Facing the challenges of running a small dairy farm, a southwestern Wisconsin family secured their future by tapping into a unique niche: producing specialty cheese for consumers who struggle to digest traditional dairy.
Lonnie Holthaus operates Milkhaus Dairy near Fennimore. With around 350 cows, the small farm needed a creative way to stay in business. During the pandemic, the family began turning milk from select cows into their own brand of cheese. The product quickly became a hit with customers who normally experience dairy digestion issues.
“We separate all of our cows that are A2. A2 basically is a protein that’s in all milk, but there’s another protein in cow’s milk called A1 that causes people to have dairy issues, so we’ve been working for the last ten years trying to get our herd converted to be totally A2,” Holthaus explained. “We’re finding out that a lot of people who were told that they’re lactose intolerant actually were allergic or had issues with the A1 protein. The A2 protein, the good protein, is in all milk, whether it’s breast milk, or dogs or cats, or koala bears or giraffes; every mammal in the world is A2 but the dairy cow for some reason has another protein called A1.”
Special Milk Gets Its Own Tank
To maintain this strict separation, the Holthaus farm utilizes two bulk tanks. Currently, about 200 of their cows produce milk eligible for the A2 cheese, a milestone that required a decade of selective breeding.
“We’re slowly trying to convert our herd to be 100% A2 both for the cheese and also for the genetics because we have people that want to buy A2 bulls or they want something from my herd. My son and my wife are big into the registered part of things, and they’re the genetic people, and we’ve been trying to get more dairy Holsteins available for genetics,” Holthaus said. “We have a couple of Jerseys, maybe seven or eight of them, but the Jerseys hold their own. There’s no doubt about that, and Jerseys aren’t 100% A2, but there’s a stronger number of A2 genetics in the Jerseys than there are in the Holsteins.”
A2 Cheese Has Steady Customers
Milkhaus Dairy now ships its cheese nationwide, though a dedicated customer base in California came as a major surprise to the family.
“Our biggest state is California, and I could never understand why. One day, I called our best customer that’s out there, and I said, ‘Why are we sending so much to California?’ She says, ‘I know exactly why.’ She says, ‘When I started buying from you, I took your cheese to a church bazaar and handed it out to people that said they couldn’t have dairy, and I’ll bet if you look at the map, there’s probably a 50-mile circle of where all of your cheese is going.’ I looked it up, and she was right on the money. It’s exactly what it was,” Holthaus shared.
Good Business Advice Helped
The Food Finance Institute originally helped the family launch their brand and is now assisting them in exploring new product lines.
“Food Finance has been a real help. We’re actually in the process right now of a study with our operation to see where we should go with it. We get a lot of requests for ice cream, and we get a lot of requests for yogurt, A2, and we’d like to maybe branch into that part of things, but we want to make sure that we’re making the right steps,” Holthaus explained. “We don’t want to jump into this haphazardly, and Food Finance, they’ve done this for a lot of people, and they’ve taken companies all the way to national branding and so forth, and they’ve been a real help.”
Holthaus shared his story with The Mid-West Farm Report during the recent Food Finance Forum & Expo in Wisconsin Dells.
