Dairy Farm Tour

Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, there are two sides to how we get food in this coun­try: how we think our food is pro­duced and how it real­ly is pro­duced. These two seem to have dras­ti­cal­ly diverged some­where in the 1950s. To a cer­tain extent, this has allowed greater pros­per­i­ty in the form of cheap food for the mass­es. How­ev­er, to a much larg­er extent we are learn­ing that much of what we sac­ri­ficed for low­er prices, uni­for­mi­ty, and uni­ver­sal avail­abil­i­ty is slow­ly killing us. Fur­ther, it has near­ly already killed off the way our food pro­duc­ers (farm­ers, most­ly, but even those fur­ther down the pro­duc­tion line) do their business.

I’ve been talk­ing for years about the eth­i­cal and envi­ron­men­tal rea­sons for buy­ing local prod­ucts and foods but since we’ve had kids, we’ve also been con­cerned about the health rea­sons. We had been buy­ing organ­ic foods when pos­si­ble (prod­ucts which are get­ting eas­i­er to find and cheap­er as a result of greater demand) and also recent­ly went about try­ing to find local­ly grown or made prod­ucts. As Wyatt is about to turn a year old — and thus will be switch­ing off baby for­mu­la and on to cow’s milk — we decid­ed to try and find some local milk. This is what led us to Hatch­er Fam­i­ly Dairy only a few miles away from us, in Col­lege Grove, TN.

We had intend­ed to just head down to the Hatch­er farm store to have some sand­wich­es for lunch and get a cou­ple of gal­lons of milk. We end­ed up also pur­chas­ing some ground lamb and gela­to, as well as sign­ing up the entire fam­i­ly for the farm tour lat­er that after­noon. This would be Wyat­t’s first gal­lon of milk and would­n’t it be fun to see exact­ly where it came from and how it was made?

Wyatt's New Friend

If you watch the film “Food, Inc.” — or even read almost any­thing from Eric Schloss­er — you’ll learn about some pro­posed laws which would make it ille­gal to report on or pho­to­graph food pro­cess­ing plants in the U.S. I’m not going to com­ment on these laws, their cur­rent sta­tus, or even if this is an accu­rate descrip­tion of what they pur­port to do; but just want to men­tion that at least some peo­ple in this coun­try are con­cerned about this aspect of the state of food pro­duc­tion in this coun­try. So what would we expect from food pro­duc­ers who had noth­ing to hide? How would we expect a com­pa­ny who is actu­al­ly proud of how they pro­duce our food? Well, you can find at least one answer at Hatch­er: they offer bi-month­ly tours of their farm facil­i­ties, by mem­bers of the Hatch­er fam­i­ly and their long-time staff. They — in no uncer­tain terms — make it clear that if you as a cus­tomer have any issues with their milk, come and see them. They are the epit­o­me of the cliche “the buck stops here.” Their prod­uct is expen­sive and they freely admit they don’t have plans to feed every­one; but you can’t help but respect their will­ing­ness to be com­plete­ly open and hon­est with any­one who walks off the street and onto their farm.

Hatcher Family Dairy Farm

It is also worth not­ing that it is clear that the fam­i­ly and staff at Hatch­er sure­ly do love what they do. I already knew enough of dairy farm­ing to know that no one choos­es it because it is an easy life. When you take into account that imme­di­ate­ly across the road from the farm is a huge golf course and sub­di­vi­sion of half-mil­lion dol­lar plus homes under con­struc­tion; you have to real­ize that farm­ing is a lifestyle they want to con­tin­ue. It would be so tempt­ing for any farm­ing fam­i­ly sit­ting on a few hun­dred acres in one of the coun­try’s wealth­i­est coun­ties to sell out and retire (and like­ly free a cou­ple of gen­er­a­tions to come from ever hav­ing to con­sid­er if they want to con­tin­ue the fam­i­ly busi­ness). It has hap­pened time and time again all across Williamson Coun­ty. But here are the Hatch­ers, of whom the youngest sib­ling just grad­u­at­ed with a degree in agri­cul­ture busi­ness and now runs the busi­ness in addi­tion to per­son­al­ly milk­ing most every cow, daily.

At the end of our hour-and-a-half tour, our two young kids prob­a­bly did­n’t have any bet­ter of an idea of where their milk comes that they did before. After all, Ains­ley already knew that milk came from cows. How­ev­er, as an adult, it is amaz­ing to see that some­one still makes and sells their milk just as they did since before the Civ­il War, when they start­ed the farm.

That being said, we all could appre­ci­ate the sam­ple of choco­late milk we got.

Ansley and a Calf

Lat­er that evening, we made beef & lamb burg­ers with some of the ground lamb from Hatch­er and then had some of their vanil­la and straw­ber­ry gela­to for desert. Din­ner with the fam­i­ly out in our back yard was the best; know­ing much of it came from anoth­er fam­i­ly down the road.

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

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