Jay Kopp, who milks 120 Holsteins on his family's farm, has been smiling ever since as Americans across the country are replacing margarine, which contains trans-fatty acid, with butter, which doesn't.

"People seem to be going back to butter," said Kopp, adding that his family uses butter and whole milk exclusively. "Now that butter is more popular, butter and cheese prices are up and so is the price for fluid milk."

That's good news for Pennsylvania, the nation's fifth-largest milk producer, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service.

Many of the state's farmers will gather Saturday for their yearly agricultural expo at the Farm Show Complex, where an 800-pound butter sculpture will call attention to Pennsylvania's national role in butter production.

It takes 21 pounds of milk to make 1 pound of butter, said David Karpinski, a spokesman for Land O'Lakes Inc. in St. Paul, Minn.

"Butter is produced essentially the same way it was thousands of years ago," he said, "by churning fresh cream until the fats separate from the liquid."

Margarine, developed as a cheap alternative to butter, usually is based on vegetable oil and contains trans fat because of a chemical process called hydrogenation.

Source: The Patriot-News