Media

By Congressman Jim Baird and State Representative Beau Baird.

When most Americans pick up a package of sliced cheese at their local grocery store, they probably don’t give much thought to where it came from or the people and technology involved in getting it onto the shelf. But right here in west-central Indiana, hundreds of Hoosiers are helping make that possible every day.

During a recent tour of Pace Dairy in Crawfordsville, located in both of our legislative districts, we had an opportunity to see firsthand just how significant Indiana’s role is in America’s food supply chain. Agriculture doesn’t end when a product leaves the farm.

Getting food onto grocery store shelves also depends on skilled workers, modern equipment, and reliable transportation. Those parts of the agricultural economy deserve our attention alongside the farms where production begins. Pace Dairy, a Kroger dairy operation, employs approximately 300 people and operates nearly around the clock. It processes approximately 120 million pounds of cheese annually, purchased from suppliers. The facility then prepares the cheese into various sliced, cubed, and shredded cheeses, packaged for consumption by Kroger shoppers nationwide.

The Crawfordsville operation supplies all of Kroger’s private-label sliced cheese nationwide and roughly half of its shredded, cubed, and block cheese products.

During the tour, we watched sophisticated automated equipment slice cheese at incredible speeds, with whirring blades that rotate between 6,500 and 7,000 times per minute. The facility regularly handles enormous 640-pound blocks of cheese, transforming them into the familiar store products we buy every day.

Behind the powerful equipment helping feed America are hundreds of Hoosiers whose work helps keep food in grocery stores across the country. Their contributions are an important part of Indiana’s agricultural story and Montgomery County’s economy.

Using a common dairy industry estimate, 120 million pounds of cheese represents the equivalent of approximately 1.2 billion pounds of milk, or roughly 140 million gallons.

For us as lawmakers, visits like this help connect on-paper policy to the real work happening in our communities. Supporting agriculture means understanding what farmers need to produce food and what manufacturers and distributors need to get their product to consumers.

That means considering the entire food supply chain when we make policy decisions. The needs of farms and food manufacturers are connected, and our approach to supporting them should reflect that.

A package of cheese on a grocery shelf may seem ordinary. The work behind it is anything but. As we consider how best to support American agriculture, we should acknowledge the full chain of people who bring food from the farm to our tables, including the Hoosiers doing that work in Crawfordsville.

This article was originally published in the Crawfordsville Journal Review.