Dungeness Creamery receives sizable USDA grant

Chances are you’ll be seeing and hearing more about the Dungeness Valley Creamery in the coming years.

Ryan and Sarah McCarthey, owners of the farm at 1915 Towne Road since March 2012, recently received a $250,000 Value-Added Producer Grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to grow their business and produce new products. They are one of 18 Washington businesses to receive a matching grant this year and it spans three years as part of a $45 million initiative to help agricultural producers and small rural businesses.

The creamery supplies certified raw Jersey cow milk across Washington and the grant, the McCartheys said, sets a plan in place to create more products, develop a marketing campaign and do more promotions.

“Overall, it helps take the business to that next level of professionalism,” Ryan said.

He said over three years they’ve set benchmarks to increase sales and add 1 ½ positions to their 11-person staff.

“That’s quite a bit of growth for us,” Ryan said.

“Because we do business in eight counties and buy local hay, feed and supplies, hopefully we can increase our contribution to the community.”

Sarah said their main emphasis is to offer product sampling in stores.

“We’ll send an employee to make contact with stores and set up a demo table,” she said.

“We’re going to be picky about who is going to be the face of the business.”

Part of that is promoting the health and safety benefits of raw milk, Sarah said.

“Most milk you don’t know where it comes from,” she said. “We get that burden but pleasure of telling them where it comes from. Plus, there’s a healthy bacteria that if you’re lactose intolerant, about 80 percent of people can have raw milk.”

Ryan said they are making the leap to step away from being the face of the business so that other employees can step up, too. Doing that frees them up to pursue more avenues for the business such as finding the right half-pint bottles for sampling.

They also plan to design new packaging for their products, increase advertising online and in print, create educational and agri-tourism videos, and create additional marketing materials.

“It’s stuff we’re already doing,” Ryan said.

“But because it’s a matching grant, it’s doubled our money we’re able to spend. Now we have to spend the whole marketing budget and we’re hoping to see it pay back.”

Projects in progress

The value-added grant follows a rural energy grant the McCartheys earned in 2015 to include solar energy on their farm. For the $80,000 project, they received $20,000, which helped pay for an electric car charging station and the solar panels save them about $1,800 a year in electricity.

Ryan said at first he was overwhelmed with applying for the value-added grant because he heard it’s highly competitive and lengthy (126 pages total for the couple).

However, USDA representatives said veterans (Ryan is a U.S. Army veteran) and small family farms are given special priority for the grant.

Ryan said there are 50-plus raw milk licenses in the state and only a handful of them work on a larger scale like the creamery. Another raw milk farm in Eastern Washington received a value-added grant, too. The grant is intended for growth within a 100-mile radius.

“Raw milk is such a small section of the market I think it’ll be good for raw milk in general,” he said.

The McCartheys have been prepping for growth before they received the grant anyway.

Ryan said they’ve been extending stalls to increase their cows’ comfort levels.

“The idea is to make the cows more comfortable while increasing their production ability,” he said. “If we anticipate selling more product, then we need to be able to have capacity to create more.”

By the end of the three-year grant period, they also hope to add a fifth delivery day to their schedule and additional stores.

This time of year, the holidays, and the beginning of the school year are their busiest, the couple says.

To increase sales year-round they’re considering making their own ice cream, yogurt and egg nog, but products like egg nog require pasteurization so that would be a few years out, Ryan said.

Living wages

Their biggest goal, Ryan said, is to provide living wage jobs.

One former employee’s story led them to seek out grants in the first place. Ryan said the employee had been at the creamery for about seven years and was considering a job elsewhere because it offered more money.

“It was hard on me,” Ryan said. “I could match that pay, but I couldn’t match that career progression for him. I thought that I don’t want to be that employer. I want to be able to pay better, so we saw a need to grow the business after that and seek creative ways to do that.”

The McCartheys recently started offering a 3-percent pension matching plan and they’ve begun increasing staff pay to match their responsibilities.

“It’s hard to do in anticipation of growth but we wanted to make a statement to the people working here this is a place you can grow with,” Ryan said.

The McCartheys took over the Dungeness Valley Creamery from Sarah’s parents Jeff and Debbie Brown, which became a USDA-certified raw milk producer in 2006.

Since 2009, the USDA has awarded 1,441 value-added producer grants, like the McCartheys’, worth $183 million.

For more information on the Dungeness Valley Creamery, call 683-0716 or visit www.dungenessvalleycreamery.com.