Best practices and metrics for dairy farms transitioning conventional dairy operations to on-farm value-added production (2015)
Team: Jazmine Davis, Graham Givens, James Hollifield, Kaitlyn Sutton/Fall 2015
The North Carolina Growing Together Dairy Team was tasked with two separate projects to assist farmers considering a transition into on-farm pasteurization. The first task was to create a financial tool to assist dairy farmers in organizing their current costs and projecting their costs and sales over the course of five years after their transition. In addition to this tool, the team also created an instructional video and written instructions to assist farmers in operating the tool. The second task was using this tool and market research completed by the team to provide an Asheville-area family with the financial outlook of a transition to on-farm production of whole, non-homogenized milk. The team also created a poster summarizing their findings.