Seventh-generation dairy farmer Andle van der Ploeg and his wife, Sjierkje, (also a seventh-generation dairy farmer) knew early in their relationship that they would eventually leave their Netherlands home to dairy in America. 

But it wasn’t until they were married with four children that the time came; the Netherlands became part of the European Union, and new regulations made dairy farming more challenging than ever.

Michelle Dickinson proudly runs Mountain View Farm in Colorado. The farm was started by Michelle’s great-grandfather in 1917 and was carried on through the generations. Though Michelle went into the family business dragging her feet, she quickly realized dairy farming is what she was meant to do.

Michelle has three children, Tyler, Stella and Jolie. For Michelle, the best part about being a dairy farmer is being able to work with her family and build something her kids can be proud of and can carry into the future.

When Adam Wolf was a kid, not much sounded less appealing than dairying.

“My dad worked me so hard I didn’t want to come back to the dairy,” he says.

But Adam’s dad, a dairyman in Texas, wasn’t being cruel. 

“He was trying to teach me a lesson,” Wolf says. “To show me, hey, this dairy business isn’t easy and it sure isn’t glamorous.”

Tim Bernhardt is the co-owner of Bernhardt Dairy Farm, Bernhardt Farms LLC and Bernhardt Ag LLC with his brother, David.

Their grandfather, George, moved to Denver from Russia in 1915, but felt the city wasn’t the place to raise a family. He bought a place in 1920 bought two adjoining farms with his brother-in-law. Today, the dairy still sits on one-half of that original parcel.

There have been cows milked under the name Docheff for over 80 years, whether the cows belonged to Jim Docheff Sr., his father or grandfather.

“We didn’t just hand down the cows from one generation to the next, we all had to buy our own individual cows,” explained Jim Sr. “Even when my granddad had sold out, my dad was milking under the Docheff name, then myself and now my boys – that’s why we still call it Docheff Dairy.”

Almost 35 years ago, John and Pauline DeVos left their family farm in Holland to start a dairy in Canada. Ten years and 80 cows later, the DeVos family moved again, this time to the Texas Panhandle, for the space and the warm climate. They opened Fox Dairy – named for the Dutch translation of DeVos, and soon grew to 2,100 cows. 

John and Pauline manage the dairy together, with John working with cows and Pauline keeping books. Their two sons, partners on the dairy, also work directly with the cows.

Brothers Arley, Scott and Lynn George returned to a northwestern Wyoming dairy farm with deep family roots in the early 1980s.

Their parents homesteaded the farm after World War II as part of a program for returning veterans; the homestead was situated on a former Japanese internment camp. The family used their two allotted barracks and modified one into a home where the Georges raised eight children and where Arley, Scott and Lynn’s mother continues to live. The other barrack served as the dairy parlor until 1981.

Chuck Feldpausch has deep roots in our nation’s dairy community. His grandparents, Roman and Marina Feldpausch, founded their family dairy in 1945 in Saint Johns, Michigan.

Chuck left home in 1993 to attend Cornell University’s animal science and dairy fellows program. That’s also where he met his wife, Nora. He returned to working with his family on the dairy in Michigan and later, he and Nora invested in a second dairy only a few miles from their homestead.

Norm Dinis is a first-generation U.S. citizen whose father, Jack, moved to the U.S. from Azores, a small group of islands in the North Atlantic Ocean. Jack grew up dairy farming on the tiny islands, immigrated to Toronto, Canada when he was 17 and worked various jobs until he decided to sell everything he owned to move to Colorado. There, he joined a cousin who was milking cows. Eventually, when his son Norm had graduated from high school, Jack bought a dairy farm of his own.

David Jackson always knew he’d be a dairyman. Sure, he left the farm for a few years to attend junior college and work for a gravel company, but his love of cows brought him right back.

He got his professional start in 1984, leasing a dairy and milking 38 cows. These days, he and his wife, Jodi, own Bentwood Dairy, where they milk 400 cows. They also farm and raise Brangus beef cattle.