The morning milking ends, the milk goes into the tank and the agitator makes no sound. A fuse may have blown, the compressor may have stopped or the power may have gone in the night; the collection truck comes in the afternoon. The first job is to measure the milk temperature and write down when the fault was noticed. Without those two, every later decision rests on a guess, and if the milk is refused there is nothing to explain it with.
| Stage | Temperature limit |
|---|---|
| After milking, milk collected daily | 8 °C at most |
| After milking, milk not collected daily | 6 °C at most |
| On arrival at the processing plant | 10 °C at most |
These values appear in Article 55 of the Turkish Regulation on Specific Hygiene Rules for Food of Animal Origin; the temperature conditions do not apply to milk that meets the raw-milk criteria of Article 56 and is processed within 2 hours of milking. Set your reading and fault time beside this table and you can see where the milk may get to before the truck arrives.
A closed tank behaves like an insulated volume even with the cooling dead, and the milk holds its temperature for a while; opening the lid often removes that advantage. If the agitator has stopped the milk stratifies, a quality problem of its own. Frozen plates waiting in the farm's chest freezer do not chill the milk directly; they keep cold the insulated volume the milk will travel in. As the milk warms the options shrink, so the decision to take it in churns to a neighbour's tank or the collection centre is made early.
Calling the dairy in advance with the time of the fault, the measured temperature and the steps taken means the outcome does not rest on the laboratory alone. Three preparations are enough for the next failure: plates kept ready in the freezer, an arrangement agreed beforehand with a neighbouring farm or the centre, and an alarm that shows the tank temperature remotely.