Tiny Dairy

Reed’s Dairy in Idaho Falls has been tremendously successful with their ice cream and cheese products. They are mostly the result of their very creative owner/operator Allan Reed. I had a most interesting conversation with them recently. "We have just tried to be creative in what we’ve done over the years. We have a small processing plant here so we bottle the milk, pasteurize and homogenize. Ice cream is part of the world we make the ice cream and the cheese. So we just tried to be creative. When people mention things to me that would be interesting if we had a product like that, I try to see if we can have a product like that. Are you passing the dairy along to any heirs? I do have a son that is involved in the business and he graduated with his business degree about three years ago and so he is working here and taking quite a bit of responsibility. How many head of dairy cattle do you have? Right now I am milking about 165, they are all Holsteins. We are small. When I started working full-time year after I finished with school, we were milking right around 200. We were a big dairy back in the early 70s and now we are just tiny compared to the 500 to 10,000 herd cows that are around now.”