The Creambrook Origin Story - Part 2
This is the second post of a blog series on how Creambrook began and we started the farm business. Click here to read Part 1.
The farm in VA that we helped manage for a year.
It felt like we were floundering without a direction. A goal came to mind to purchase a farm before Ben turned 30 years old. We began on a quest to find a dairy farm where we could plant our roots and raise our young family.
Ben flew to Wisconsin and toured dairy farms for sale. Raw milk is illegal in WI so our plan was to ship milk to a local coop. A few weeks later, we went together to see one farm that we had decided would be worth pursuing. It had a house, barns, milking parlor & heated floor, and a pond and trees. It was beautiful! The financing fell through and it didn’t happen, but we appreciated the experience.
The farm we attempted to purchase in Wisconsin.
The following year, we traveled from PA, where we were living & working on an organic dairy, to Missouri to see several dairy farms. The plan would have been to be certified organic and ship milk, but the milk market was beginning to become unstable.
We decided to look closer to “home” in Virginia and on a whim, Ben contacted the realtor of a farm in Middlebrook. We had driven by hundreds of times & it had been on the market for six years.
God blessed us that year with a relationship with a business mentor, who encouraged us to set big but realistic goals and to get really creative on a business plan and funding to be able to purchase a farm (still in our twenties with very little savings).
It was a wild experience, with many early mornings before Ben’s day job to hammer out a business plan and get it approved by banks and “slow money/agricultural” investors.
If you’d like to hear more about the business side of how Creambrook began, here is Ben’s guest interview on The Baker and The Farmer Podcast.
November 2016
In February 2017, three weeks after welcoming our second son, we got a contract on the farm in Middlebrook. It was a grazing beef farm with a small feed lot and two silos, pasture and hay fields that need a lot of love, and a Sears & Roebuck bungalow-style farmhouse.
Now the real work kicked in. There was a long list of contingencies to be able to close on the farm and we spent countless hours working to make it happen. It was an audacious goal but we believed that if God wanted us to be able to farm there, it would miraculously happen, and if not, there were many opportunities for the door to slam in our face.
November 2016 & expecting our second son
Our business plan was to ship fluid milk to a creamery a few hours away and possibly have a small raw milk herd share as a side business.
We left PA in March 2017 with a toddler and newborn and moved into a two room above-garage apartment near the farm to continue working towards closing….