Mike Armstrong gets up at 3:30 in the morning, every morning, to milk his Jersey cows. And he’s damn happy about it. Cows are his life. His father was a dairy farmer and his grandfather before him. He never thought about doing anything else and didn’t until 2016, when doing it a different way became a necessity.
For generations, the Armstrong’s were a commercial dairy sending their milk to Purity Milk Company for processing. “We were going broke and had been for a long time,” Mike says. They had borrowed and refinanced twice to make ends meet and were still losing $10,000 a month. Some years ago, there was a program called “base building,” which took a farm’s production and sales from the months of September and October. If you produced over that, you were penalized, keeping supply and demand in line (Canada still has that system). Then the government did away with that program and let dairy farmers make all the milk they could. Prices went down and only those that could produce the cheapest milk could make it.
So, in 2016 Mike needed a niche. He had a conversation with a state inspector who told him (off the record) that he should produce raw milk; that his was the cleanest dairy that he inspected, and if anyone could do it, he could. In October, Mike went to Clarksville with one gallon of raw milk to drop off. That became the first delivery of many.