| ‘The Girls’ of College Grove produce happy customers |
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By: MICHELLE WILLARD, Post Staff Writer
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Posted: Sunday, April 19, 2009 6:13 am
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atcher Family Dairy spokeswoman Lucy Hatcher scratches Ivy under her chin. Hatcher names and tames all "the girls" on the farm, treating them more like family than property.
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Happy cows don’t live in California. They live in College Grove at the Hatcher Family Dairy.
The cows are happy at the Hatcher farm because they are treated like family, not workers.
Instead of numbers, “the girls,” as Lucy Hatcher calls them, have names like Amy, Ivy, Sasha or April.
“People want to know who their food source is,” Hatcher explained.
And at Hatcher Family Dairy, people don’t just know who produces the milk, but each individual cow.
The girls are happy because they graze the lush pastures at the farm on Arno Road and are free from bovine growth hormone and antibiotics.
Hatcher Family Dairy produces milk for the wholesale market and for local patrons, which can be bought at the farm in College Grove or at a variety of stores in Williamson and Davidson counties. The farm is looking for a vendor in Murfreesboro but hasn’t found the right fit yet.
Like most family farms, the Hatchers ran into problems making a living selling on the wholesale milk market. And after 175 years and five generations, the family didn’t want to sell so they came up with a new plan, Hatcher explained.
They donated a milk bottler to MTSU’s Agriscience program and ran a test market for locally produced milk. They sold out of product every week.
“We knew we had something going,” she said.
So they installed their own processing facility and started giving farm tours to local schools to supplement income.
The difference between Hatcher and mass-market milk isn’t only in how the cows are treated.
The main difference is the amount of time from cow to bottle. Hatcher milk is processed and ready for sale in a few days.
Mass-market, processed milk found in local grocery stores can come from anywhere in the nation and is more than a week old before it reaches the shelf.
Most of the milk found in grocery stores here comes from Texas and New Mexico, while local milk goes to Georgia and Florida, Hatcher said.
Mass-market milk is also ultra-pasturized and homogenized to increase shelf life because of transportation, while Hatcher milk is minimally pasteurized and the cream line of whole milk and heavy cream isn’t homogenized.
Hatcher said they don’t homogenize the milk because vitamins, minerals and omega-3 fatty acids attach to the butterfat.
“Our milk is pasteurized and minimally processed to disrupt as little as possible the natural benefits of pasture-derived milk,” Hatcher said.
The taste is also affected by all the processing, too. And the difference between mass-market milk and the local stuff is unbelievable. (Hatcher’s chocolate milk is so good it’ll make you weak in the knees.)
But it’s not cheap. A gallon at the farm store runs $5, and it’s more from retail outlets.
“If people want cheap milk, they don’t want our product,” Hatcher explained. She added if they want to know where and who the milk comes from then Hatcher Family Dairy is the place to go.
Michelle Willard can be contacted at 615-869-0816 or mwillard@murfreesboropost.com.
More info …
www.hatcherfamilydairy.com
615-368-3405
info@hatcherfamilydairy.com |
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