John and Celia Harrison have partnered in both marriage and business to manage thriving dairy, cheese and event center operations.
This Tennessee dairy does it all
The white Baptist church van slowly climbs the curved blacktop driveway leading up to Sweetwater Valley Farm. When it parks, eight elderly women emerge and walk with purpose through the double doors of this unique-to-Tennessee farmstead cheese store.
They head directly to the sampling table, using toothpicks to stab cubes of some two dozen varieties. Comparing notes, the women move to the cheese case.
They don’t select a lot: a brick or two of yellow aged Cheddar or Italian Pesto, or a shrink-wrapped package of Gouda. At $5 per 10-oz. brick, the cash register starts ringing up the sales.
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Brick by brick, package by package, it adds up to more than 100,000 lb. of cheese sold annually through this little retail operation to the local church ladies; moms and teachers herding schoolkids on tours; agri-tourists from the nearby cities of Knoxville, Cleveland and Chattanooga; snowbirds heading south for the winter on nearby I-75 and again when they drive back north in the spring.
As the billboards, website and brochures for Sweet-water Valley Farms scream out: "Cheese. Cows. Wows!"
Sweetwater Valley Farm is owned and operated by John and Celia Harrison, the 2012 Innovative Dairy Farmers of the Year. The award is sponsored annually by the International Dairy Foods Association and Dairy Today magazine. The Harrisons were nominated by Jennifer Walker, director of dairy stewardship, and James Drake, Dairy Direct farm relationship manager, both of Dean Foods.
The Harrisons’ operation is located in Philadelphia, Tenn., just a few miles off I-75, 45 minutes southeast of Knoxville and an hour northeast of Chattanooga. The operation includes a 1,000-cow dairy (soon to be 1,350), a small cheese factory, the retail store, a 5,000-sq.-ft. event center called "The Udder Story" and farm tours that last year hosted 12,000 to 13,000 agri-tourists.
The Harrisons are being recognized for their incredible level of innovation: at the farm level and then taking their own milk to make cheese. They sell that cheese both retail and wholesale, and leverage the Sweetwater Valley Farm brand to tell their farm’s story.
"Our strategy has been to diversify and at the same time add [to our] land base," John says. "But we’ve always tried to remain flexible. I wake up every morning thinking: ‘What can I change today to make this a better operation?’ "
Being within commuting distance of Knoxville has made additional land acquisition difficult. Eastern Tennessee, with its mild year-round climate and attractive cost of living, is also a mecca for retirees. That dual demand for real estate, until the recent economic downturn, had pushed land prices nearly out of reach for forage production.
Dairy farms in the area had few options: innovate, stagnate or exit. The Harrisons chose to innovate. And boy, have they.
After graduating from the University of Tennessee in 1981, John farmed for three years with his father and brother on a fourth-generation family farm established by his great-grandfather in the early 1900s.
Wanting to expand, he leased a farm on his own to operate a 150-cow dairy. A few years later, when Celia was in medical school in Alabama (she is now a trauma physician at a nearby hospital’s emergency center), she let it be known that she eventually wanted to return to Tennessee.
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Dairy Today - January 2012
