Kansas State’s Call Hall Dairy Bar serves up more than just scoops of ice cream. The dairy bar has served ice cream and hot food, as well as locally sourced meat, cheese and eggs, on campus since it was commissioned in 1964.
Products sold at Call Hall are also available around the Manhattan community, as the processing plant delivers milk to students living in dorms, sorority and fraternity houses.
“We pick up milk and process it here for the dorms for the student housing,” Jared Parsons, dairy plant manager, said. “We also make fluid milk for the Greeks.”
Along with fluid milk, the dairy plant also processes and produces up to 42 flavors of ice cream and various cheeses, including processed cheese.
All the dairy comes from the K-State dairy farm, located about four miles north of campus. The farm houses approximately 225 Holstein cattle that get milked three times a day.
In addition to the dairy cows, Weber has its own cattle and pigs used to teach agriculture students at K-State. These cows and pigs are later processed and available to the public at the dairy bar.
“Beef and pork and stuff like that, it’s all outsourced here on campus as well, so all the meat and dairy products, as well as the eggs and the flour, are all produced by K-State students,” Anthony Fink, dairy bar manager, said.
The dairy bar also sells the grain milling science’s flour, beer bread mix, pancake mix and oatmeal cookies when available. Customers can purchase jam made by the food science department when it is available.
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“We have burgers — hamburger, cheeseburger, bacon cheeseburger, still have our chicken salad, our ham and turkey sandwiches and our peanut butter and jelly,” Fink said.
The agriculture department holds many hands-on learning classes, and the ones taught about dairy in Call Hall include fundamentals of milk processing in the fall semester, as well as a dairy products class taught in the spring semester.
“We have dairy products class which deals with all the dairy products that are able to be made out of milk, you know, you got your yogurt, butters, your cheeses, your processed cheeses and ice cream,” Parsons said.
Parsons, a former agriculture science major at K-State, continues to see the advantages that come with having these classes.
“The benefits of students being here is the ability for them to learn the trait before they go out into the real world,” Parsons said. “One of my joys in life is getting to see my student workers grow up and graduate and then later connecting … and being able to see where they’ve gone.”
The dairy bar is open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays.
