Cynthia Morgan looks baCk on 30-plus years in ... - InMaricopa.com

Clockwise from above left: The big red barn is where the fall and winter
tours start, and it’s also where the cows give up their milk; Cows are fed
every eight hours; Roxie, the Shamrock Farms mascot, proudly stares out
from the farm’s entrance monument. Photos by Jake Johnson
Boyce, a resident of Rancho El Dorado,
came to Maricopa before Shamrock Farms
decided to move its principal milking
facility from Gilbert in 2003. “The new
subdivisions were encroaching on our farm
there,” Boyce explains, “so we obtained
these 1,000 acres and started designing and
building what we believe is the finest dairy
operation in the state, if not beyond.” About
half of the spread contains dairy barns, the
commodities (for cattle feed) barn, a garage
for repairing rolling stock, water and fuel
tanks, offices, pens and other structures.
The balance of the acreage is for crops
(mainly corn and alfalfa) and pastures, as
well as recycling centers for cattle waste.
“Ours is a very environmentallyconscious
operation,” Boyce says, showing
a visitor where cattle waste is recycled to
produce fertilizer that is used to grow the
crops. He also pointed out separate organic
facilities on the farm, where the larger
operation is duplicated, but on a smaller
scale. A biologist and a native of Arizona,
Boyce has been with the state’s largest dairy
firm for 30 years.
From October until May, the Shamrock
Farms marketing department conducts
tours three or four times a week for
seniors and school children, who gather
in specially-designed facilities to see a
presentation on milk production and to
actually watch — from a safe and sanitary
position — the actual milking take place.
Tour groups also pile onto special “trains”
that weave their way slowly through the
cattle barns, pastures and other points of
interest.
There are no samples handed out to
visitors, however.
“The raw milk we produce here — about
two million gallons a year — is trucked to
our processing facilities in Phoenix,” Boyce
says, where the milk is pasteurized and
broken down into various components to
produce several varieties of milk, cream,
half-and-half, cottage cheese, ice cream
products and novelty items.
A tour of a typical Shamrock Farms
dairy barn reveals about 1,600 cows resting,
snoozing or eating from long troughs of
pre-mixed food laid down every eight hours
by special vehicles that mix hay, molasses,
alfalfa, hominy, cottonseed, canola, barley,
soybeans and other components into
a mass that the cows line up for. Actually,
each black and white head pokes through a
special “gate” when the food truck rolls in as
every cow eagerly awaits its next meal.
Huge bins surround a tank of molasses
at the commodities barn, where all of the
food components are stored in separate, but
equal, troughs. A backhoe is used to trans-
30 InMaricopa.com | Vol. 5 Issue 3