Our Biggest Lesson Learned
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Welcome back for some dairy farming lessons learned, actually one BIG lesson learned--the HARD WAY. We're not too proud to admit that we've made our fair share of mistakes. In fact, we bring them up often, as a way to remind ourselves of how far we've come. I don't think you can be growing as a business if you aren't making mistakes, after all. Because growth is uncomfortable and often happens without analyzing every potential outcome. I think it's the way it has to be, honestly. If we would overanalyze our decisions, we'd probably not have the chance to make the good ones! How do you know, unless you try?
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But we're an open book to other Microdairy farmers, so let's dig into one of our biggest mistakes and the lessons we learned.
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In the spring of 2020, just a couple of months after our business started and right around the time of the pandemic and food shortage fears, our customers were BEGGING for more milk. As you know, we started with a single cow, Buttercup, and only had 5-6 gallons of milk each day. And when Lily, our second cow, freshened, we had about 12 gallons each day, but it wasn't enough. So we did what we thought was right: we bought another cow. Then that wasn't enough. So we bought two more. And, you guessed it, it wasn't enough. So we added a 6th cow to our herd in a period of 3 months. And guess what? We realized we overshot.
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Though we were still selling every drop of milk (and customers still asking for more), what we forgot was our setup. We started with a converted horse barn to a few tie-stalls, a single bucket milker, and a single 15-gallon vat pasteurizer. And 1 person working (I still had really busy full-time hospital work during the start of COVID, helping to bottle only 3-4 days/week). But now we had 35 gallons of milk each day. So that meant at least 2 pasteurization cycles each day, bottling all that milk, delivering all that milk and the worst: shoveling all that manure.
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We did not have a tractor yet. We had a single wheelbarrow and shovel. And that was fine in the spring/summer months and as the cows were outside in pasture and as there WERE ONLY TWO. But six cows' worth of manure is much greater than two cows, as you probably know.
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Our workload dramatically increased, to the point of near burn-out. Jesse was still milking twice-a-day at that time, too, and we knew: something had to give. That's about the time we realized we had to switch to OAD milking (read more about that here), which was a game changer for our business. But that's also the time we promised ourselves we would never get that far ahead of ourselves. That our decisions would be more thought-through before they were made. That we'd think strategically and make sure we had space, equipment, manpower to handle the next upgrades.
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It might seem like common sense, but we were doing what we thought was best: listening to our customers!
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We quickly learned (and have not forgotten) that just because your customer base is asking for it, this doesn't give you permission to lose your mind. While we still appreciate and work toward the requests our customers, we'll never again "outkick our coverage" as Jesse puts it. We know we need to make changes slowly, thinking through them and making sure we can afford the additions and manage them with our time.
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While we were, fortunately, able to escape the burn-out by way of OAD milking and adding a second vat to reduce our days pasteurizing back to three, we learned some hard lessons that year.
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We can't recommend this concept enough. As exciting as the market can be for your products, you can't grow too quickly, or you'll burn out. And please, don't be afraid to pivot, make changes, or slow down. We've done this many times, and all of them have helped us tremendously.
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Keep farming, friends.
Lisa