Seth McEachron ' 04

火博体育赛斯

Growing up on a dairy farm in Salem, 纽约, Seth McEachron ' 04 could have felt a lot of pressure to take over the family business someday. His family had been dairy farmers in the area for nearly a century, after all. 

But he and his father made a plan for McEachron’s future: Go to college to study something other than agriculture, then take four years to try something different before deciding whether he was interested in the farm. 

McEachron chose 火博体育大学 because he could get a broad liberal arts education and study business. Also, his sister, Sarah McEachron ’01, was already an education student at Skidmore. The business and economics courses he took at the College inspired him. 

“My business classes led me to want to be an entrepreneur and got me excited about seeing what we could do to improve our farm, make it more sustainable and bring a great product to local people,麦凯伦说. 

He was so eager to get started, he didn’t finish the four-years-off-the- farm plan post-college. After a stint working for agricultural financial services company Farm Credit East, 他和他父亲合伙, 不, in 2006 to start planning and implementing some fresh ideas on the farm. 

First up: Bottling their own milk so they could offer a single-source, 100 percent traceable and local product. It’s an idea they had started discussing while McEachron was still at Skidmore, 但时机不对. By 2006, with the local food movement picking up, they were ready to take the leap and wanted to be the first dairy farmers in the area to do it. 

“We were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, when people wanted to support local farms and get a high-quality product they enjoyed,麦凯伦说. 

In 2008, Battenkill Valley Creamery was up and running, with milk going from cow to bottle and on a truck for delivery within eight hours, 从而产生更新鲜的产品. Because the milk is separated cold rather than hot — and the whole milk is 4 percent instead of the standard 3.25 percent milk fat — it’s especially flavorful and creamy, too. Battenkill’s milk has twice been rated No. 1 Highest Quality Milk in the state by Cornell University’s Department of Food. 大于1,000 high-end coffee shops and restaurants, such as Michelin-star restaurants like Per Se and Jean-Georges in 纽约 City, 用巴顿基尔的牛奶, 奶油和一半加一半. 

Battenkill does its own distribution, too, keeping it mostly local. Other than business deliveries to 纽约 City and some home deliveries in 

Peekskill, 波基普西, 新泽西和长岛, they don’t stray far from the Northway, mostly delivering to stores and restaurants from the Albany area to north of Lake George. They also offer home delivery in 萨拉托加温泉市. 

In 2009, the company started producing ice cream and opened an ice cream parlor at their Creamery Store in Salem as a way to draw the public to the farm. 他们一直在创新, collaborating recently with Kru Coffee on a popular cold brew latte. Battenkill provides the milk and bottles the drink. 

The Creamery has grown to meet demand — it produced 600 gallons of milk a week when it opened in 2008 and now produces 52,000 gallons a week — but hasn’t faced the same pressure most smaller dairy farms do. 

“We’re lucky because we bottle our own milk,麦凯伦说. “We set our own milk prices and we’re cutting out the middle man.” While McEachron says he can’t predict the future of farming, he anticipates more consolidation. 

“Business in general is survival of the fittest,他说.

And he continues to draw upon the lessons he learned at Skidmore. “You’ve got to be creative — come up with different ways of doing something, 或者一个新产品, or try to figure out how to make your product differentiated,他说. “All of that is important with 创造性思维很重要.”