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  • From: "Coylie Ries" <sassyniowa@iowatelecom.net>
  • To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing" <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Local: The Route to Survival for Family Farmers
  • Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2007 09:27:42 -0600

In the Des Moines, Iowa area, there is a small farm that is selling its milk directly to the area grocery stores, and that includes the larger stores such as Hy-Vee and Dahls.
They sell it in the old-fashioned milk bottles were delivered to your door and the bottles are returnable. Everyone I know who has tried the milk, just loves it! And spend the extra money to get it. They will even wait in line longer to return the bottles! (Here in Iowa, we have 5cent return on all pop cans and bottles, so we turn them in here back to where we bought them in the first place.)
The whole milk is just that, straight milk with the cream still on the top! I believe they are doing very, very well with their product.
Sassy

Local: The Route to Survival for Family Farmers
September 21, 2004 Tuesday
http://www.organicconsumers.org/corp/local092804.cfm
Sell in Bulk, Lose Farm. Sell Locally, and Watch Revenues Grow.
By KEITH SCHNEIDER.

Keith Schneider, a former New York Times reporter, is deputy director of
the Michigan Land Use Institute.

ONE of the truly good-news stories in American agriculture, and one with
meaning for small businesses of all kinds, is what's happening on Tyler
Road here at the Shetler Family Dairy.

Not that long ago, George and Sally Shetler were small fry in an industry
dominated by big players, producers of a bulk commodity in which prices
essentially had not budged for 20 years. Continuing to supply the
conventional fluid milk market, the Shetlers concluded, would take them
down the same bankruptcy path that the Department of Agriculture says
claimed almost 400 farms a week from 1974 to the mid-1990's, most of them
small.

So in 1995, the Shetlers decided to try a more entrepreneurial approach. If
the markets they could reach through conventional channels were
unsatisfactory, what new market could they tap?

The one right around them, as it turned out -- bottling and delivering
their milk directly to stores in Traverse City, 25 miles away, the center
of a five-county region with 165,000 residents and growing faster than
almost any place in the Midwest.

The couple, who raised five children in a 90-year-old farmhouse with one
bathroom and a lot of wallpaper with cows, sent a survey to local markets
and learned that proprietors were eager to sell fresh food produced by
local growers. They then sat at their dining table and wrote a
straightforward business plan on one page of unlined white paper -- ''Start
small within 1995. Action to be taken: Pray!!'' -- that accurately
described the fast-growing business they and several of their children
operate.

Today, the milk from its 38 cows is bottled in a $140,000 microcreamery the
family built and stocked with used equipment. The dairy ships 1,300 gallons
of milk and dairy products twice a week to 50 stores in the Grand Traverse
region. Their truck has a set of Texas longhorns bolted to the roof of the
cab, a black-and-white Holstein pattern and a slogan: ''From Moo to You.''

The result? Revenues have grown fourfold, and the farm now has seven
employees.

''You know what this has done for us? Every other weekend now I get off and
don't have to milk,'' said Mr. Shetler, 53, who bought his 180-acre farm 25
years ago.






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