I’m sure everyone has seen or driven by one of those HUGE animal operations.

Bunches of animals, pigs, cows, chickens… whatever it may be, crammed into a small building without much room to move.

Whether you call them confinement operations or CAFO’s (concentrated animal feeding operations), they’re both the same.

They really don’t make much money per animal.

Like huge dairies, for example, are at the mercy of what the processors determine the market value is for the end product - milk, butter, cheese...

In reality, it’s literally pennies on the dollar.

Currently, a large dairy farm only gets paid about $1.74 per GALLON!

That’s insane.

So the extra money you’re paying at the store is NOT going to the farmer doing the hard, everyday labor. It’s lining some middleman’s pocket.

But that is also why those farms must push their cows to produce as much as possible.

If they can get one cow to produce 10-12 gallons a day (maybe more), that’s where they can make money.

I’m not here to bash large confinement operations, because I’ve worked on them basically my whole adult life.

Dairies and a hog farm. The latter being the worst..

I’m just explaining WHY they have to do it the way they do.

And if you’ve never worked on a large farm, you can’t bash it. A LOT goes into it, just so they can barely skim by.

So, back to the reason for this blog, how do us little guys compete with the large production farms?

We don’t have cows that will produce that amount of milk. That’s hard on the cow, and they don’t live long with that high milk production.
We have only a handful of cows, each producing 2-6 gallons a day (depending on lactation status and seasonal changes).
We don’t have acres and acres of farmland to grow our own feed or make silage (common feed used on large dairies).
We don’t have a big enough herd to justify buying things in bulk for discounts - detergents for cleaning milking equipment, milk filters, limited storage space for feed or hay that will go bad before being used...
We’re charged the same amount for having a raw milk license and having milk tested as the big dairies. No small farm discounts!

But our cows have names, not numbers, and get scratches behind the ears because they love it.

One cow, Brownie, will lick Scott’s hat off his head every day while he’s cleaning her udder LOL!

The main factor is: We know our customers!

The big dairies don’t know the families they’re feeding.

And the families that buy their end product (we’ll stick with milk as an example) don’t know anything about the farm or the farmer who produced it.

You get to come to our farm, meet the actual farmers who feed and milk the cows daily.
You get to see the cows that produce your milk, which feeds your family.
You get a small glimpse into what goes on behind the scenes every day with our posts and videos on social media.
You can feel good knowing every penny you spend is going directly to the person caring for the animal that feeds you.
You even share in our grief when we lose an animal, but also the joy in the miracle of birth after pulling baby goats or a calf.

You don’t get that when you buy milk from the store.

Not only is the raw milk from our farm better for you and your family, but you also get the connection with your food. Not the dead, sterile, faceless environment from milk on the grocery store shelf.

Just making one small change on your grocery list, even if it’s buying one thing from a local farmer that you know, you can make a huge impact in your community, AND for that small farmer that celebrates when you choose them over a commodity from the grocery store.

What’s that one thing for you?

How do Small Farms 'compete' with large scale?

The main factor is: We know our customers!