Donegan Family Dairy

Joe and Emily Donegan

"You can only milk the females." That’s what farmer Emily Donegan jokingly says was her first lesson in running a dairy farm. She was right out of college when she joined her husband, Joe, on the farm.

This young couple has been farming for seven years, which they describe as a growth phase. They say they’ve been “learning by doing” all along the way. When they started, with about 18 animals, their plan was to run a small, conventional dairy farm, but they quickly decided to transition to a larger, organic dairy that would be more economically feasible.

Their milking operation is a seasonal one, which means two things: they try to get all the heifers giving birth at the same time each year; and there’s a period of time in the winter when the couple gets a little break, doing no milking at all. The cows are in a constant cycle of having a calf, freshening, lactation, drying off and then giving birth again. It’s a system that requires a tremendous amount of coordination. Calving time begins in earnest in February, which gives the Donegans a relatively quiet December and January, and gives the animals ideal seasons—summer and fall—for producing milk. Milk production ranges from 200 pounds a day at the start of the season to something like 2500 pounds at its peak.

Their milking operation is a seasonal one, which means two things: they try to get all the heifers giving birth at the same time each year; and there’s a period of time in the winter when the couple gets a little break, doing no milking at all. The cows are in a constant cycle of having a calf, freshening, lactation, drying off and then giving birth again. It’s a system that requires a tremendous amount of coordination. Calving time begins in earnest in February, which gives the Donegans a relatively quiet December and January, and gives the animals ideal seasons—summer and fall—for producing milk. Milk production ranges from 200 pounds a day at the start of the season to something like 2500 pounds at its peak.

Emily wasn’t sure what she was going to do after her own college graduation in Asheville, North Carolina one year later. She’d “tried on many ideas,” she said, but really wanted to learn how to do maple sugaring and to have land for horses. By the time she graduated, in 2006, Joe had completed an internship at a farm in St. Albans, Vermont, had spent the winter there and had bought four bred heifers. That summer, he bought more calves to raise as heifers. Emily moved up to Vermont and the two of them began their farming life together.

The Donegan Family Dairy is in Charlotte, Vermont, a quarter of a mile from where Joe grew up. When they began, the land they were on had a road running through it, which wasn’t ideal. Plus, they soon learned that the law would limit their small operation to producing only 6 gallons of milk per day, which wouldn’t sustain them. That’s when they moved to different acreage and began their organic dairy operation.

They eventually contracted with CROPP / Organic Valley—the farmer-owned co-op that supplies Stonyfield with organic milk—and began to build their operation. Within a year, they were milking 18 or 20 in the organic herd, had rented more land and moved first into a trailer and then into the rented farmhouse that they will soon buy.

Son Patrick spends a lot of time out in the barn with Joe and, when Patrick’s many uncles visit, that’s where they all go to play. Patrick is so used to being out there (he saw his first calf birth this past February) Emily expects he’ll be helping out with the barn chores pretty soon.