The face of dairy farming in Cleveland County
The gently rolling fields of Cleveland County used to be home to more than 100 dairy farms dotted around the rural, piedmont county.
Today, that number has dropped to three.
Greg Traywick, county extension director, said dairy farms have been disappearing in Cleveland County.
“During the 1950s and 1960s, Cleveland County was home to more than 150 Grade A and Grade B dairy operations,” Traywick said. “Following a steady decline in numbers during the next 20 years, dairy production decreased dramatically in the late 1980s as a result of the federal whole-herd buyout program.”
By 2017, the USDA Census of Agriculture reported only eight dairy operations with 563 milk cows in Cleveland County.
“Declining profit margins and retirement of older farmers put other dairy farms out of operation,” Traywick said.
Currently, there is one large commercial dairy still operating - Bell Dairy in Kings Mountain - and two smaller niche market dairies, Underwood Family Farms and Bridges Dairy, also known as Guernsey Girl Creamery.
The farmers say diversifying, staying up on technology and finding new ways to sell have kept them in business.
In the north end of the county, somewhere between Lawndale and Polkville and nearly in the shadow of the South Mountains, Christy and Michael Underwood run a small farm.
Christy Underwood said it has been her husband’s dream to have a dairy farm someday and the very first farm animal they ever got was a dairy cow.
“We’re kind of new to dairy. We started our dairy in 2014,” she said. “We didn't have parents in the business, we’re from the ground up.”
Michael is mostly from Pennsylvania and Christy is from a small town in eastern North Carolina. Their journey to farming was long and unexpected.
Initially, Michael was on track to become a teacher and was working on a history degree in Wilmington. Christy was pregnant with their first son when Michael came home one day with a magazine article about sustainable farming. He immediately felt that was their calling.
The couple completed a year-long farm internship in Asheville and then began looking for their own land.
“We started driving around Asheville and Charlotte,” Christy said. “We really loved Cleveland County.”
Over the course of the next few years, they rented and leased land before eventually landing on their own farm near Lawndale.
Christy Underwood, said at this point in their farming journey, they are half meat and half dairy.
They started off with pasture-raised meats because they were leasing land and didn’t want to invest in infrastructure on land they didn’t own.
They got a herding dog, some sheep and then transitioned to a dairy. Christy said selling lamb was getting costly because of butcher fees and ultimately they wanted to build more of a relationship with the animals instead of just ending lives.
It was nine years before their dream of a dairy farm came to fruition.
Currently, they have around 35 cows, which is all they can sustain on their 90 acres. Michael said they are nontraditional and milk once a day, but it allows them time for family and helps prevent burnout.
“We don’t get as much milk but we have a much better quality of life,” he said.
They bottle twice a week and are open to the public on Mondays and Fridays when people can pick up orders of meat and dairy at the farm. They also sell at local markets.
The Underwoods said by direct marketing their milk, they’re able to keep afloat.
And they’ve built up a customer base of around 500 people, some of whom have been buying from the Underwoods for the 17 years they’ve been farming.
“They watched the evolution of our farm,” Christy said.
They sell beef, pork, veal and milk with meat bringing in more money than milk.
They’ve learned from other farmers and are closely connected with the local farming community.
“It takes a whole community to run a dairy farm,” Michael said.
Although they use organic practices, they are no longer certified because it was cost prohibitive.
“Small farms have to figure out how to make more money with less,” Michael said.
On Bridges Dairy Road, Ashley Bridges McMurry runs Guernsey Girl Creamery.
A third generation dairy farmer, her grandfather started the dairy in the 1950s and after a farming accident claimed his life in 1999, her dad took over.
When milk prices plummeted in 2011, he was at a critical point of making a business decision and decided he wanted to sell the herd.
“Unfortunately I think around that time 2010, 2011 a lot of farmers made that decision about their livelihoods, stay in or get bigger. A lot didn't care to get bigger. More infrastructure, more equipment, more feed, more help. I completely understand why a lot of folks have sold out over the years,” McMurry said.
She said her dad steered her toward keeping the cows and processing her own milk.
That’s when McMurry started Guernsey Girl Creamery. She received a $10,000 grant from RAFI, the tobacco trust fund, and started up her business.
With 35 to 40 head of cows, the dairy is considered a microdairy.
“I knew I had a really good product,” she said. “We’re still the only 100% guernsey cow dairy in the state. With that being said, it's not really what I wanted to do in the beginning. I wanted to be able to milk cows and sell the milk to someone else who wanted to process the milk.”
She said couldn’t find anyone willing to do the processing so they ended up taking it on.
Initially, she worked another job and ran the dairy farm on the side, trying to make ends meet. They sold at farmers markets up until four and half years ago when they decided to build a small store and have people come out to their farm to pick up products.
They haven’t been to a farmers market since.
McMurry said her husband grows produce and processes their own beef and they sell pork and honey.
The store is open on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and operates on an honor system.
They keep milk and beef in the refrigerator along with produce and honey and people can come by and drop payment in a can or send payment through Venmo.
The McMurry’s sell buttermilk, whole, chocolate and seasonally flavored milk, cheese and, as of last year, fried cheese curds which McMurry said are like mozzarella sticks only better.
“That was something new and different, but when you're small like us you have to diversify in several different ways to maintain an income,” she said.
In Kings Mountain, the sole commercial dairy continues to carry on a family tradition.
Mary Beth Black, with Bell Dairy, said it goes back three generations.
“My grandpa was farming when he was a young man in the late 40s, early 50s, then my dad took the operation to Grade A around 1974,” Black said. “Grade A is like selling the fluid milk, the better grade of milk. Most dairies are grade A. So that's when the farm started. At that time, there were thousands of farms around the county, there were dairies all over.”
She said they’ve managed to hang on for two reasons.
“Probably we’re a little bit crazy,” she laughs, “And we stayed up with technology and always reinvested back in the business. Some dairies just get run down and decided it was time to call it quits.”
Bell Dairy is constantly keeping up with new methods. She said in 1997, they put in a new parlor, and now they are installing robots which will mean farmers don’t have to put the milkers on the cows. She said they are only the second dairy in the state to use robot technology.
“That has definitely been part of our success, we stay up with the technology,” Black said. “I think it's been about six or seven years ago we put on neck tags that track movement of cows, sort of like fitbits for cows. It tells us how much they are eating and how much they are moving and keeps a check on if someone is sick.”
She said they have around 300 milk cows and several babies for a total of about 700 animals.
“Really, at one time 300 was a large dairy,” she said. “Compared to some of the other dairies in the state, we’re a smaller dairy now. There are a couple of dairies in Gaston County with over a thousand cows.”
Bell Dairy remains a mostly family-run operation. Black said her father, uncle, brother and his wife and herself along with three outside employees work full time on the farm.
The milk is then sold to the PET plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina. She said their dairy produces 19,000 pounds of milk a day.
She said it has its challenges, including the current economy.
Just like every other industry, there are supply chain issues and it can be difficult finding someone to work on broken equipment.
Feed has gone up and although the price of milk is better than it has been during COVID, expenses have gone up as well.
Even so, Black enjoys it.
“I feel like it's very rewarding,” Black said. “We enjoy working together as a family. It's neat when you have my grandpa, my dad and my kids. You have four generations. My grandpa is 94, he's out and watching over making sure we do everything right. Probably one of the most rewarding parts, having all the different generations together.”
Rebecca Sitzes can be reached at rsitzes@gannett.com
This article originally appeared on The Shelby Star: Cleveland County sees decline in dairy farming
