Saturday, February 27, 2010

Hashing it all out

More ideas keep popping up, it's just insane.  "You know what we could do..." is a pretty common thing to hear in our house right now.  Part of it is that we have a ton of things we'd like to do, and a few that we know we should do...but the area is so void of fresh anything as far as food goes (again, not beef or baking potatoes) that we keep having conversations about where the steady money lies.  Both of us would like to have a small dairy eventually - maybe 10 cows - but only if we could sell from the farm.  It'd have to be pasteurized - the USDA is pretty serious about this - but what other requirements there are we have yet to find out.  Guess we better, because not only is dairy a huge part of our food dollar but we could sell products like ricotta, mozzarella, cottage cheese & yogurt and give the whey to our pigs.  Just rolling all these things around.  

4 comments:

Jordan said...

Hey -
Let me know if you find any good sources of information that are semi-easy to understand on the requirements for having a dairy. I've heard nightmare stories about how much money it costs to satisfy requirements, but without reading regulations directly, I'm not sure how to find out what the requirements are. I'm thinking about goats up here in upstate NY. There's only one licensed goat dairy, about 2 hours south of me. It might be a decent market - depending on how much it costs to start up.

Erin said...

Hi Jordan,
I've read that there are people that have extremely cheap start-up but that knowing your state's regulations is essential. That way you know what you can get by with! There is a woman in Wisconsin who milks several cows and is Grade A, with $3,000 of used equipment. The inspector tried to tell her she needed to make changes but she replied that it wasn't in the code (knowing it better than the rep worked out for her!). She had a storage tank, one "claw" and stainless steel bucket. That was it. Pasturizing would obviously add more cost though if its required.
There are several goat dairies having trouble where we moved from, I'll make some calls and see if they may have equipment you could buy if you like - or maybe get contact info for you?

Jordan said...

Oh, that's interesting. I've had several people tell me that I couldn't get going for less than $75,000, but I don't know who really knows. Where did you come from? Curious why the dairies are having trouble - maybe I'm wrong in thinking it could be a good market.

I've used SCORE as well, and they're really useful, but not ag specialists. I'm thinking about contacting the local extension agent for help - I know I want to do goats, but am not sure whether I want meat, dairy, or something else.

Erin said...

Both cow & goat dairies are having trouble in the central valley of CA. Water is becoming more scarce and the recession has affected the price of milk. Most of the dairymen there base their entire operation off of the milk so money isn't so stable when the market changes. But if you were just direct-selling locally you would have a much different market. Most of the goat dairies in that area of CA sell to a creamery who sells to grocery stores all over the state. If you sold cheeses and soaps made with goats milk then you wouldn't be so reliant upon just the milk sales. Those may be better to start with because they will put you in contact with people that are interested in goats milk products and will give you a customer base to start with when you begin marketing milk too. People here sell it, hand-milked & raw, for $8/gal.