“It’s one step past the clean water movement — we’re the clean milk movement,” said Jennifer Gotto, director of marketing at Dairy Tech.

Dairy Tech was at the Colorado State University Innovation Fair on Thursday along with 29 other agriculturally based inventions from northern Colorado companies. It was the only Weld County-based company in attendance.

Bovine veterinarian Richard Dumm started Dairy Tech. He created a pasteurizing system to help keep baby calves healthy, and he has been building on that technology for more than 15 years.

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The company takes the colostrum, or nutrient- and fat-rich first milk produced by the mother cow, and puts it into a specially patented “perfect udder” bag, and then pasteurizes it in Platinum Series Pasteurizers.

The bag and the process both keep the milk clean and sterile.

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Pasteurizing colostrum is a reasonably new idea, and is not used nationwide. But, Gotto said, farms using the technology consistently see healthier herds, which grow bigger and stronger.

The cleaned colostrum can also be refrigerated in the bags for a few days or frozen to keep it long-term if necessary.

As the product started selling to a lot of farms in South America, people connected the dots.

“These folks are realizing if it works for their calves, it will work for their families,” said Wyman Nielson, Dairy Tech president. “We’ve seen the application that we started for calves and so we can move beyond our small world and maybe help people too.”

Dairy Tech has developed a “popper” that works much like an old fashioned pop-up turkey timer to determine the cleanliness of milk. The popper goes into pasteurized milk and confirms that it has been heated to a temperature that will kill pathogens in the milk.

In countries where raw milk is sold often, this can be useful.

“We’re not ready to roll it out yet,” Nielson said, “but we are given good indications from people high up in some of (the South American) governments that it would be good for their people.”

The company has trips planned this summer to countries scattered across South America for testing and additional research.

And, the benefits of drinking milk are many.

“The more access to clean milk, the healthier the population is,” Gotto said.

But that’s not shocking for those who grew up with the “Got Milk?” slogan. What could be surprising is how many people in the world don’t have access to clean milk.

“We’re just a small company, and we try to make the biggest impact we can with our resources,” Nielson said, noting he’s worked in many fields, but this company is different.

“This is the first opportunity I’ve had to feel like I can make a difference in the whole world,” he said. ❖