The American spirit was certainly alive recently on at a 300-year-old, cream-line dairy farm, where a farmer is working around the clock to bottle his own milk after his processor told him to dump it. Locals have been lining up to support him and his family farm non-stop!
When Ben Brown’s dairy processor told him they could no longer buy his milk, he got to work bottling it himself.
Brown’s Whoa Nellie Dairy farm has been providing high-quality, cream-line milk since the 1700s. He sells some of it at his on-site farm store, but a large portion of it used to be sold to a dairy processor who pasteurized and bottled it for local restaurants and markets.
When he realized he would have to dump hundreds of gallons of milk each week until his 70 milking cows dried up, he couldn’t fathom that idea. So he decided to do something about it!
Brown got to work pasteurizing the milk in small batches in his 30-gallon vat and then bottling it up.
He posted on Facebook that they would open up the farm store for additional hours to sell the milk directly to consumers, and the response was overwhelming:
The line to get milk was over 20-people deep for hours!
“I know their uncle, Larry Basinger, and we want to help the Brown family through this,” one customer said. “We’re going to buy 10 gallons. I have orders from our whole family.”
They sold out within hours and have sold out almost every day since. On days they don’t sell out, they donate their fresh, non-homogenized milk to local charities.
“I hate waste, and I don’t want to dump milk. People can use it, and I still have to pay my bills,” Brown said.
Brown and his wife Mary Beth purchased the farm four years ago from Ben’s parents. He admitted to a local newspaper that his family has “barely been scraping by” in recent years, and that at first, he was afraid the lock down would be the end of them.
“I don’t want us to go under. This farm has been in the Brown family since the 1700s,” he said.
Two weeks ago, the farm was able to purchase a second 45-gallon pasteurization vat, so Brown won’t have to stay up all night processing it anymore.