Have a little faith

(Continued from Page A1) home, she had a plan. She didn’t start by bottling milk. That was too risky to jump into selling such a highly perishable product. She wanted to build their brand with something shelf-stable.

She called her mom to talk through her idea of making milk-based soaps to start her business. It turned out that her mother had just been at a women’s Bible study where they learned how to make goat’s milk soap. Emily took it as a sign that she was on the right track.

“There’s a lot of Jesus in this operation,” she said.

Through a farmer connection, she found a creamery for sale in a construction trailer. She rolled it home, and it took a year for her to get it inspected and ready to go.

Burned out. Emily burned the candle at both ends for a while to bottle milk and do the other daily farm tasks.

“I would get done milking, take a shower, work in the creamery all night, go out and milk the cows and then roll right into my next day,” she said.

It came to a head one day when she had a big order to fill but also needed to haul manure. She asked her younger sister, Elizabeth, to stay in the creamery and watch the milk temperature in the pasteurizer for 30 minutes. That was all she needed but “those 30 minutes were precious to me.”

It turned out that working in the controlled environment of the creamery, where she can work at her own pace, was a good fit for her sister, who is immunocompromised. Elizabeth runs the creamery three days a week.

Emily’s mother, Amy, and older sister, Mandy, help make soaps. Her other sister, Amber, helps out in the creamery one day a week.

New place. Eventually, the creamery business was built up enough that it made sense to build that new dream facility. Emily had the cash flow to make it all work. Funding for that came through Farm Credit Mid-America’s Growing Forward program, which allows young and beginning farmers to get capital with relaxed underwriting standards. Emily worked closely with Amy Weaver, a senior financial officer with Farm Credit Mid-America, to get into the program.

The Growing Forward program also provides resources, mentorship and educational opportunities.

“If we’re just giving them money, we’re not doing enough,” said Dakota Everts, head of customer engagements and Growing Forward for Farm Credit Mid-America.

The cows settled into the new barn about a month ago. They downsized to about 60 cows in the milking herd to fit the robot. The new building will also house a new creamery, retail store and educational area.

Family. Emily’s roots in farming run deep. Her great-grandfather bought the farm in 1898. Her father grew up in the house where he would later raise his family. Tim said his first job on the farm was filling water troughs for the hogs when he was 5.

In addition to the hogs, the family raised laying hens and dairy cows. His mother had an egg route where she would deliver eggs to local houses each Friday.

When Tim was 14, his father died from cancer, leaving him to run the farm. He had to take care of his sisters and mothers, so he got out of raising hogs and chickens and focused his business on dairy cows.

“Farming is always what I wanted to do,” he said. “It’s in my blood.”

He and his wife, Amy, had four daughters. In addition to their daugh- ters, they now have five grandchildren. When Emily came back from college, she wanted to jump ahead immediately into the future.

Her father was hesitant, she said. He wasn’t supportive of her dream because he was scared, she said.

“He told me that I was crazy and that I wouldn’t be able to do it,” she said.

“She got out of college, came home and said I’m doing everything wrong,” he said. “I said, ‘I raised four girls, have a good wife, have no debt. What more do you want?’”

He thought it would be too much for Emily, to take on all that debt to build new. When his father died, he was left with his father’s debts to repay. When he owned everything outright, it was a point of pride for him to never get in that situation again.

“When you’ve been doing something for 55 years, change is hard,” Tim said. “But watching that robot work is amazing.”

Seeing is believing for him. The father and daughter still butt heads sometimes, but Tim has his daughter’s back. She runs things primarily during the day, but he’s “my go-to to bounce ideas off of. He’s not my yes man. He’s a great person to keep me in check.”

Though her new building is nearing completion, and things are moving in the right direction, there are still hard days. Some days she wants to cry. Emily wrote a couple of Bible verses on posts in her new barn to keep her motivated. One is Ephesians 6:12. The other is Matthew 17:20: “If you have faith like a mustard seed, nothing to you will be impossible.”

(Reporter Rachel Wagoner can be reached at 724-201-1544 or rachel@farmanddairy. com.)

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