acceptance ramp developed into an important social center of communication within the village community. Since the dairy was founded, an apprentice has always been trained wherever possible .
The electrification of the village in 1911 brought a noticeable improvement. Although there was now electricity instead of kerosene lamps for the lighting, general dairy operations had to be maintained by the steam engine for reasons of cost.
The steam engine drove, among other things, the butter churn, the centrifuge and all heaters and pumps via a rotating iron rod (transmission shaft on lubrication bearings) located in the ceiling area and belts. With the centrifuge, large quantities of milk could be continuously separated into the cream and low-fat skimmed milk required for butter production. In it, the milk was rotated into a system of many plates on top of each other and thus distributed in millimeter-wide layers. The cream flowed inside, the heavier skimmed milk pressed outwards and in the centrifuge finally left as the remainder of the centrifuge sludge . Since the amount of skimmed milk obtained in this way was larger (about 80% of the raw milk volume) than the cream, the skimmed milk drum heater (about 85 degrees Celsius) was also larger than the cream drum heater (about 95 degrees Celsius). The steam engine supplied the hot steam required for pasteurization for both of them and also moved the respective drums via the belt drive. These rotary movements also resulted in further transport in the pipelines.
At that time, the resulting skimmed milk was taken back by the farmers for cattle feeding without subsequent cooling. The cream now flowed on both sides over the horizontal pipe coils of a cooler. Mostly cold water circulated in the cooling tubes (also in a countercurrent process). Then it was pumped into a large double-walled tub, the cream creamer, to ripen at night. If it should be cooled, you gave cold water, if it should be heated, depending on the weather, you put hot water in the double wall. Ice from the ice cellar could also be used to generate cold water.
In order to be able to butter the cream the next day, it was also prepared with an "acid alarm". That could be a pail of leftover milk from the day before, or a pail of well-mixed buttermilk; here the experience of the buttercup was required. Only when the acidity, temperature, etc. was right, in the evening it was possible to check and help, the cream came into the churn through the churn in the morning. After the keg had been running for about 35 minutes, with experience you could tell from the sound and through the sight glass when the butter was good.
Since the older churns did not have a kneading mechanism, the butter had to be pressed several times over a funnel through two rollers on a table after draining the buttermilk and washing it twice . Both rollers were about 1 cm apart and were loaded until the consistency of the butter was good. It was packed either directly with the wooden mold in pieces of half a pound or in wooden barrels. The butter always had to be wrapped in appropriate parchment paper. It was a requirement to take a sample of each buttering and to keep it for a certain period of time. The resulting buttermilk and a certain amount of whole milk with about 3% fat for the supply of the population were then sold; it was made up of certain proportions of skimmed milk and cream. During the First World War , the wife of the dairy administrator had to run the business alone or with the support of an unskilled laborer.
Between the world wars
The metal chimney has been replaced by a brick chimney. It was no longer necessary to load the ice cellar every winter when the dairy cooperative bought an ice machine in 1926, which was then connected to the large transmission shaft of the steam engine. In the ice cream machine, the rotary movement was fed into a pump (overpressure, 60 at) via a connecting rod , which in turn generated cold through pressure. The cold then got through metal pipes and cooling liquid (salt water with minus temperatures, i.e. brine , as a carrier) into the cooler or into an approximately 2 × 4 meter large cooling room, which had particularly thick walls as insulation. The entire butter supply, produced in one week, could be stored here in wooden barrels of 50 kg each. According to a contract from 1935 with the wholesaler Trettin in Szczecin , the clamping service brought these barrels weekly by horse and cart to the next place with a train station. They arrived in the city in refrigerated trucks, where they were immediately packed in small portions and taken to the shops.
After about 5 to 6 years, the dairy acquired a new, more powerful ice cream machine (Linde type, 10 HP), which was operated directly via an electrical connection and with ammonia bottles instead of the steam engine . The coolant was still brine, but it could now also be fed directly into the swivel arm of the new semicircular cream gripper using brine pumps.
At the beginning of the 30s the catchment area of the dairy expanded, because Neunfeld, Schönfeld and Karlshof came to Fahrenwalde and Friedrichshof. A better steam engine (10 hp) was necessary and this also included a new boiler system from Eisenwerke Hamburg- Bergedorf .
An additional plate heater was also purchased around 1933. With this universal heater, which is also operated by the boiler system, both the skimmed milk and the cream can be heated to different temperatures through various plate connections in order to safely kill possible tuberculosis pathogens. At the same time, the heater within the plates had a connection for the milk leading to the centrifuge, which was thereby preheated in a countercurrent process. The pasteurized milk cooled down a little afterwards before further cooling was added in the cooler, mostly with water. A second centrifuge was now available and it was able to reduce the fat content of the skimmed milk to 0.01%. By buying a butter maker with two integrated twin rollers, the time-consuming separate kneading was no longer necessary and the butter only had to be packaged.
The new cream gripper now had an agitator that stirred the semicircular tub at intervals. The agitator was a pendular pipe system in which cooling brine could also flow. The outer double wall, on the other hand, was suitable for adding hot water. The bacterial cultures necessary for the cream maturation no longer had to be produced daily, but came at intervals by post (Friedel, Dresden), which made preparation easier. Instead of the beam balance, there was now the two-chamber pointer balance with a lever pull, and larger quantities of milk could be accepted.
Since a lot of water was used in the dairy business, the transmission of the steam engine pumped the water from the pipe (about 8 cm in diameter) via a rod with leather cuffs and valves into an approximately 2 m³ large storage tank on the roof. So gravity was enough for the water withdrawal. The used water ended up in a septic tank and then into the sewage system at some point in the Randow and Oderhaff .
At the end of the 1930s, a large water tank was installed to equalize the pressure of the pumped water in the operating room. This was necessary as long as there was no connection to the central water supply. At that time, depending on the time of year, around two to three quintals of butter were produced and packaged in the butter maker with an integrated kneading roller. During this time, the farmers' co-determination increasingly came to a standstill; the cooperative was subordinated to the state dairy association, which in turn had to follow the Reichsnährstand . Any dairy administrator who wanted to keep his job had to become a party member. At the end of the war, some bombs fell on the dairy area, but missed the building. Milk production was maintained until the " trek ". All animals not taken there were abandoned by the population.
Post-war years
After the end of the war, the dairy industry in the eastern areas was under the control of the Russian command . In 1946 provisional operations could be resumed. The milk supply was particularly difficult in the areas near the border, because there, despite the many war victims, all the houses were extremely overcrowded due to the many refugees from the former Reich territories and the number of inhabitants had almost doubled. The immediate post-war years were far greater years of hunger for the population than the actual war period. The supply structures and farms had largely been destroyed, the soldiers still in captivity; Women and children, who did almost everything to avoid starvation, shaped the picture. For the milk producers, self-sufficiency was the focus. Black markets formed , where food was of great importance, as city dwellers tried to exchange their possessions for something to eat. Therefore, attempts were sometimes made in the villages to provisionally butter it themselves and to market the butter. Although the authorities set a high milk delivery rate per cow, many tried not to bring all of the milk to the dairies. As a result of the land reform carried out in the GDR area , all properties over 100 hectares were expropriated. The land and cattle were distributed to small and new farmers, and some became national property. But it also happened that farmers who could not or did not want to meet their "should" were imprisoned by the state authorities for a few days.
The fat content of the milk was examined at irregular intervals, at least once a week, by a laboratory assistant from the milk control organization. Samples were taken from all of the up to 100 individual suppliers in test tubes and checked in the company's own laboratory for fat content, dirt and reductase (bacteria and germs). The technical equipment also included a hand centrifuge and an electric heater.
The steam engine was decommissioned at the beginning of the 1950s when all large appliances could be converted to electric drive. The boiler system now only produced superheated steam for heating milk and providing hot water for cleaning. All milk pipes, tubs, barrels, etc. still had to be washed out and disinfected thoroughly every day, hot and with chemicals (purine, P3). For the weekly general cleaning all pipes and machines were unscrewed.
1950s
In the 1950s, many village dairies were again their own cooperatives; but they were subordinate to the Association of Mutual Farmers Aid or the respective “Council of the District”, which also tried to organize the entire food supply regionally and nationally and thereby tried to wrest it from the black market. In order to create certain incentives for the large farmers, there were the so-called “free peaks”: If farmers delivered more milk to the dairy in excess of the “target”, they were charged a much higher price per liter or received vouchers for certain items. This allowed the controlled amount of milk and butter to be increased somewhat and the supply situation slowly improved.
The catchment areas were also reorganized after the war, as there were only functioning dairies in a few villages and towns. The villages of Züsedom, Broellin and Karlsruh were added and ten employees were employed there at times. There were different work areas such as butter production, sour milk quark production, milk reception, skimmed milk dispensing, the office and the cheese cellar. The resulting skimmed milk was now used for various purposes as instructed. In large tubs, stirring with large wooden stirrers and certain additions, a crumbly white sour milk quark was created, which was then filled in wooden barrels weighing 50 kg and stored in the cold room until the Boekmann company brought it to Pasewalk for the production of Harz cheese . Depending on the necessity and the contract, the skimmed milk was also used for the production of casein and so-called skimmed milk square cheese for the population until the 1950s . The dairy cellar was used as a cheese cellar for several years. Cheese production was in the care of a specially trained specialist and, among other things, rennet obtained from beef stomachs was used to prepare certain cheese cultures .
Whey was a waste product in cheese production and this made up around 60% of the volume of skimmed milk. In the first post-war years, whey was not only fed to cattle, but was also used to extract whey protein as a protein-rich, but low-fat spread. In later years the whey was sold cheaply to self-collectors or only fed to cattle. The butter churn is filled up to twice and the butter is then packed there, mostly in a wooden mold and parchment paper, in pieces of half a pound each, ready for dispatch.
1960s
Since Fahrwalde got a central water pipe around 1960, this also simplified the dairy business. There was a sale of drinking milk bottles and cream in the dairy. At the end of the 1950s there were significant changes, as the farmers merged or had to merge into agricultural production cooperatives of various types. While the majority went with type 3, in which everything was completely combined, some farmers opted for type 1, in which only the livestock was kept individually. As before, these few farmers brought their milk to the dairy every day - twice in the summer months - with their horse-drawn carts by milk can. For farmers of type 3 this work was no longer necessary, as was the time-consuming daily milking. The livestock were concentrated in a few large stables and complete milking brigades were formed for this purpose . The now larger quantities of milk no longer needed to be transported in cans, one could now use large milk boilers and all the milk was transported or pumped by just one person. That saved time for everyone and the number of suppliers to the dairy was increasingly reduced due to the LPG training. This process increased even further when after about a decade in Fahrenwalde the LPG type 1 dissolved into type 3 and this LPG should and could set up large stables with hundreds of cows. According to LPG statistics, the milk yield per cow increased from 1968 to 1972 from 3,093 to 3,400 kg and the number from 450 to 600 cows. In relation to 100 hectares, this meant 35 cows instead of 27.
The general process of concentration towards ever larger structures in agriculture (many LPGs then became a KAP ) also had an impact on the dairy industry. The previously independent dairy cooperative had to become a branch, in 1962 a collection point of the dairy cooperative of the city of Pasewalk. As a result, there was also no need to produce butter, which of course could be carried out far more effectively in large companies with larger, better technology. During this time, up to 13,000 liters of milk were accepted daily. The milk collection point gradually became a one-man operation, which later belonged to the LPG. The only thing that took place here was the collection and cooling of the LPG milk, the transport of which was made easier by a direct pipeline built in 1969 from the stable. At set times, water was first added, then milk, then water again (rubber balls in between) and an automatic switchover was carried out using suitable T-pieces. At the collection point, the cooler, now only used for the raw milk, and an aluminum milk tank for 20,000 liters (which cost 30,000 marks at the time) became the most important equipment. The high pressure boiler was replaced by a low pressure boiler. The brick chimney was no longer necessary.
resolution
1988 was the last year of use of the pipeline, all milk was now collected directly from the stable by tanker. The political change in 1989 led to the dissolution of the LPG, the farmers got their brought back land and mostly leased it on. The dairy was now owned by the trust company , which then sold it; then the entire building was converted into a residential building. At least since the turn of the millennium there have been no more cows in the village. The Pasewalker dairy was also closed shortly after reunification, and there are only very few dairies in the entire state. The number of local milk suppliers is also constantly decreasing. The EC has its milk quotas and the price per liter that the dairies can pay the farmers is falling, while all other costs are rising. The reduced-fat skimmed milk or whey has meanwhile moved from cattle feed to a diet product and instead of milk bottles, milk is now mostly handled at ultra-high temperature and homogenized in disposable packaging.
