The 8 cows that accidentally started a farm

I never set out to start a farm. This is the story of how one happened anyway, and it starts about as unglamorously as these things do: with a borrowed truck and trailer, and eight dairy cows I only meant to buy one of.

That trip is where Moxie Farms actually began, long before the farm had a name and a family attached to it.

The cow that started it all

Over 20 years ago, I was on a mission to find something that would change the entire trajectory of my life (although I had no idea at the time). It was the early 2000’s, and the internet was young, but I had a fresh copy of Jo Robinson’s Pasture Perfect: The Far-Reaching Benefits of Choosing Meat, Eggs, and Dairy Products from Grass-Fed Animals and I was on a mission to find a grass fed dairy cow.

Finding grass-fed milk cows in Tennessee

At that time online forums were popping up everywhere and I was lucky enough to be an early member of Joann Grohman’s Keeping a Family Cow online community. I had searched high and low for a grass fed dairy cow with no luck when I received my monthly subscription to The Stockman Grass Farmer and in the classifieds was an ad for a farm that was selling its herd of grassfed Jersey and Jersey x Normande cross cows.

Peaceful Pastures was an early grass-based raw milk farm in Tennessee, and circumstances had forced them to sell their dairy herd. I finagled a truck and trailer and headed off to Tennessee to buy a cow. When I got there the owner walked me through his entire herd and was so heartbroken about selling “his ladies”.

After a couple hours of tracking up and down a Tennessee mountain looking them all over I just couldn’t decide which to pick. After some negotiations the decision was made and eight, yes eight, grassfed dairy cows were loaded onto the trailer. I figured that since it was so hard to find these cows I could bring them back to Missouri and sell them to cover the cost of my trip.

Adventures in milking

When I got back to Missouri, all hell broke loose. I had a rented pasture with plenty of grass and water but I didn’t have a single other thing. Not a barn, not a stanchion, not a lick of hay, no experience with cows OR milking and zero plan. Four of the cows were in milk and I had literally never touched a cow in my life (plenty of horses but no cows).

I was very lucky that Sherman, the man that owned the land, knew how to hand milk a cow. What followed was a whirlwind couple of days: a crash course in hand milking, a tiny shed thrown together with a makeshift stanchion, and an emergency trip to Hamby Dairy just north of us for a milking machine when it became painfully clear that I couldn’t hang with milking four cows by hand twice a day.

Eventually, I fell into an exhausted rhythm of getting the girls milked and fed morning and night. Talk about trial by fire. I found out later that some of the local farming community had apparently been taking bets on how long I would last and how long it would take me to kill the cows.

Cows plus garden equals working farm

Meanwhile, I still hadn’t found the time to list the extra cows for sale, and I was absolutely drowning in milk. I put a quick listing on Realmilk.com, thinking I could sell some of the excess until I got my feet under me and figured out what to do with the rest of the herd. Instead, my phone started ringing off the hook. There simply wasn’t anyone else around Kansas City offering milk from truly grass fed dairy cows, and almost as quickly as I could produce it, someone wanted it.

Before the cows came along, I had also planted a big garden to feed my family. Once I put a refrigerator in the garage to handle the regular milk pickups, I started setting out whatever vegetables I had left from the garden that I didn’t have time to preserve because, well, I was now milking cows twice a day. Those disappeared too. The people coming for milk became regular families, and what had started as a temporary situation to my eight cow problem quickly became organized into a membership. Somewhere in all of that chaos, the cows I intended to sell never got sold, the garden stopped just being our garden, and without ever setting out to farm for a living, I had apparently started a farm.

Twenty years later

I wish I could remember the names of all eight cows that climbed onto that trailer in Tennessee more than twenty years ago. I remember some of them: Momma, Brockle, Nana and Mable. They were the OG ladies, and I certainly didn’t understand at the time just how much they were bringing home to Missouri with them.

I thought I was buying cows. What I really brought home was the beginning of a herd.

Those cows gave us the genetics we have spent more than twenty years building on. Their daughters had daughters, and with every generation we learned a little more about what worked on our land and in our system. We kept the heifers that held their condition, grazed hard, stayed healthy, bred back and became the kind of cows we wanted more of. Eventually the traits we once had to search for became simply what our herd is.

It’s funny to think about how hard I had to work to find that first grass fed dairy cow. I searched everywhere I knew to look, found an obscure classified ad, drove to Tennessee and somehow came home with eight cows when I only intended to buy one.

Today, the milk from the herd those ladies started goes home every week with families who know exactly where it came from. Along with it goes the cream, butter, yogurt and cheese we make from that same milk. What once required me to search halfway across the country has become a normal part of Friday and Saturday around here.

But there really isn’t anything normal about it. Behind every jar of milk is the cow that produced it, the cows that came before her, the pasture under her feet and more than twenty years of paying attention to what works and what doesn’t.

I went looking for one grass fed dairy cow because I wanted better milk for my own family. I had no idea those cows were going to help me build a farm.