By Damaine Vonada, Ohio Cooperative Living
When Colleen Jackson instructed her children’s homeschooling group in the early 2000s, she prepared a lesson featuring milk straight from the Holstein cows lolling in the pasture on her family’s 180-acre dairy farm near DeGraff.  

“I scooped the cream off the top of the milk, then put it in a jar with some clean marbles and let the kids shake the jar,” she recalls. “They turned the cream into butter.” 

She didn’t know it then, but Colleen and her husband, Ray, would later carve their own niche in Ohio dairying in 2019.

Like many dairy farmers in recent years, the Logan County Electric Cooperative members found themselves struggling with high production costs and low milk prices. Ray helped keep the farm afloat by working for a bovine genetics company, but things were tough. Faced with losing the farm and the way of life they love, Ray and Colleen converted an outbuilding into a licensed creamery named for the stream that crosses their land, and Indian Creek Creamery was born. They began producing and bottling non-homogenized milk crowned with a layer of cream, wagering that consumers would thirst for their minimally processed product.

“We started the creamery because we needed to be able to sustain our farm and pay our bills,” Colleen says. “We also wanted people to know what real milk tastes like.”

The Jacksons know a thing or two about “real milk” because they both grew up on dairy farms. He is from the Wellington area, and she was raised near Urbana. They met at Ohio State, where Colleen majored in business and Ray, a self-described “cow nerd,” studied dairy science. After marrying in 1990, they rented acreage from Colleen’s father until Ray found an affordable farm about 5 miles north of DeGraff. Though run-down, it had a functional milk house and an early 1900s farmhouse, which they moved into in 1995.   

Today, Ray and Colleen have 140 Holsteins, and keeping the herd happy and healthy is their top priority. They grow their own crops for feed; use sand as dairy cow bedding to cushion the stalls (they say it’s the gold standard); and maintain a free stall barn where the cows can come and go as they please. “The single biggest thing we do for our cows’ comfort is let them leave the barn and go outside into the pasture,” Ray says. “They enjoy the pasture so much that they’ll even lay down in the snow.” 

The Jacksons breed their cows via artificial insemination, and because cows instinctively seek a quiet place to give birth, they put expectant moms into a special “maternity ward” pen three weeks before they’re due to calve. Getting the newborn calves off to a good start is all in a day’s work for Colleen. “I hand-feed them with either bottles or buckets for two months,” she says.  

Ray and Colleen milk 70 cows daily and process the raw milk into Grade A milk that’s sold in half-gallon, BPA-free plastic bottles. They only offer three products: regular whole milk, chocolate milk made from a recipe Colleen developed, and A2/A2 whole milk.

Cows have two variations — A1 and A2 — of the gene that forms protein in milk, and Indian Creek Creamery’s A2/A2 milk comes solely from DNA-tested cows possessing two A2 genes. Since it requires laboratory analysis and separate processing, A2/A2 milk has a premium price, yet is gaining popularity because many people who have difficulty digesting A2/A1 milk can drink the A2/A2 version. 

Their method preserves the flavor of raw milk, but they never homogenize because, Colleen explains, “We provide milk as nature intended, with nothing added and nothing taken away.” Although butterfat naturally floats on raw milk, large-scale milk producers both fragment the fat to make a uniform liquid (homogenization), and also remove some of the butterfat to meet federal standards. “Typical whole milk is 3.25% butterfat,” notes Ray. “Our milk tastes richer because it’s 4.2% butterfat.” 

The creamery’s initial production run was just 83 half-gallons, but now the Jacksons turn out 4,000 bottles weekly and deliver them to customers ranging from chefs and baristas in Cincinnati and Columbus to independent grocers and specialty shops in small towns. Before homogenization took hold in the 1920s, every bottle of milk had a top ring of cream, so when Ray gave milk samples to prospective buyers, he had to teach them something that their great-grandparents did routinely: shaking the bottle to mix in the cream. His personal touch paid off. “People love it when a farmer shows up, looks them in the eye, and tells them the milk is so fresh that it was in the cow the night before.” 

To find locations that sell Indian Creek Creamery products, click here.

By Ann Hinch | Ohio Holstein News - Nov/Dec. 2021 ​

By Matt Reese
Luke Jackson just finished up his sophomore year of high school at home and did not get to spend much of his spring on the baseball diamond with his teammates like usual. Not much has been usual, after all, in the spring of 2020.

Luke loves sports of all kinds and has missed the athletic activity, but the coronavirus that kept him off the athletic fields also helped double the demand for his family’s Indian Creek Creamery in Logan County. As their new business boomed in recent weeks, Ray and Colleen Jackson were glad to have some extra help on the more than 70-head dairy farm from their two sons (Luke and Samuel, a student at Calvin University in Grand Rapids) who were both home from school due to the pandemic.
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Ray has been involved in the dairy industry most of his life and milking on the Logan County farm since 1991 and, in recent years, saw a need to respond to the increasingly challenging market conditions for milk. The Jacksons had a family meeting with their children a few years ago. They either had to do something differently, or get out of the dairy industry. The family decided they wanted to set the stage for a possible future for the four children — two boys and two girls — to continue in the dairy industry on the farm.
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“We were in a position to either get out of dairy or try something different and risk failing,” Ray said. “I have spent most of my career trying not to fail, and I have come close a couple of times.”

Read the full article here: https://ocj.com/2020/06/creamery-business-booms-during-covid-19/

Ohio couple moves forward with dairy farming by giving a nod to the past.
Gail C. Keck | Apr 22, 2019

Dairy farmers Ray and Colleen Jackson have known for several years that they would need to make some big changes to continue milking cows on their family farm near De Graff, Ohio. With a milking herd of about 74, they aren’t producing enough volume to ship out the truckloads that many processors now prefer; and the prices they were getting weren’t offering much, if any, profit.

“Doing what we’d been doing was not sustainable,” says Colleen.

Their production system was already as efficient as they could make it, Ray adds. “We spent our whole lives learning how to make milk efficiently, now we have to learn new tricks.”

About three years ago, the couple even called a family meeting with their teenage and young adult children to discuss whether they should give up on milking cows.

“I just laid it all out after church one day,” Ray recalls. The consensus was to find some way to keep the cows; but to do that, they realized they needed more control of their milk market.

They are hoping to get that control by bottling and selling their milk to customers eager for minimally processed dairy products. In February, they bottled their first jugs of unhomogenized, flash-pasteurized whole milk. “If this works, it will fix things financially,” says Ray.

Read the full article here: https://www.farmprogress.com/dairy/dairy-determination

Ray Jackson and his family are dairy farmers in western Logan County looking to diversify their product with what may be a trend on the horizon for the industry — something called a2 milk.

“It’s daunting right now, but we’re excited for the possibilities down the road,” said Jackson, who is a sales rep for ABS Global, formerly American Breeders Service along with working on the small dairy farm.

Regular cow’s milk is about 85% water. The rest consists of lactose, fat, proteins, and more. About 30% of the total protein in that assembly is made up of beta-casein. Two variants of this protein are found in cow’s milk, a1 and a2. Cows are genetically predisposed to produce milk with either a1 or a2 proteins, though a new trend has recently raised the eyebrows of dairy farmers looking to cows that can produce a2 without any a1 beta-casein.

Like in nearly every sector of the food industry, consumer preference has permeated through the store shelves to influence production at the dairy farm level. Proponents of a2 milk stand by the claim that it not only helps with digestion of dairy products, but that it is actually suitable for lactose intolerant individuals to consume without issue. The claim is gaining steam and warrants taking a deeper look into the research behind it as well as the dairy farmers looking to capitalize on the possibly emerging market.

“The a1 and a2 proteins are naturally genetically occurring in cows,” Jackson said. “And of course like all traits there’s two genes for it so they can be homozygous a1, they can be heterozygous and have both genes, or they can be homozygous a2. The milk they produce is proportionate so they can actually make a blend of the two proteins or just one or the other.”

Read the full article here: https://ocj.com/2016/10/the-intrigue-of-a2-milk/?fbclid=IwAR23aIi9BEkuA7YzkZONlOlCUYf-bkVEqR5W8_FokEvsBC4QY8n04ezGb9A

By Susan Crowell | Photos by Dave Liggett
This article originally appeared in the May/June edition of Our Ohio.