Dairy Finds Niche in Lactose Sensitivity

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

One of the ways farmers can add value to their products is by specializing in a niche market. As the number of consumers with lactose sensitivity has grown over time, owner of Alexandre Family Farms, Blake Alexandre saw an opportunity to cater to this market, with A2/A2 milk.

Alexandre… “Two-thirds of the world’s population believe that they’re lactose intolerant and many of them are, but literally some of them are really just having issues with the protein in milk. It’s kind of similar to the gluten situation where people are now allergic to wheat and it's the wheat and the milk that have kind of changed. It’s not really the people or their guts.”

Now their herd consists of animals with only the A2/A2 gene.

Alexandre… “There’s just this one little histidine where there’s supposed to be a proline on the amino acid chain. And so once we had that knowledge, its like, wow you can’t just sit on that and unlearn it. You’ve got to act, so we started buying only bulls and semen that was from bulls that carried the A2/A2 gene. And the reason we say A2/A2 is because the bull or the cow and the milk cow case, inherits a gene from each of their parents. And so when they get an A2 gene from both sets of parents, then they’re carrying A2/A2 as opposed to A2/A1 or A1/A1.”

The Alexandre family has vertically integrated to manufacture their dairy products under their own label, Alexandre Family Farm. Learn more at alexandrefamilyfarm.com.