Farm Profile: Insight Dairy, LLC

By anyone’s accounting, agriculture is a tough business. Dairy farmers make their living through hard work, good luck and a whole lot of knowledge about subjects as diverse as economics, herd health and management, implement and heavy truck maintenance as well as basic human resource skills are just a few of the skills that Chris Fredricks and Jessica Hula draw upon daily as they grow the business of Insight Dairy, LLC in Little Falls, NY. Both came from family farm backgrounds that stretch back several generations in the Mohawk Valley, so they knew what they were getting into, but perhaps when they started Insight Dairy LLC in 2007, they didn’t know exactly how big their operation would grow to be and the impact it would make on the surrounding community.

The beginnings of Insight Dairy were modest by today’s standards. Chris and Jessica started by purchasing a small free-stall dairy farm with a herd of 138 cows. At that time, the cows produced just 45 pounds of milk per day. With the focus on growing the farm, those numbers soon changed. They were at 250 cows within a year and added 100 to 150 cows every year thereafter. Today Insight milks around 2600 cows, each of them yielding 92 pounds of milk. That totals over 75 million pounds of milk annually, which helps feed families throughout the Northeast from their Mohawk Valley farm.

Achieving this required hard work and a sharp focus on the business of running the farm and building the farm’s infrastructure to make the operation more efficient. Over the last 17 years Chris and Jessica have built five barns, added 1800 cow stalls and a rotary milking parlor. The rotary milking parlor is a wonder to watch. It is essentially a giant carousel that 50 cows at a time ride on while they are being milked by an automatic milking machine. Insight’s staff manage the herd into a collector pen, direct them up a ramp on to the rotary parlor clean them and attach the milking machine. They continue riding around and are fully milked out when they get to the other side. By efficiently managing the most time consuming aspect of dairy farming, this machine, in its own building, makes possible for Insight’s large herd.

Building the farm’s infrastructure also included expanding operations to include establishing a trucking fleet and operation to move their milk to processing plants, managing over 4700 acres of wide spread fields to produce over 70,000 tons (corn silage & haylage) of feed for the cows. In turn, all of this required hiring and training employees to help run the farm. From their two person, family run farm, they have grown to a major business in the community that employs 38 team members and contract with diverse businesses from farm implement dealers to computer specialists who troubleshoot their software and the monitoring collars that each of their cows wear to track their location, health, and output. Each of these relationships, be they with employees or contractors, contributes to our regional economy and helps maintain the flavor and culture of Herkimer County.

A part of Insight’s contribution to the community is making the farm a visible example of agriculture in our area. The farm hosts student groups, farmers from near and far to learn about new methods and the general community. Many come for the free public events that Jess and Chris have for families. These include the Farm to Food Truck Hoe Down scheduled for May 10th this year which will have several food trucks offering a variety of foods and the Halloween season Trunk or Treat which attracted over 1800 people in 2023. Check their Facebook page, ‘Insight Dairy, LLC’ for more information.

The challenges of this success are formidable. Every issue in the news that we think about, be it inflation, supply chain management or finding and keeping good employees is a challenge that Jess and Chris face daily. Ever had trouble getting an appliance fixed because the part is on back order? Imagine that part being the electric motor of the rotary milking parlor and you have hundreds of cows lined up and ready to be milked. They keep three on hand, one in operation and two in reserve ready to be switched out. Your business having trouble finding customer service staff? Insight Dairy is a 24/7/365 operation that requires great commitment from all of its team. Yet whenever and wherever there is a need on the farm, from an ailing calf to a tanker truck with a full load needing service, the staff is there to remedy the problem.

Integral to their success as a couple is the contribution of the team members who work alongside them day by day to support the herd and deliver fresh milk to the processing plant. They come from many different backgrounds including skilled mechanics and drivers as well as herdsmen (although perhaps they should be called “herdswomen” since they are an all-female team) and the H2A immigrant workers who run the majority of work in the dairy building. They come to work at Insight because they are treated fairly, the owners work alongside everyone else and the wages are above the regional pay scale.

With all of these challenges, why do they continue to farm? Surely, there are easier ways to make a living, even to build a large business such as theirs. Most of all because they were born into it and they want to continue the tradition of supplying high quality dairy products to their customers. Part of this is also seeing the tradition of farming in the Mohawk Valley live on and build a future for agriculture by keeping the land open and productive. Without farming, our beautiful countryside would be a very different place without the fields of corn and hay as well as the cows, barns in the farmyards.

Farming is a vital part of Herkimer County. Next time you drink a glass of milk think of Insight Dairy and of the hard work that went into that glass!

By Garet Livermore, Cornell Cooperative Extension Herkimer County

Article published April 10, 2024.

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