Holliday family building "cottage industry" with Jersey cows

Soon after Sharron Holliday and her family got their first Jersey dairy cow in the fall of 2024, they discovered that the cow was producing more milk — a lot more milk — than they thought a Jersey cow would produce.

“We were getting 10 gallons a day just from her, and we needed an outlet for that,” Sharron said.

That “outlet” is the Holliday Family Farms Farmstand east of Denison, where friends of the family can buy various dairy products including milk, cream, ice cream and butter, among other things, on the “honor system.” It’s something that Sharron said she’d like to see growing into a real “cottage industry” in the near future.

“I’m five to six years away from being able to retire from my day job, and I’d like to be able to focus on expanding this and growing it,” she said. “I just feel like you have to start now, build your customers and stuff like that.”

Sharron has plenty of help in keeping the “family business” running along with her daughters, Sidney Eisman and Sophia Holliday, and her sons, Jared and Joel Bohnenkemper, helping with a small herd of three Jersey milk cows that the family plans to expand.

She’s also dedicated to educating people about the benefits of raw milk, which the family uses to make such products as “kefir,” a fermented milk beverage similar in consistency to a thin yogurt or a “smoothie” — and which she believes has gotten a bad rap.

“Raw milk is not necessarily dangerous,” she said. “We take steps. We’ve disease-tested our cows, and we handle the milk properly. Those are big steps in making sure that the end product you’re getting is a relatively safe product… How you’re handling the milk and how clean your cow is are really important factors in making sure you’re getting clean milk, and we make sure to strain it and cool it.”

Another thing about Jersey milk cows, she said, is that they produce milk with a different kind of beta-casein protein known as “A2/A2,” which makes their milk more digestible to people who have issues with “store-bought milk.”

Jersey cows are generally smaller than other dairy cattle breeds, such as Holstein and Brown Swiss, and in some cases, they tend to produce less milk than the other breeds, Sharron said. Their milk is also higher in butterfat than the other breeds, meaning dairy farmers get more cream from Jerseys than Holsteins.

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