Why We Started Maid-N-Meadows

           I have been sharing some of our journey in the cheese business, but I thought today I should share some of the personal reasons of why we actually started this journey to begin with. What really pushed us forward was a time of crisis in our family and marriage....this business, was actually born out of a serendipitous opportunity in a time of insane uncertainty. While our friends were supportive, there was no getting around that given the stress we were relating to, this was a rather risky time to invest in such a huge undertaking.

Early label design!

           Looking back though, I think the business was a beacon of hope. It was something that we could build together, even though at that moment  we had forgotten how to work together. The efforts we have undertaken to make our family stronger were and are valiant ones. But this business is still in the early stages and the hours are rough. I still look back in wonder at how far we have come, but I still wonder about the path forward!


         Once upon a time there was Daniel! A boy who dreamed of farming a dairy, like his uncle and grandfather did. He started milking when he was 7. He sat on one side of the cow and his 6 year old brother on the other, racing to see how much foam they could make in the bucket. By the time he was 9, he and his sister were weekend farmhands, milking for the neighbor's commercial dairy.
       Fast forward three years and he was the 12 year old at the auction barn. His father having dropped him off, only to later pick him up with his choice of calves to raise. Daniel recalls those days with some pride as he knew if those calves didn't make it he wouldn't be aloud new ones. He set his own alarm to make midnight barn calls on his precious calves and doctored them faithfully when they were ill.

       By the time he was in his twenties he was running his own dairy. But around the time we married the milk market fell through the floor. Thousands of dollars were going out every month with terrible long hours to boot. It was a stressful time. The milk company didn't want to pick up our milk any longer. We were too small of a dairy to be worth their time. But finances were to strained to expand to their liking. So that was it! The dairy was done. There wasn't any talk of herd dispersal though. Daniel knew those cows and their mothers and their mothers', mothers' and he wasn't going to part with a single one. But a lot of debt had been racked up over the last year and now the slow slog of paying that down had to begin.
       We threw around the idea of cheese the winter after Daniel quit milking. But we were already in so much debt and the facility looked complicated to build. What if we didn't like making cheese? What if we couldn't sell it? So we put the idea on the back shelf and kept working and paying off debt.

      Daniel started that journey by working as a rural mail delivery person for USPS. He was a substitute driver and so was constantly on call. But the pay was good. Then he took on milking and leasing his cows to another dairy. His hours away from the farm were racking up and were somewhat chaotic due to the on call nature of the post office. But then he was offered a job repairing commercial chicken houses at a very good pay rate... then the hours were incredibly erratic!! Many of those jobs were done at night (sometimes all night) after Daniel had finished working for the post office or the dairy. THEN! The dairy wanted him to do their artificial breeding and some of their IV work on-call! It was a time of high stress and major juggling to keep our own animals cared for.  I felt very trapped in the arrangement.
      By this time we had paid off all of what we owed, but the intensity of the work load didn't subside. We were not sure how to move forward and communication broke down completely. We had to get help to figure all this out and fortunately, we did. It was in that process of re evaluating what was important and aligning that with a new, collective vision, that we got a phone call.

     "I was just down at Heavenly Homestead Cheese and they have a guy just begging them to make cheese. He says he can sell it for them. But they are closed down now. I think Heavenly Homestead would help you get started if you just got in touch! This is an opportunity that won't happen again and you will regret it if you pass it by." This man must have been touched by a guardian angel or the Holy Spirit to make such a random phone call and to us of all people! He was absolutely correct that this was the kind of opportunity we were seeking in prayer for! Yet we were also at an incredibly fragile point in our relationship as a family. The kind of work required to pull this off would be very stressful and would require the entire family pitching in. That was a lot to ask of all of us at that point as we were still recovering from a lot of tension and conflict.

Lots of late nights and early mornings in prayer.

      We took some time to pray about it. We called and spoke to Terry, at Heavenly Homestead. We called and spoke to the kind man who was building a business as a distributor. We spoke to our family and counselor and friends. Then we spoke to the children. After more prayer, we decided to give it a go, with Terry as our guide in the cheese making world!
      Many long hours, support, help, and encouragements later, we have brought the facility and cheese making to our home farm. Betting on us 2 years ago would have been a poor bet, but we have grown a lot as a couple and a family since then. All praise to God for carrying us through the hard times.

The Daniels family came to clean and paint on this day! Bless them!