Raising Connections
Critters, Companions, Commerce, & Agriculture: Casual yet intelligent conversation connecting topics for Rural, Suburban and Urban listeners.
Raising Connections
The Unhomogenized Life: Real Milk, Real Farms, Real People 03-16-2026
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On this week's podcast, Rachann is joined by Laurie Savage, one of the owners of Brown Cow Creamery. Step onto the farm and into the heart of a community where dairy farming is more than a livelihood, it’s a way of life. Follow the journey from pasture to pint, exploring the world of cows, cream‑line milk, and the craft of non‑homogenized, direct‑to‑consumer dairy products. Explore the art of small‑batch cheese and ice cream, the charm of an on‑farm farm stand, and the deep roots that connect families through 4‑H, Dairy Bowl, and Future Harvest. Whether you’re a food lover, an ag enthusiast, or simply curious about where your milk comes from, this show brings you stories that celebrate tradition, innovation, and the people who make it all possible.
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Audio file
RCP Podcast Brown Cow Creamery Total Release Date 3-16-26.mp3
Transcript
Our pet care with a personal touch is not just a motto, it's really what we do.
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This morning, as always, we have a fun and interesting guest, Lori Savage from Brown Cow Creamery.
How did you decide to open a creamery?
How did you get where you are?
I grew up on a dairy farm in Frederick County.
My parents milked 60 cows, raised my brother and I there.
And then I met my husband, who's also a dairy farmer.
I like to say, you know, I grew up on a dairy farm and I married a dairy farmer.
You would have thought I would
I met my husband in a place that wasn't dairy related at all.
So I guess it was fate, you know?
There was a path that was put out for you.
Dairy in Maryland has changed a lot by growing up in the dairy industry.
What's the change that most makes you go, yeah, that's okay.
Dairy farming has definitely changed.
And now we're down to just a couple of farms left there.
We've had to change the way we do things
We don't sell our milk on the wholesale market.
We flip to doing direct to consumers just so that we could stay afloat, basically.
Do you find that the amount of milk consumption is changing?
Fluid milk consumption has been dropping for a number of years.
it as total of milk consumption.
I grew up on a farm, so I knew what this was.
She got her first delivery of from farm to her home, and she had two questions.
Do you cook them the same way?
And two, there's stuff floating on the top of
And the answer for me was yes, they cook the same way.
The shells just mean it came from a different colored chicken.
And the milk, the stuff floating on the top, educate us.
So we do cream line milk, which means we don't homogenize it.
Probably all the on-farm creameries in Maryland don't homogenize.
We do cream line, which is what people ask for.
The fat floats to the top of the milk.
The fat globules are not mixed all through the milk, which is what homogenization is.
It's allowed to rise to the top.
and says, hey, do you sell cream?
And I'm like, well, you could just buy her milk.
So that makes the cream of the crop rise.
And that's where that line comes from.
You said something that was really important, and I really want to put that out there.
Homogenization means that the fat molecules are homogenized.
And it keeps them from separating.
Homogenize, or a cream line was the word that you used.
The cream or the fat molecules, globules rise to the top.
Does that mean we take the milk and shake it or invert it a couple of times?
But recently, the whole milk for kids legislation went through, and now schools
have the option of serving whole milk to the kids if they want to.
So hopefully kids will be drinking more milk now that it tastes better.
You've been in the dairy industry and you've served in different capacities.
So that mouthfeel felt like whole milk.
It had the feeling of whole milk.
It had the richness of whole milk.
but it was still low-fat milk.
I don't believe on the commercial level that it's being added to milk.
Okay, so not the fluid milk, but maybe to ice cream.
And there's an important reason that it's added to ice cream, and you touched on it.
A stabilizer means it doesn't go bad in the plants form.
I think it keeps up from crystallizing.
So back in the day, I remember a product called ice milk.
And that was an ice cream that was sort of an ice cream.
And when you make ice cream now, it doesn't crystallize like that.
And it's because of the ice cream making process.
So we've gone from milk and coffee to ice cream.
You are located at Brown Cow Creamery, you're on Ridge Road.
Is it Damascus or Mount Airy or in between?
And you've done something that is a lot of folks dream.
Yeah, I mean, it was always a dream of my husband and mine to be able to sell direct to consumers.
On our farm where we were before in Dickerson, we basically milked cows.
We milked a pretty large herd.
We used to milk 200, and we've kind of downsized over the years.
We were basically price takers.
A lot of times that price was not anything that could cover our bills.
So we made the decision to downsize our herd even more and start direct marketing.
So we started in Dickerson by shipping some of our milk to
a cheese maker in Lancaster County.
He's a goat farmer, and he makes cheese as well on his farm.
And then we added the cheese by shipping our milk out to this cheese maker.
And then we brought the cheese back and sold it here.
So that was kind of our first taste of direct marketing.
And our focus then was to sell some from the farm from pickups.
We were given the opportunity to take our herd and move across the county.
We're still in Montgomery County.
Our whole business format changed.
You did something kind of wild and crazy.
You loaded up cows and moved them?
Yeah, so we used a farm in Dickerson.
We didn't have a creamery there.
So we loaded up our cows and moved them across the county.
I don't think very many people do that, move entire herds of cows.
And when you say entire herd, you're not talking a few, you're talking a lot of cows.
I'm picturing lots of trailers going up and down.
My son also, he raises a lot of beef.
So they came over more over time than the dairy cows.
Tell us about that transition.
When we moved here, there was a lot more pasture for the cows to be in.
so space for them, but they're fenced off into paddocks.
But our cows had grazed the whole farm where we were, so they were like, tape, what white tape?
And they just basically blew right through it.
We grow all of our hay for cows, and we also grow some corn as well for them.
It's sort of similar to corn, but you don't harvest it the same way.
We had some success with that.
So it was a really great project.
when you're mowing it, you're collecting it and baling it and making a food product.
So it's a really efficient system that when they eat grass and turn
it into beef and dairy products.
Mother Nature's got a cycle there.
But you're still smiling, your eyes are still glowing, and you're like, yeah, we're doing this.
So you started off, and it's a really interesting story.
For our audience who don't know those terms, price taker is what exactly?
So that was when we received a check.
And basically that price is set by the government.
It's a crazy formula that nobody, I don't think, truly understands how it's figured.
Then we would be given a check and it could be, you know, a lot one time and
very low, half that the next times, and you just never know.
The market's up and down and all over the place in the dairy industry.
price that we can set, and we get all that money instead of having to pay.
If it were 100% profit, that would be lovely, but you have payroll, you have insurance, you
And by selling your own product, there's even an insurance component there.
We'll be right back and continue this conversation.
Welcome back to Raising Connections.
So I wasn't quite as involved in the store as I would have liked to have been.
But now that things are more settled, I've spent more time in the store.
People come in and they introduce themselves to us.
When they come in the door, they say,
Hey Lori, hey Jenny, who's my wonderful manager.
They tell us our life stories, they ask us questions.
Does that give you a sense of community and relationship?
Because your expression on your face, this is why I wish we had a video, right?
Do you find the folks who make the time to come into the store want to be part of a community?
I hope so, but I can tell you we appreciate every single one of them.
I got the opportunity to come in and have ice cream over Christmas.
After all the snow we've had, I think I'll pass for right now.
Maybe I'll go yogurt for a while.
Well, it's funny because last weekend, it was warm on Saturday, and we were really busy.
We were really busy, so that little bit of warm up.
And the next day, I was in the store.
in their homes, tired of cold weather.
Now, if you had a hot chocolate stand, boy, I would be there.
We're working on adding more pieces to what we offer.
Not anyone can go in and open a farmer's market.
You can sell at farmer's markets, but there's still permits involved there.
One of the delays that you had and one of the items that you're working with is...
For those who don't know what that's like, could you tell us?
And then we also had to have a permit to be able to take those items to farmers markets.
And all that's at the state health department level.
And if we want to do other products at the
the farmers market, like the milk and ice cream, and that's a county health department area.
The store is overseen by the county health department.
There's a lot behind the scenes.
Not only are you a farmer, but you're also a business manager.
You're a product manager, and you're a manufacturer.
How do you keep all of those parts moving?
And so you have a store manager.
And you have a really interesting story.
Your daughter started in college being raised on a dairy farm and moving into the dairy world.
This helped the transition a little bit.
Help us out there with the story.
So my daughter went to Virginia Tech and majored in dairy science.
I can remember doing a visit to Virginia Tech when she was thinking about going there.
And by the time she got to her dairy science area, she was the only one.
And honestly, she can do lots of things with a dairy science degree.
She can pretty much do anything in the ag industry.
She's a 4-H agent for Montgomery County.
But when she got out of school,
When she graduated, it was COVID times and it was going to be hard to find a job.
The farm that we're on now, the previous owners had a job opening to oversee their dairy herd.
So I sent it to her and I said, hey, you know, here's an opportunity.
There's not going to be many opportunities with COVID going on.
So she reached out to them and they hired her.
So this is the same creamery that we're on now.
So she knew how to use all the equipment.
She knew the recipes for the ice cream because everything's the same.
and we used the same recipes as they did.
So it was just like an easy slide in for us when she knew how to do everything.
She actually had to teach me how to use the equipment.
a bit of a teacher and a hall monitor.
I would assume that the entire operation is still good.
And the youngsters mean calves.
Yeah, my husband does all that now.
She ended up in the creamery learning how to use the equipment.
And being the manufacturing side of things.
How did you get involved with this?
Sounds like your daughter was the gateway.
Yeah, the previous owners of the farmer we are now, their sons and my kids grew up in 4-H
together showing cattle at the fair.
They were on Dairy Bowl together.
For those folks who are not in 4-H, it's a big deal.
So these kids starting at a very young age have to have knowledge of all those
things to participate in Dairy Bowl.
That's the cream on the milk, because it's showing the cows.
4-H is one of those things that was a gateway.
And for folks who want to become...
What advice would you give them?
Would you tell them to get involved with their local 4-H?
They can reach out to their county 4-H.
If they don't live on farms now, there's still opportunities.
At the state level, there's a dairy leasing program.
So you could find a farm with animals that are able to be shown and lease a cow.
fair, the state fair, there's lots of showing opportunities through the year.
So that's that hands-on opportunity for kids who don't live on farms.
How do they even know if this is something for them?
So get out there, get employed, get your feet wet, start learning the things, meeting people.
What was the one thing that you weren't really expecting when you opened the farmer's market?
definitely a great thing, but it was a lot to try to keep up with that customer base.
And the permits don't transfer.
The permits follow with the owners.
So hitting that ground running and keeping those customers in the products they're
used to, had to stop and come back because of the permit change.
What are folks asking for in the farmer's market these days?
Are they asking for the cheeses, the milks, the cream?
We're still able to offer the peaches and the apples.
And that's that business manager, produce, stocking, which goes back to marketing, right?
you had the knowledge coming in.
In running that business, we talked about the permits.
Was that something you were ready for?
Well, we did have a lot of experience.
markets really, I think, set us up for success.
I think it really did need to be stepped up.
You might not see all the same things that you always saw coming here.
And that was pretty confusing for people, I think, because we
we didn't have that same amount of produce as the former owners had.
But I always kind of have been hard on myself.
Am I really doing enough social media?
And I think you hit on something really important.
You did everything that the books tell you to do.
You went from the farm to direct sales, to farmer's market, to bricks and mortar.
You've done everything to textbook perfect.
And you've felt the pinches along the way and the growth along the way.
It is that micro business and that reassurance that you're doing it right, you don't see every day.
I mean, we have a lot of returning customers, which is fun.
Sometimes you just stop yourself and you're like, oh, this is kind of mind-blowing.
People actually come here and buy our stuff.
But it's neat to have those returning customers.
When you said that you have farms in
many different areas of the county.
That seems like a strategic nightmare.
That's not possible with farming right now.
It's pretty hard to have a farm.
I mean, there's certainly some big farms out there, but most farms are fragmented.
You have a field here, a field there that you're renting just to make
sure that you can make enough food for your cows to eat.
Do we beep before we go around?
Well, technically, you're not supposed to go around, right?
If it's a double line on the road, you're technically not supposed to go around.
But we do try to move equipment when it's not rush hour, if we can help it.
We're making the food to feed the people to do the things we do in our daily lives.
Thank you for doing the things to help us through our daily lives.
If we want to learn more about you, where do we find you?
How do we get in contact with you?
Most of our marketing is done on Facebook.
Instagram, but mostly Facebook.
The page is Brown Cow Creamery on Facebook.
Maybe we could do some really local delivery at some point as well.
So it sounds like you have a plan moving forward.
Social media is part of the plan.
Product development doesn't sound like it's part of the plan, or is it?
We would probably like to move into
showing some different products, especially maybe looking at some soft pasteurized cheeses.
But we do see some opportunity to do some soft pasteurized cheeses.
So we have a pretty good customer base, Latino customer base and also South Asia
Indian customer base and they're looking for some soft cheeses and they love our milk.
So we would like to move into doing some more products.
So we have more things to look for.
It's probably going to take some time.
Don't expect it soon, but it's hopefully in the books.
It's a growing, maturing operation.
You've had the network, you've got everything put together.
There is a position that you have been involved with that is pretty unique.
Contrary to popular belief, it's impossible to just farm and make a living.
I don't know too many farm families out there who just do that.
Most everyone has an all-farm job.
So my off-farm job is working for Future Harvest.
It's kind of neat that I can be a farmer in my farm life and then
and also serve farmers in my off-farm job.
So my whole week centers around farming and agriculture and helping farmers.
But Future Harvest is an organization that's been around for 20-some years.
It's a sustainable regional farmer membership organization, mostly based around the Chesapeake Bay.
We're located in West Virginia, Maryland, DC, Virginia, Delaware.
And we do a lot of farmer education and training, a lot of beginner farmer training.
Amazingly, there are a lot of people out there who want to become farmers.
surprise you the number of people who are interested in our programming to become farmers.
We have an annual conference that attracts three to 400 people every year.
It's been in Silver Spring the past couple of years.
It might be business planning, it might be, you know, how to plant carrots, whatever.
So we give you a small amount of money to hire a consultant to help
work on whatever part of business you're looking for help in.
We also do a Feed the Need program, which is many grants for farmers to take produce to food banks.
You're continuing to build your network.
And it's such a diverse group of people
and not only in their backgrounds, but in what they want to grow and how they're doing it.
I mean, everyone's different and it's just, it's amazing to see that.
And when it comes together every year at conference, it's definitely a fun and amazing time.
Is agriculture alive and well?
I mean, we have to feed people, right?
And we have to feed them good bits.
And we need to teach them the homogenized versus the cream line.
Future harvest, you're looking forward, you're sustaining, you're regenerating people and farms.
And that's got to feel really pretty darn amazing.
I mean, what do farmers want to do but feed people?
They're caring, they're nurturing, they're giving.
The basic reason for farming is to feed people.
You have to love what you're doing.
Thank you for making some connections with us today.
And Laura Savage, thank you for joining us here to make some connections.
We'll make some more connections.