By CELESTE BAUMGARTNER
Ohio Correspondent

HAMILTON, Ohio — In their mid-sixties, Joe and Janet Streit started a dairy herd. They’re selling shares in the herd and have more business than they can keep a handle on.

Joe and Janet both had health issues a couple of years back and they decided to change their lifestyle. They gave up their antique furniture restoration business to get away from the chemicals involved.

“The next step was we wanted to stop consuming all those chemicals,” Streit said. “We owned this farm but we didn’t farm it ourselves, we rented it out, and we decided to start farming it ourselves. I had no intentions of milking cows.”

“We bought Santa Gertrudis beef cows,” he said. “My plan was to keep this program really simple; we would bale some hay for winter feed and pasture those beef cows and that was going to be it.”
Then the Streits became familiar with the Weston A. Price Foundation, a nonprofit, tax-exempt foundation which is dedicated to restoring nutrient-dense foods to the human diet through education, research and activism.

“The more we learned, the more we realized we needed to be drinking raw milk,” Streit said. “The whole answer is nutrition.”
They bought a herd share in Indiana, but it became a hassle to go and pick up the milk.

“We decided to buy one cow,” Streit said.

“I agreed to one cow,” said Janet, who grew up on a dairy farm.
The next day a friend of theirs bought eight herd shares.
“That was three years ago,” Streit said. “It wasn’t long before we had all kinds of people calling so we bought a second cow ... and then a third cow. I thought that people who wanted raw milk would be ‘old coots’ like us but our clientele is young professional people.”

Many of their share owners are people in the medical profession, nurses, dieticians, pharmacists, several medical doctors in addition to lawyers, judges, “educated people who have done their homework,” Streit said.

“What I have finally come to realize is that there is this tremendous growing number of people in America that want to know exactly where their food comes from. They want to go to the farm and get their food.”

The Jersey herd has grown from the one cow Janet agreed to, to 20, all Jersey or part Jersey. The Streits have 250 some herd share owners. Each share gets one gallon of milk per week; some own 5 or more shares.

“If you want to buy a share in the dairy herd that share costs $50,” Streit said. “That’s a one-time charge and if you ever decide ... you want to stop for whatever reason then we’ll buy that share back.”

Herd share owners pay a monthly board of $22 for the upkeep of their portion of the herd that they own. The Streits are building a new milking parlor and that cost may have to increase.
“We’re currently using old fashioned (Surge) bucket milkers”, Streit said.

“We have a new milking parlor under construction which is going to have a pipeline and the milk will go directly into the bulk tank.”
Having both grown up on dairy farms, the Streits knew the confinement of dairying. They are looking for a young couple to run the dairy.

Herd-share owners Kevin and Shelley Fuge help with milking on the weekend; another owner, Marsha Stevens, milks on Friday mornings.

The Streits get a couple of calls every week from people who are interested in buying into their herd, coming to the farm to get the milk and maybe some farm fresh eggs or other products the Streits sell.

“That’s where the future of small farming is,” Streit said.
“We have a lot of good people and they love our milk,” Janet added.