July 1, 2021 - The Farmer’s Pride, Toni Riley

At nine years old, Ally Jones was the typical “girly girl,” with bows and frilly everything. She had nothing to do with a farm or dairy cattle.

Then she joined 4-H and started showing her first Brown Swiss dairy heifer.

Now at 22 years old, her alarm goes off a little after 4 a.m. She drives 18 miles and at 5 a.m. milks the same breed and some of the same cows from her show string at her family owned Legacy Dairy, the state’s only single source cream-lined milk.

Ally’s enthusiasm for milking cows is evident as she talks about starting this business venture. She admits that it was her first show heifer purchased in 2009 and known affectionately as Leah Torpedo that brought the family “where we are today.”

She boarded her cows at another farm until 2013 when her family purchased what the community of Hiseville, near Cave City, knows as the “Old Glenn Jones Farm.”

Glenn Jones was her father’s uncle. The farm originated with Ally’s great grandfather, making her the fourth generation to milk and continuing the family legacy, hence Legacy Dairy’s name.

The family started milking in 2014, selling milk through a co-op as well as selling raw milk. Then in 2016, a fire devastated a barn full of hay, and they closed the milking parlor doors.

Ally went off to the University of Kentucky to college and realized she was too far from home. She kept badgering her dad, saying, “Let’s milk cows again - let’s milk cows again.”

Ally came home after a semester and her family began developing a plan to milk cows and sell the milk themselves.

After hours and hours of planning and locating a funding source, Legacy Dairy built a processing plant and started selling their own milk in March of 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic closed down the country. But this was a surprising benefit.

Ally recounted what happened. “Phillips IGA, just down the road, had agreed to carry our milk. When the pandemic closed things down, they had no other milk for two weeks but ours. Lots of people tried our milk and stayed our customers. Phillips is our biggest client.”

Now Ally’s week consists of milking one day, milking and processing the next.

Each morning she milks 15 head, sometimes with the help from her granddad, William, in about an hour and a half. It’s mid morning by the time she finishes cleaning up and feeding the cows in the loafing shed.

While she works with a nutritionist for a feeding ration, the cows are on pasture 365 days a year. The rest of the day is taken up with managing orders, delivering milk to customers, updating the farm’s social media sites, and looking for new customers. She milks again at 4 p.m.

The next day she milks and processes the milk, which amounts to an average of 9 gallons per head per day, or approximately 270 gallons of milk over two days.

About 6:30 a.m., she takes a milk sample and drives the 20 miles to Glasgow to a lab to be cleared for processing. She calls her dad, Doug, who is waiting in the processing plant, and tells him the results are good and they can start processing. She joins him, and for the next two and a half hours, they process whole milk into gallon, half gallon, and pint plastic containers and chocolate into half gallons and pints.

While they would have liked to use glass containers, Ally said the washing equipment was cost-prohibitive, along with the extra work of keeping up with glass containers and deposits.

While Ally runs the milking operation, Doug helps with the processing and any other part of the dairy and is also the farm handyman when not at his full-time job as an ultrasound technician.

Ally’s mother, Genelle, teaches Kindergarten and is the face of Legacy Dairy at farmers markets. Her brother, Jagger, helps out. but, “well, he’s into sports,” Ally laughed.

Currently, Legacy milk can be found at 30 locations, nearly all with within a 75 mile radius of the farm. Recently Legacy milk joined Market Wagon and is available on the Lexington and Louisville hubs.

Ally is incredibly proud of the milk her Brown Swiss produce and especially the single source designation.

“That means all our milk comes only from our cows on our farm, and the milk you get today will be the same quality and butterfat you get next month. Our Brown Swiss butterfat count isn’t as high as some breeds, but we think it’s really rich.”

Find Legacy Dairy online at www.legacydairyky.com.