Faria Brothers Dumas Dairy, Texas

This large dairy, north of Dumas, has more than 7,000 cows, generating more than 300,000 pounds of milk per day. It uses one of the largest “rotary parlors” in the nation, a circular milking carousel that has a 106-cow capacity, milking each cow in under nine minutes, allowing 700 cows to be milked per hour. Each cow is milked three times a day. The milk produced here is immediately cooled, and is shipped to the Hilmar Cheese Plant, in nearby Delmar. There are more than a dozen large dairies in the Panhandle, which, when combined with the area across the state line in eastern New Mexico, is the third largest milk producing region in the country, generating 15 billion pounds of milk in 2017.