HENRYVILLE, Ind. – Gelato made out of milk from goats will be among the new products offered by an Indiana dairy with help from a grant.

Sirocco Ridge Farmstead Creamery in Henryville received a $31,384 grant from the Dairy Business Innovation Alliance (DBIA).

Milk supplied to the creamery is from its parent company, Sirocco Ridge Farm Dairy, which is growing its herd to add gelato and hard cheese to its product offerings.

The DBIA, a partnership between the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association (WCMA) and the Center for Dairy Research (CDR) at the University of Wisconsin, awarded 30 other grants totaling $2.5 million.

The grant program is designed to encourage small- to medium-sized dairy farmers, entrepreneurs and processors in the Midwest to pursue innovative projects such as dairy farm diversification, on-farm processing and value-added product creation. The program also helps efforts with marketing dairy projects for export.

The winners were among more than 100 grant applicants from across the 11-state DBIA region.

“These projects stood out for their ambitious, distinctive approaches to adding value from farm to vat,” said WCMA Executive Director John Umhoefer.

“Almost all are first-time winners and these funds will help them grow and innovate,” said CDR Director John Lucey.

David Taylor and his wife, Beth, own and operate the Sirocco Ridge farm and creamery, a provider of primarily milk and soft cheese from 25 Lamancha goats.

David Taylor said seven goats will added to the herd to produce gelato and hard cheese. The farm is also involved in breeding goats.

Seasonal fruit and other flavors of gelato, an Italian frozen treat, will be made with a pasteurized ice cream maker purchased with the grant.

He said the frozen treat, containing about 3.5 percent butter fat, will come out soft from the 52-gallon ice cream maker and then go into a hardening freezer. The freezer will quickly bring the temperature of the finished product to below zero for smoothness.

The remainder of the funds are being used to purchase a cooling unit for making “Flavored hard cheese in the creamery’s aging room.

Taylor said the cooling unit, designed not to pull moisture out of the air, will allow hard cheese to age properly at 55 degrees at 85-90percent humidity.

He anticipates making both products starting in the spring. “The idea is by summertime, we’ll be at a production level that we’re happy with,” he said.

Taylor, a professor at the Indiana University Southeast campus in New Albany, and his wife, who’s employed full-time at a not-for-profit organization, purchased their 14-acre farm after getting married nearly 20 years ago.

The farm was mainly a provider of fresh eggs from cage-free chickens when the couple first put their land into production close to 10 years ago. Taylor said goats were later added to sell milk.

Eventually, an outside creamery used to make cheese from the unsold shares of milk from the couple’s recipes.

Each goat produces nearly 3,000 pounds of milk annually, he said. 

The on-site creamery, making predominantly soft cheese, was started in 2020 after the outside creamery went out of business.

Taylor said adding hard cheese and gelato is aimed at making their operation, about 20 miles north of Louisville, Ky., more profitable.

He said selling just milk from goats was more of a break-even venture for a small farm with a regional customer base, limited by the cost to the consumer being much more expensive than milk from a cow.

Taylor also said the cost of the new investment was kept down because the equipment needed for making pasteurized milk and soft cheese can be used for churning out the additional products.

“We were looking for something bigger and cheese and gelato are much better value added than liquid was ever going to be,” he said. Taylor said production of gelato and hard cheese was already planned but the grant makes it possible to start immediately.

Without the grant, Taylor said it would have taken a few more years to save up enough money for the expansion. “The grant allowed us to do this when we wanted to do it rather than waiting until we built up our capital,” he said.

The Taylors also raise 12 different types of garlic offered separately from their cheese at farmers markets. “Fresh garlic on top of goat cheese is absolutely wonderful,” he said.

DBIA is supported by funding from USDA. Since its inception as part of the 2018 Farm Bill, DBIA had awarded about $7 million in grants to 88 dairy businesses within its service area, which also include South Dakota and Kansas.

The program also offers technical assistance and education to dairy farmers and processors in the region.