03/06/2026
Dear Twin Springs Creamery community —
Milking cows has been a lifelong dream of mine. My family and I started milking our first cow in 2017 with no grand plan — just a belief that our community deserved access to fresh, local milk.
Over the years, many of you welcomed Twin Springs Farmstead and Twin Springs Creamery milk into your homes. You supported us at stores, visited the honor fridge, shared kind words, and helped prove something important: people still care deeply about local dairy and knowing where their food comes from.
Recently, our pasteurizer experienced a major mechanical failure requiring significant repair. While working through that challenge, we were also forced to take an honest look at sustainability — not just financial or ecological, but personally and as a family farm.
Dairy farming is deeply rewarding work, but it is also relentless. Cows must be milked every single day. Equipment doesn’t wait. Milk doesn’t pause. And when systems break, the margin between success and burnout becomes very small.
After much reflection, we made the difficult decision to place a pause on pasteurized milk production at Twin Springs Creamery.
We will continue milking cows — just on a smaller scale — and will be focusing on supplying our raw milk pet food, which remains available through our farm honor fridge and local retail partners (Bloomington Farm Stop Collective; Bloomingfoods East and West; Springville Market; Sommherr’s Bakery; Bethel Lane Farm Stop, with a few additional customers considering adding it on).
I want you to know how proud I am of the milk we produced together. Hearing from customers who rediscovered milk, could digest this milk, or watched their kids fall in love with real milk has meant more than I can adequately express. The conversations in the milkhouse and stories posted on social media make this pause incredibly difficult.
None of this would have been possible without:
• our incredible fans- you all
• the stores, bed and breakfasts, bakeries, and cafes who believe in local dairy
• our hardworking creamery and milking team
• and especially my partner Sara and our children, who gave countless early mornings, late nights and weekends, and multiple moves to make this dream real.
This is not goodbye to dairying.
If anything, this experience confirmed something even bigger: our community wants and needs local dairy that provides real local dairy products - more than one small farm can provide alone. People want high quality milk that comes from a farm they can visit and know.
Twin Springs showed what’s possible. Now the question becomes how we build something durable enough to support multiple farms and future generations of dairying in and around our area.
Thank you for walking this journey with us. Truly.
We’ll keep milking cows.
We’ll keep caring for the land.
And we’ll keep working toward what comes next.
James Farmer
— Twin Springs Creamery
PS- Don’t hesitate to reach out to me directly with any questions- [email protected]
