The Story of People Who Really Love Cows
It all started with some kids falling in love with some cows.
My grandpa, Grover Raymond, was a hard working man who had the habit of looking at and buying different farms. My grandparents moved multiple times, but the main farms my dad remembers growing up on were in Homer and Ceresco (where we are now), Michigan. My grandpa worked for Goodyear tire as well as farmed. My grandma, Margaret, was a school teacher who worked in multiple places including a one room school house not far from where our current farm is. She also worked tirelessly on the farm alongside her husband.
Grandpa was raising bred heifers to sell on their farm in Homer, but my dad and his siblings fell in love with those cows. The kids didn’t want the cows sold! So we got into dairy farming.
In 1968, when they bought what is now MarGro (Margaret and Grover) Farms in Ceresco, we began selling milk commercially.
My dad went away for several years working in electrical for Central Dairy in Michigan. He also lived in Texas and was an electrician there. Eventually, he moved back to Michigan and was a nurse. He also came back to working on the farm. After his dad had a stoke, he was consumed with the farm and my mom who was his boss at the hospital at the time basically told him he needed to show up to work more or quit. He quit to farm (and date my mom).
Through all this time he continued to sell milk through a co-op for pasteurization. The farm was once up to milking 90 cows! But due to debt, things were stressful even at that high of milk production. My dad worked diligently to get out of debt and finally achieved it. They lived not wealthy lives, but comfortably milking only 20-40 cows.
In 2013, I, Rachel Hagaman, left culinary school to come back to work full time on the farm. I took over the majority of milking as well as planting, harvest, and any other job dad had on the farm. I may not have been the boy every man wants especially on a farm, but I was determined to work just as hard as one.
In 2015, my sister, Sara Sweet, came to work for us as well! We found that while we weren’t big enough for a host of employees, we did need more than jus the two of us. With her there, we were all able to accomplish so much more in a much more timely manner. There’s few people you’ll meet who work harder than my sister. She was an incredible asset to the farm.
Life was good on the farm. We were the epitome of a family farm. We all got along exceptionally well and worked well together. Sara had by 2020 2 kids and we were all able to navigate her work schedule pretty well plus we had new farm buddies. We worked through dad being off for 12 weeks with a broken leg, losing our night milker, family medical issues, and more. The three of us were really making things work out well.
Then in the end of March 2021, I told my sister I thought I might be pregnant. A week later, She realized that she also was late for her period. My dad suddenly had two pregnant employees. I’m sure that year he was both entertained and terrified by us. Being pregnant together was truly such a joy. And an even bigger joy when we both had girls 11 days apart.
But this did impact our work. With Sara now having 3 kids, she had to figure out her new financial situation as well as childcare. She opted to quit the farm and start an in home day care to be with her kids everyday. I had my mom watch my daughter part time and went back to work on the farm part time. Our once well oiled machine was now mostly on the back of one man.
It was a hard first year. We were milking around 30-40 cows and trying to keep up with our crops all while being down 1.5 employees. My dad was struggling to get the field work done on time as well as keep up with the cattle. Doing the bare minimum with that number of milk cows plus heifers and steers and young stock puts us at around 10 hours a day worth of work. We were late on putting crops in and barely able to keep our head above water with the animals.
In the meantime, I was going through a personal life paradigm shift. We had a last minute shift in our birth plan with my daughter. I was misdiagnosed with gestational diabetes which put me at high risk for an overly large baby. When my daughter measured as much smaller than anticipated or even typical for her gestational age, that threw the OB into another frenzy. They wanted me to go through all sorts of testing because something was “wrong.” My hopes for a natural birth seemed to be escaping me. Thankfully, I knew a good doula who talked to a homebirth midwife for me. After a quick phone interview, we switched providers at 35 weeks. Four short weeks later, our sweet Natalie was here. I had the most beautiful, long home birth with here where everyone believed in me and trusted that I was designed to give birth to her. She has been healthy and thriving ever since.
I began to question everything. Could everything they tell you is so dangerous really be that bad? What about everything that was so good for you? Was it really good? I started my journey towards being a crunchy mom all because of some scare tactics that were attempting to push unnecessary medical interventions. I already thought we lived fairly healthfully, but my eyes were opened to modern toxins and the healing power of whole foods. Truly, the way God made things were good and often we messed with that.
In summer of 2022, things weren’t going well with the co-op we had been with for years and sold our milk through. They became less and less for the farmers, especially smaller farmers like us. My dad talked and threatened to sell the cows all together. These were dark days. We didn’t want to sell the cows. The same little boy who fell in love with heifers his dad intended to sell was now a middle aged man whose love had only intensified for cows. I loved the cows. All the kids in our family loved the cows. We couldn’t bear the thought of no longer having cows, but we really didn’t see another option.
That is until August when I got a hair brained idea.
Someone had recently mentioned to my dad that they were doing herdshares. He brushed it off because he said selling raw milk is something he’d NEVER do. We were sold the ideology that raw milk is inherently dangerous and there’s no way to produce it safely. In the same week, I was asked personally about raw milk from our farm. Then our co-op started giving us grief without helping us work through some issues. All this added up to me calling my mom in a parking lot on a Friday because an idea popped into my head. What if we did find a way to get milk direct to consumers? What if raw milk isn’t actually that bad for you? She told me that if there were ever a moment in time that dad would consider this, it is right now. I made her promise to me that she wouldn’t say anything to dad so I could have the weekend to research it. And research I did! I found RealMilk.com and Raw Milk Institute as well as a Michigan herdshare farm that I reached out to and talked to personally. I armed myself with facts and safety and good arguments. I was so nervous talking to him about it. All to my surprise, he was game!
Though he was interested in pursuing this route, we all, myself included, were still somewhat hesitant towards raw milk. We knew if we were going to do this, we would want to do it right. We wanted to be sure that the milk we were to produce would be as safe as possible. So we set out on our journey towards being a herdshare farm. We visited another farm, read books, did research, became members of Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund, went through extensive testing, enrolled in RawMI training and mentorship, got a home lab, figured out the right bottles and new equipment, and so much more. All of our previous start dates for our herdshares have came and gone as we have been in the pursuit of excellence.
In the time we have spent towards working to have high quality, low risk milk, we did begin drinking raw milk ourselves. Previously, I had been back and forth on my ability to digest dairy. Once having raw milk, my digestive woes left completely! My mom who was not at all a milk drinker fell in love with raw milk. My niece, who was not doing well on formula, began to thrive on our milk. All of our health seemed to get better and we love the taste! My family had always been big dairy fans previously, but hadn’t noticed it truly benefitting our lives. Experiencing the benefits first hand solidified that this is the route we should take with our farm. With our quality markers being in a great range, we feel confident in providing this milk to others and cannot wait to see how it will also benefit their lives.
We are now approaching a year from when this crazy idea was born. The summer heat and humidity have reminded me of the hot, despairing days last summer when we were drowning in work and contemplating selling the cows. This has been a lot of work getting to this point, but we have hope again. We have hope in the future of MarGro Farms. We have hope that this farm my grandpa landed on would continue to be a thriving dairy farm. And we have hope that we can raise more generations of kids that will fall in love with cows.
