Let Me Tell You A Story

Let me tell you a story:

When we started our creamery in 2020, we had zest and energy and so much life. We had a single cow and bucket milker. And then COVID hit and we grew our herd to eight, milking twice-a-day with that same old bucket milker. And though it wasn’t a problem for me (Lisa), Jesse and his back had a different story. After hundreds of lifts with the full bucket milker, his back had it. And he could barely walk and struggled to get through chores for weeks. Truth be told, we wanted to quit. In fact, we had a plan to exit. But then, like a message from above, I came across the idea of once-a-day (OAD) milking. And it felt like our souls were reignited.

You see, adding a creamery adds so many more hours of work each day. It’s different work, not as physically demanding, but it’s still time-consuming, necessary work. Equipment has to be really clean, we vat-pasteurize our milk before bottling it, so it has to be processed and cooled and then bottled. The bottles need labeled and date stamped. Then the milk needs delivered so it can be sold. With twice-a-day milking, we were running around nonstop, trying to keep up with all the tasks as a husband and (full time hospitalist) wife with three kids in tow. But OAD milking gave us back a solid 2 hours each day, which was exactly the fuel our bodies needed to keep going.

And we’re so glad we kept going. Because so much opportunity for success was waiting on the other side.

We added more milk flavors, and more products including gelato and seasonal eggnog and now: yogurt! We built a farm shoppe to host our community and started selling other local makers goods and foods. We’re grown to new accounts and have added more cows. We have plans and dreams for the future of this farm business and we’re starting to see some real success as far as our bank account.

I can’t say this has been easy, but I can say it’s worth it. And that’s why we’re here. To cheer you on, to help you through it. To teach you the mistakes we made so you don’t make them. To tell you about grant opportunities and teach you how we made our logo and our labels. To offer support in finding caps, bottles, flavoring powders and sauces. To show you how to start social media sales and email marketing. None of this is first nature, it’s all things we’ve learned. But we are here to help, friends.

OAD milking changed our farm business for the better, and we think it could change yours, too. If you want to start OAD on your farm: check out our guide. 

Keep on farming, friends!