Our Farm Story
After Jesse's first-generation family dairy farm had to sell in 2017, we were devastated. Jesse loved the life and work of dairy and couldn't imagine his life without it. We wanted to raise our kids with the work ethic of farming and wanted a chance to teach them the rhythms of farming. But we didn't have a farm. Or equipment. Or a lot of money. Enter the Microdairy concept.
Years before, Jesse read of a small on-farm creamery in a magazine, on which a family milked just a few cows and sold the milk locally through their creamery. We were intrigued by the idea of keeping all the milk, making our own dairy products, and really getting to know our customers. We loved the simplicity of the old-world dairy farm, where the customers know the cows and farmer, and. the farmer makes a living wage doing what he loves. We wanted to try this.
But how? Every article we'd read, podcast we'd heard told us we needed a million dollar investment to start a dairy farm and creamery. We had just under 20 acres on our little homestead, pasturing a few beef cows and chickens. We had a small horse barn, but no dairy facility. So we started to save and spent hours educating ourselves on the dairy processing laws of PA. We met with our local dairy inspector who told us of other similar farms and helped us understand the rules and regulations.
Fast forward to 2019, we had kept two heifer calves from the sale of Jesse's parents' herd in 2017 and they were now bred and ready to calve. We bought a 15gallon vat pasteurizer, built an addition to our horse barn to house our milking parlor, milk house and creamery. We bought a bucket milker, upgraded electric and drilled a well. Just under $30k was our initial investment, just as our first heifer, Buttercup, calved. We sold 5 gallons of milk each day those first months of 2020. And things took off.
By the end of 2020, we had a herd of eight cows and sold every drop of milk, raising our prices several times that first year to keep up with demand. We knew we were onto something.