Casey and Stacey Phillips kept smiles on their faces through each of the hurtful comments. The owners of Dry Valley Farms in Radford, Virginia, listened to a customer talk up a storm of misinformation about antibiotic use and what she felt was different between organic and conventional milk. The entire exchange was detailed on Stacey’s Dairy Farm Wife blog. Then the customer dropped the mother of all mistruths and walked way:
“Well, organic milk tastes different for some reason, maybe its because the cows on organic farms aren’t abused and are better loved,” the customer claimed.
Stacey said the moment left her and her husband speechless. Every dairy farmer knows that cow comfort is critical to the farm, and that’s no different at Dry Valley Farms. The problem is that the some people outside the industry don’t know that. Farm animals are treated like family, and Stacey’s impassioned blog post after the encounter highlights that. “We take care of our cows and in turn they take care of us,” she said. They’re the reason the Phillipses wake up at 5 a.m., why they don’t take family vacations, and why they have an abbreviated social life. The cows’ health and comfort are why the couple sacrifices their personal comfort every day of every year.
The post in its entirety is worth a read and can be found here.
This isn’t the first time these two farmers have had to push back against misinformation. Last year, they took part in the dairy industry’s #MilkTruth campaign, and faced a backlash from animal-rights activists. “We feed our families these products that people are bashing; that should be the ultimate show of just how safe we know these products are,” Stacey told Virginia Farm Bureau at the time. What that campaign did was put the Phillipses on the path toward advocacy of industry truth.
Want to see more? Dry Valley Farms can be found on Facebook here.
Images courtesy of the Dairy Farm Wife blog
