An Enterprising Family

Minnesota Organic Milk (MOM’s) is a successful family-run organic dairy that sells their dairy products to numerous Twin Cities food co-operatives and grocery stores. The Hartman’s –Mike, Diane and Mike’s brother, Roger, are the family behind this successful enterprise. “When we were planning this, we had 52 farms lined up to go,” Mike says as he remembers the planning for the creamery in the early 1990s. “But every way we figured, it didn’t work financially.” The point of setting up a farmer-owned creamery was to capture the processing and marketing profits for the farmer owners. So, when it was clear the big creamery idea wouldn’t fly, the Hartman’s decided to build a smaller version for their farm, purchasing used equipment sized to their 35-cow herd.

Mike is an advocate for small, on farm dairy processing. The Hartman family also operates the only exclusively organic dairy processing plant in Minnesota. “Small on farm creameries can help rejuvenate the countryside,” he says. “They can make small dairies like ours profitable. That will create economic opportunities in [small] towns. And urban people will be drawn back to the rural areas.”

The vehicle for this economic renaissance is a milk processing room packed from floor to ceiling with dairy processing equipment that Mike has located from as far away as Wyoming and Pennsylvania. Mike’s discoveries have allow M.O.M’s to bottle two kinds of milk – skim and 2-percent, make a range of flavored ice creams, make butter and, most recently, bottle chocolate buttermilk. “Our creamery is what I call diversity within diversity,” Mike says. Diversity and flexibility of the creamery also reflect the diversity of the Hartman farm. Besides the dairy, the farm has pigs, dairy steers, chickens for meat and eggs and a variety of crops.

Hog Wild

Mike’s philosophy is there is no such thing as waste on a farm: for example, rinse water from the creamery, rich with milk solids, is fed to the pigs. Hartman’s even throw their junk mail to the hogs. “The old story is that hogs like to spend one third of their time sleeping, one third of their time eating and one third of their time in destructive activity,” Mike says. “They shred all that paper and mix it in with the bedding and manure and it makes a good carbon source for the fields.” Another unexpected benefit Mike discovered is that “The sows act as protection from predators for the chickens.”

M.O.M’s other products include:

* vanilla ice cream,
* chocolate chip molasses ice cream,
* chocolate ice cream and
* butter.

“Vanilla out sells the flavored ice creams four or five to one,” Mike says. “People would rather add their own toppings.”

Roger describes a new initiative that makes use of another underutilized product. “There is a point – it happens all of a sudden – when the buttermilk separates from the butter,” he says. In the past the buttermilk would have gone to the pigs or the chickens. Recently they’ve been adding organic chocolate syrup to the uncultured buttermilk. “We’ve been letting people taste it and they keep coming back for more,” says Roger. They are waiting until their glass bottling and washing operation is finished before marketing the buttermilk. The glass-bottling project is pure M.O.M.’s in style. Mike and Roger located a used glass-bottling machine and brought it home. Now they are studying how it operates, cleaning it and getting it ready to run.

Happy Customers

As in any business, customers and marketing are vital to success and M.O.M.’s marketing program is as diverse as the rest of the farm. They sell to:

* food co-operatives,
* grocers and
* a farmer-owned marketing co-op.

They also sell to consumer managed buying clubs. Roger, who does a lot of M.O.M.’s marketing, says people ask him if he drinks his own milk. The answer is yes and no. “I drink the milk from the creamery to test it,” he says. “But I prefer milk straight from the bulk tank. It’s really delicious.”

Although M.O.M.’s cannot sell milk straight from the bulk tank; their goal is to get certified organic dairy products to their customers that tastes as close to the sweet, fresh taste of “straight-from-the-bulk-tank” as processing rules allow. That includes lower pasteurization temperatures, minimal agitation, no homogenization of bottled milk and careful handling of the finished product. It is this kind of careful attention to detail that keeps customers coming back again and again to M.O.M.’s