Testing and Certification

Mandolin Creek Dairy pledges to produce the safest milk that you can drink. This document describes how our dairy will achieve that critical goal and ensure that unsafe milk products never leave our farm.

Safety Before Profit

Mandolin Creek Dairy considers the safety of its product as its most critical mission.

Do No Harm

Raw milk producers must recognize that even a brief moment of complacency could result in a tainted end product.

Milk that might be safe for healthy adults might still contain enough pathogenic material to sicken or even kill an individual with an undeveloped or weakened immune system. Worst of all, our customers might not even realize that they or their loved ones suffer from such a condition. And we do not want to be how they find out.

With that daunting responsibility, Mandolin Creek Dairy will do everything in its power to prevent unsafe products from reaching its customers. Above all, we will try to do no harm.

Trust But Verify

Our rigorous policies and processes seek to prevent any contamination from occurring, but they only work when they are followed scrupulously by the workers that execute them. As we are all indeed only human, we expect human errors will occur. We believe that each and every batch of milk must be verified to ensure somebody did not inadvertently make a mistake.

Discard After Doubt

If any doubt has been raised about the integrity of a batch of milk, we will simply feed it to the pigs; we would prefer to have fat pigs rather than sick customers.

Learn From Failures

Every discarded batch of milk offers an opportunity for learning how to be better. That could mean training a worker to take better care during sanitation and handling processes, or the outcome could be adjustments to our policies and processes to cover situations that we had previously overlooked.

Openness and Reporting

We will work openly and transparently with our owners. Our lab results will always be available for inspection on site, but we hope to deliver our results through this site in the future.

Milk Testing

Our milk will be tested regularly for safety, both in-house and independently.

Test-and-Hold

Every batch of milk will be held in our coolers on site, until our in-house test results have come back clean.

In-House Verification

Our daily testing will be performed by our own laboratory. Because we have this equipment here, the results are available within 24 hours of production, at which time the batch of milk can be released to our customers.

This laboratory testing process checks the milk against the standards required for pasteurized milk, so you can be assured that each quart is as pure and fresh as permitted by science.

Independent Verification

In addition to our on-site testing, an independent certified laboratory will perform random testing periodically to verify our in-house laboratory results. This ensures that our results are accurate, as we reiterate our testing motto: trust but verify.

Herd Testing

Mandolin Creek Dairy performs routine screening of its herd for common caprine diseases present in Oregon:

• Caprine Arthritis and Encephalitis (CAE)
• Caseous Lymphadentits (CL)
• Johnes' disease (Paratuberculosis)
• Brucellosis

New Animals

We test all new animals immediately after purchase, regardless of any claims that the animals come from a disease-free herd. New animals are kept isolated from the main herd until their results come back clean.

Periodic Testing

We test the entire herd periodically thereafter, as some diseases may manifest after remaining dormant or incubating for many years.

Standards and Certifications

Working with other organizations that support raw milk, Mandolin Creek Dairy will be seeking to achieve numerous standards and certifications, as we expect them to help us deliver the highest quality milk to our customers.

RAWMI Common Standards

The Raw Milk Institute (RAWMI) Common Standards provides the frameworks for developing site-specific best practices for raw milk operations.

To that end, Mandolin Creek Dairy has committed itself to the development of its own Risk Analysis Management Plan (RAMP), Standard Sanitary Operating Procedure (SSOP), and identifying Critical Control Points (CCPs) in its processes.

ISO 9001

In our commitment to the highest possible standard of quality and excellence, Mandolin Creek Dairy is working to become the first raw milk goat dairy in Oregon to have its policies and procedures certified as ISO 9001 compliant.

For the layman, this certification shows that an organization has implemented processes that monitor and control its critical operations, ensure a means of continuously maintaining (and improving) the quality of every aspect of its operation and production.

In many ways, this certification should mostly entail administrative work, as the bulk of the required materials will have been developed in order to meet the RAWMI Common Standards.

Auditing and Oversight

Our customers and auditors can review and track our progress through our internal pages.