How to Start & Manage a Micro Dairy: Step 1

Reader Contribution by Steve Judge
Published on September 5, 2012
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The Philosophy of a Micro Dairy

I am a Micro Dairy owner now, and I have been a large dairy farm owner in the past. And I can tell you from first-hand experience that there is no resemblance between the two. Running a Micro Dairy with four cows allows me to have a normal life, make a decent living and have time in the day to do all the things I want to do. My goal, through this blog and my company, Bob-White Systems, is to help as many people as possible successfully realize their own dreams of starting and managing a Micro Dairy.

To paraphrase Bob Marley, you can do it if you really want it. Whether your goal is to have a diversified farm that offers a range of products for sale to your local customers, or you want to be totally self-reliant and feed your own family, or even if you have a career or day job but want farm fresh milk for yourself and to make a few extra bucks, a Micro Dairy or small-scale dairy is a real-life-sized endeavor. You don’t need to smell like manure and be chained to your cows and endless chores. With a Micro Dairy you can have a healthy rural lifestyle, treat your cows humanely and make a great delicious product that here in Vermont sells for between $6 – $10 a gallon right from the farm. Or use it to make home or farmstead cheese, yogurt, butter or other products and sell it for even more.

To my thinking, Micro Dairies are part of the future of agriculture and not the past. It’s something we strive to create at Bob-White Systems, and I get to interact with people on a daily basis who are involved in all sorts of farming. Along with my own experience, that gives me great insight into the right and wrong ways to have a Micro Dairy. Over the next year or so, I will be sharing those with you – and hopefully you will be sharing your experiences with me so I can pass them along here. And send your questions – if you have a question, chances are a bunch of other people have the same one.

Whatever your current level of farming experience, I really want to stress that Micro Dairies are extremely simple operations – or should be. Any region where you can grow grass, you can produce farm-fresh milk. Very little equipment is required beyond the milking and processing equipment:

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