Posted on 06/18/2008 6:20:44 PM PDT by SJackson
After years of setbacks and delays, Theresa Depies began bottling organic milk this spring from her herd of about 20 Jersey cows. The road was long, but this dairy owner is proud that ...
SPRINGBROOK -As she walks among her "girls" in the lush, green grass on her Washburn County dairy farm, Theresa Depies can't help but smile.
Her pride in Springbrook Organic Dairy shines through in her 18-stall barn and the attached fluid milk processing plant, both kept neat as a pin.
Mrs. Depies has every right to be proud.
This spring, 18 years after they started farming, she and her husband, Jeff, reached their longtime goal of selling organic whole milk from their small Jersey herd to local consumers.
"It's been a long road," Mrs. Depies said. "We've made a lot of sacrifices and have some regrets, but I did it my way."
The Depieses expected to reach this point at least four years ago but were sidetracked by unexpected hurdles in securing financing and the required permits.
The dream also was put on hold by the basic need to pay the bills.
At 47, Mrs. Depies said she's finally doing what she was meant to do, and, while her farm is still a work in progress, the future looks brighter.
The energetic mother of five wears many hats throughout the day as she juggles home-schooling, housework, daily farm chores and twice-weekly milk deliveries.
"That's the fun part of the business for me: selling our product," she said.
Mr. Depies works off the farm for an irrigation company.
This month, Mrs. Depies is busy promoting Springbrook Organic Dairy's creamline milk through store samples. The farm also will supply 100 gallons of milk and be featured at the Sawyer County Dairy Breakfast Saturday, June 21, in Hayward.
Mrs. Depies said they've been warmly welcomed by health-conscious consumers seeking an alternative.
"The way we're doing it, we don't see how we can't make a decent living milking 25 cows," she said.
Pioneering ahead Mrs. Depies said she's always had a pioneering spirit and would have fit in well with early settlers as they forged new territory.
She and her husband are from eastern Wisconsin. Mr. Depies grew up on a large dairy and hog farm near Luxemburg.
Mrs. Depies' parents were the first generation in her family to not farm, but she always felt a tug toward agriculture.
After working at other jobs, the Depieses decided to follow their dream. In 1990, after two years of searching, they bought a 148-acre dairy farm near Springbrook.
The Depieses have been building their Jersey herd since 1990, when Mrs. Depies received her first cow as a Mother's Day gift.
She bought one cow and bartered for another with a Percheron filly.
"Everything else has been raised here," she said. "For three years in a row, we've had a good run of heifer calves; we had eight heifer calves this year."
The Depieses also raise a few pigs, with bloodlines that go back to Mr. Depies' home farm. They have pork and beef processed at Whiskey Ridge Sport Shop and Processing in Radisson and take orders for the meat in spring.
The Depieses knew if they wanted to be profitable, small-scale dairy farmers, they couldn't sell their milk through the usual channels; they had to capture a premium market.
They approached several lenders with their plans for a small processing plant. Bankers were skeptical.
"I had my market, I had stores that were willing to buy my product," she said. "I went to eight to 10 banks; everybody wanted a different business plan."
Financing finally came through from the Farm Service Agency in 2004.
As they expanded their herd from within, they sold produce from a three-acre community-supported garden and raised cattle dogs to sell, putting most of the money back into the farm.
They gradually pieced together a processing facility, buying used bulk tanks and other equipment. They found a bottler and refrigerated truck online.
Always organic Although they've always practiced organic farming, the Depieses only recently got organic certification, through Organic Tilth and the new Nature's International Certification Services.
Intent on setting their own milk price, the couple has never sold raw milk to a procurer. Until they started bottling this year, they dumped their milk to the hogs rather than accept a pre-set price.
"I kind of did this in a silent protest," Mrs. Depies said.
They started using intensive rotational grazing last year out of necessity during the drought and liked it so much that it became part of their routine.
The farm has about 60 acres of hay and pasture, and 30 acres of permanent pasture.
Cows are fed only a small amount of grain - enough to entice them to put their heads through the stanchions at milking time, Mrs. Depies said.
"Every once in a while, we try to feed them a little more, and they're just not interested," she said.
Cows enter the barn only for milking. Open housing and a bedding pack are provided in the winter.
Herd health focuses on prevention rather than crisis control, and that's paid off with a next-to-nothing veterinary bill.
"I can tell just by the way (a cow) has got their head cocked when they come in the barn or if they're just standing kind of funny in their stanchion if it's a cow I have to monitor," she said.
Milk doesn't get much fresher Cows are milked into buckets, and the milk is carried from the barn to a 1,000-square-foot processing plant, where it's tested, pasteurized and poured into reusable glass bottles for storage in a walk-in cooler.
Processing is done whenever there's an ample amount of milk.
Mrs. Depies said most farmers who process their own milk are extra mindful of quality, and she's no exception.
"If something's wrong with the product, there's nobody to say 'It wasn't me, it was them,'" she said.
The Depieses' milk is at more than a dozen grocery and bulk-food stores, bakeries and restaurants within about an hour's drive of the farm.
Mrs. Depies said she spends about $100 a week on gas to deliver milk.
Milk sales are growing, and she hopes to sell 350 to 400 gallons of milk a week eventually. Milk sells at retail for $4.25 to $5 for a half gallon; there's a $3 refundable deposit for the bottle.
"I really want to be connected to (consumers) and what they're looking for," she said.
A farm storefront isn't in the plans at this time, she said.
Now that she has her own processing plant, Mrs. Depies said she might pursue her cheesemaking license.
But, after years of uncertainty, the Depieses are looking forward to getting into a routine with milk sales and paying down debt.
They hope their hard work might make dairying an attractive option for their children, ages 14 to 23.
But if none of them chooses to farm, Mrs. Depies said, the business is small enough that she and her husband can continue to work it themselves well into their retirement years.
"This is a perfect time for us. The consumers are ready, they're wanting change," she said. "We're gonna do all right."
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If people want to pay for organic, I say more power to ‘em.
I thought it was legally problematic these days to sell unpasteurized, however.
Notice that their cows are fed hay, rather than grain, very important. Cows did not evolve to eat corn and soy feed, as a result about half of the bicarbonate of soda made in the U.S. of A. goes to cattle suffering indigestion (History Channel reference). The “range-fed” and “kill-it-and-grill-it” crowd insist this makes feedlot beef bad for us. Whatever, I say vote with your wallets.
My word! They could have done wonders with organic grapes.
What? Big Oil, Cargill and Big Milk are not forcing her out of business?
The article says they pasteurize their milk.
Darn! I thought I read it thoroughly.
I know the organic purists demand unpasteurized and claimed pasteurization cause everything from heart attacks to hemorrhoids.
The article said they pasturize their product.
Good for them, making their dream come true.
Ping
Well, it is true that higher sugar/higher carb diets for animals that ferment their food (rumination) cna have serious bacterial imbalances that cause them to produce more gas than they normally would, and cause bad bacteria levels to get dangerously high and require antibiotics to control.
Hence grass fed cattle can have less gi tract problems and infections than corn fed cattle. Too much sugar is bad for any animal. Look what it does to man. Every animal eating too much sugar is more prone to infections, their immune system is weakened, they get obese, and the body pH shifts towards a pro-cancer, more acidic environment.
http://www.realmilk.com/documents/SheehanPowerPointResponse.pdf
The above website is a point by point response to allegations by the FDA that raw milk has been proven to be unsafe. You can check it out yourself and decide if it makes sense. If the FDA truly believed raw milk was dangerous for human consumption, it would be outlawed. It is not. It must simply be labeled "Not for human consumption" and can be sold in many states. So they provide a "back door" for legal sale of a supposedly "dangerous" food product.
To my understanding, raw milk is a healthy food, for those who can digest it (mostly of European descent.) Happily, I'm one of those, as I quite enjoy the stuff.
I would not recommend pastuerized milk to anyone, except in some emergency where that was the best available of a bad lot, and pasteurization was necessary to deal with milk of suspect origin (rather like boiling dirty water in a pinch.) The pasteurization destroys some of the healthy elements, and ruins the fats in milk, rendering them unhealthy.
Did you happen to notice which state this was in?
Then of course, there is the health school that says humans were not designed to drink any kind of milk except one... and that only until the age of six months.
I kind of got to liking soymilk for a while there, until I found a website claiming it was a substance of the devil.
As explained at Got Milk? Getting There...: Gene Research Focuses On Lactose Intolerance:
Some biologists believe that during the development of the dairy culture 10,000 years ago, some people acquired a mutation that allowed them to digest lactose into their adult years. If true, this hypothesis could explain why most Europeans tolerate milk products.
See also Lactose Intolerance and Evolution: No Use Crying Over Undigested Milk:
Simoons demonstrated that low prevalence of lactose intolerance was associated with pastoral practices among early populations around the world. Hirschhorn recently provided strong genetic evidence for the culture-historical hypothesis using contemporary techniques of genomics and single nucleotide polymorphisms. His research group found that European derived persistent lactase production is due to a mutation near the lactase gene that occurred only about 10 million years ago and rapidly increased in prevalence.
A lengthier, and quite readable, explanation of how this evolution came about can be found at Most adults can't stomach milk. Most humans produce little or no lactase after infancy. This is the enzyme needed to digest "milk sugar", aka lactose. With this genetic evolution, some humans produce lactase through their adult lives.
The evolution of lactose tolerance can only have begun with the domestication of livestock around 10,000 years ago.
Human beings consume an amazing variety of stuff, most of which did not come into this world with the primary purpose of being human food.
To make a "religious" argument that we weren't designed to eat something is silly (well, unless perhaps one is speaking of most of the artificial crap in fancy packaging that is sold in the modern grocery stores ;). There is mostly just the practical issue of whether the body does well by the food, or does ill.
Thank you for the ping.
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