Delton and Bridgett Good, who own and operate Meadowview Jerseys, both hail from conventional dairy backgrounds.
After they tied the knot in 2019, they decided to venture into the family business in a way that surprised them both.
Meadowview Jerseys specializes in A2A2 raw milk, milking 50 to 60 cows in a recently retooled, fully robotic, state-of-the-art facility.
The couple took over a farm four years ago that was already selling fluid raw milk and some value-added products.
Growing up around conventional dairies in Virginia, where Bridgett’s father milked 200 cows, and Lancaster County, where Delton’s family milked 60 cows 10 minutes from Meadowview Jerseys, presented a bit of a learning curve.
The most recent owner had maintained a farm store for about the past 15 years and was milking Jerseys on the 12 acres that was left of his parents’ farm for about half that time before the Goods arrived in early 2020 and bought the place, lock, stock and barrel.
The farm is all in grass, with the Goods buying in forage from a neighboring farm.
What’s A2A2?
Beta-casein makes up about 30% of milk protein and is present in two forms: A1 and A2. A2A2 cows, produced by breeding an A2 bull with an A2 cow, produce milk with only the A2 protein.
The Goods said many customers who are lactose intolerant, have Crohn’s disease or suffer from other conditions that don’t allow them to process conventional A1 milk do not have a problem with A2A2 milk.
“It’s more digestible,” Delton said.
“You get more out of it,” added Bridgett.
It doesn’t work for everyone with such issues, they said, but many customers find it helpful enough to drive several hours from neighboring states to buy it.
And at $5 a gallon, the Goods are not tacking on a huge premium.
About 70% of Meadowview Jerseys’ sales are fluid milk. The Goods make value-added products like cheese curds and kefir on-farm, and a neighbor makes their cheese. They also sell their own beef, which they have processed off the farm.
“The only thing we can do raw is raw milk,” Bridgett said during a tour of the farm including a processing room with bottling equipment, a pasteurization tank and a holding tank set up by the previous owner two years before the Goods came on board.
“When you want to start selling to stores, you have to have a processing room and you need a bottler,” Bridgett explained.
“After you start touching it, you have to pasteurize it. Like, once you start making stuff. Cheese is an exception, because you have to age it 60 days. So, you don’t have to have a raw milk permit to make raw cheese, because it’s aged that 60 days.”
Even though 70% may seem like a high number, the 30% of value-added products represent a critical part of the business.
“Probably 25 percent is sold here,” Delton said from the air-conditioned confines of the farm store. “And we have about 20 stores throughout Lancaster County, independent stores that I deliver to, and we have a few wholesale customers that pick up that go to New York, New Jersey.”
One Berks County customer, Valley Milkhouse, an artisan cheesemaker in Oley, brings its own 400-gallon bulk tank mounted onto the back of a trailer for weekly pickups.
“A2A2 is incredible milk for drinking, incredible milk for yogurt, incredible milk for butter and incredible milk for fresh cheeses,” said Valley Milkhouse founder and owner Stefanie Angstadt, who recently celebrated 10 years in business with an on-farm celebration attended by the Goods.
Around two months ago, the goods installed a fully robotic, Lely Astronaut A5 milking system. They also just finished completion of a new free-stall barn that will accommodate 98 cows at capacity.
“They said it would take us about two weeks to train them, and it took us four days,” Bridgett said. “The Jerseys really, really got it.”
At around $200,000 per unit, not including installation — they have room to accommodate a second, but are currently running with one — the Goods aren’t sure about when they might see full return on investment. The robotic milking machine, which thoroughly cleans and disinfects teats, uses lasers to precision place the teat cups and features a digital display screen tracking each cow’s (and individual udder’s) output and a host of other useful information. It is only part of the high-tech system.
Fitbit for Cows
Tracking collars on each cow allow the animals to decide for themselves when to eat, drink, relax or be milked. Milking takes about six minutes per cow.
“The collars track activity,” Bridgett said. “It tells us how long they’ve been eating, it tracks the rumination, the chewing, how long they’re laying down doing nothing. It tells us everything like that.”
“We both have the app on our phone,” Delton said. “We can see basically anything we want to about each individual cow right on our phone at any point in time.”
The heifers are tracked by a different system called CowManager via an ear chip that provides information about cow health, fertility, nutrition and activity.
The Jerseys can even get brushed whenever they feel like it.
“There’s two cow brushes,” Bridgett said. The cow literally just touches them and trips them, basically it starts brushing them whenever they get under it. It’s pretty neat. They’re designed so that when the next one hits it, it brushes the other way. That way, the brushes don’t wear out quickly.”
The Goods, who met through friends and showing animals, figure the automated system saves them a combined 40 hours of labor between them.
The combination of new barn, automated milking system and other spa-like accoutrements has been good for business.
“There wasn’t much ventilation in our old barn, so that really helps them out,” Bridgett said. “We have brand-new mattresses for them. It’s like 100 degrees, and there’s great airflow. We’re milking more now in the summertime, when they’re supposed to be down, than we ever did. The cow comfort definitely went way up.”
Production per cow has increased by about 10 pounds per month, they said, with output around 22,000 pounds per week, or 2,600 gallons.
The Goods ruminated on their unlikely foray into the world of A2A2 Jerseys.
“My mom bought us some Jersey, and they were just to show or whatever like that,” Bridgett said.
