Factory Tour Capital of the World

We’re staying in Gifford Pinchot State Park outside of York, Pennsylvania.   We stayed in this park 7 years ago on our last trip to Maine.  It’s a very nice park.  As an added bonus there are 2 18-hole disc golf courses in the park.

The park is 2,338 acres with a 340 acre lake.  It has rained part of every day we’ve been here.  Things are very green and soggy now.

York County advertises itself as the Factory Tour Capital of the World.  That certainly got my attention!  I’m always looking for factory tours on our travels.  We hit the jackpot!  There are more tours than we will have time for but we’re doing our best to get to as many of them as we can.

Perrydell Farms.

We woke up to a rainy, windy morning but decided to go ahead to Perrydell Farms.  We wanted to get there early enough to see them bottling the milk and we figured that would be inside so the rain wouldn’t matter.

We were surprised at how small an operation this farm is.  After parking we went into a small store and was told to go on back to the bottling room.  We met Tom (one of the grandson’s of the original owner, Howard Perry) and his wife Donna.  Donna makes the ice cream and Tom gave us the tour. 

Very small operation

Tom bottling the milk from this morning’s milking.

Tom would put the empty plastic jugs on the belt, they would then be filled with milk and lids applied then Tom would take the filled jugs off the belt and load them into plastic crates.

The only way to get it any fresher is to buy your own cow!

The farm was bought in 1923 by Howard Perry.  His two sons, George and Roger eventually took over the farm and they had the foresight to start bottling their own milk in 1963.

The farm is now owned and operated by George's sons, Tom, Greg, and Chip. Everyone in the family stays involved in the farm.  We also met Tom's mom while we were here.

The black pipe you see runs directly from the processing room to the bottling room.

Moving the milk from the processing room to the bottling room.

The breed of cow is mostly all Holstein.  There was a Jersey calf that was bought for a 4-H project and has since grown up and produced a few cross breeds.

The cows have just been milked and were resting.

The majority of the food fed to the cows is grown here on 170 acres.  An additional 180 acres of land is rented for planting and harvesting feed.  There are approximately 250 cows.  About 130 of them are milked.  They are milked twice a day and are not injected with any hormone that would force them to produce more milk.

The calves had their own area and each had a little “cow” house to get out of the rain.

We bought some ice cream.  Triple chocolate for me and salted caramel for Mark.

Ice cream for the road.

We also bought some ice cream for later.

And we bought a few other items.

Cookies and cream milk taste like 

melted cookies and cream ice cream!

Even though this was a very small farm we had a great time.  We arrived at 9:00 when they opened and were the only ones there for the tour but as we were leaving there were several people coming in for the tour.