Page 7 - BusinessWest January 9, 2023

“We got together as a family and decided that we needed to either diversify or get out of farming completely.”
real way for dairy farmers to make more money is to make more milk, which doesn’t always line up with demand. And we have no control over the price of the product we produce.”
There are only 115 dairy farms left in the Bay State, and there probably wouldn’t be any were it not for the Massachusetts Dairy Tax Credit, which enables them to remain competitive, she said, adding that there are six operations in Hadley alone, a concentration that testifies to the quality of the soil in that region.
In the early years of this century, the milk market essentially collapsed, primarily because of oversupply, she said, calling this a scary time for the Barstow farm and all the others in this market.
“The milk market crashed like no one had ever seen or felt before in this country; we were getting $12 per hundred pounds of milk, when our break-even was $22,” she explained, adding that it was a critical time in the history of the farm, or another criti- cal time, to be more precise.
“We got together as a family and decided that we needed to either diversify or get out of farming completely,” she recalled. “And that’s when we started talking about how we wanted to diversify and who we wanted to include. And we knew that we wanted to be thoughtful of what the next generation was interested in doing and what our strengths are.”
A Process of Evolution
Over the next several years, diversification would come in several forms, starting with the dairy store and bakery in 2008, an opera- tion inspired in many ways by Denise’s cousin, Shannon Barstow, who does most of the baking. It’s an operation that would transform
David Barstow says his family lives by the farm’s motto, ‘looking forward since 1806.’
the farm into a true destination.
“We understood that people were going to have to drive here if
we were going to get the support and the revenue we needed,” she recalled. “So we did lunch, and we started probably too big for our britches. But we’ve definitely settled into who were are, and we have a really supportive community.”
The dairy-store operation and bakery offers both breakfast and lunch as well as a number of prepared foods — and ice cream. The bakery serves up pies, cupcakes, brownies, turnovers, croissants,
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