CONTAINER ENTHUSIASM: NY Dairy Supply Innovating in Smaller Operations By Ann Hinch
SOUTH KORTRIGHT, N.Y. — Positive association is a powerful sales tool. Coca-Cola has spent decades linking its soda to Santa and cute polar bears, while Ford touts its F-150 with farm and construction work. Don’s Dairy Supply tempts potential clients with samples of milk, cheese and yogurt made on the farms of clients using its equipment. Dan and Erin Richards began bottling cream top milk on their first-generation Cossayuna, N.Y., farm three years ago. Armed with a 100-gallon vat pasteurizer, Bunker Hill Creamery processes about 800 gallons from 200 Holsteins each week into white, chocolate and maple-flavored milk for retail. But their dream of an on-farm creamery began earlier, when in 2016 they contacted Don’s, two hours away in South Kortright. Dan Richards had seen something about a mobile goat milking parlor/processing unit that owner Don Coager and his family designed and built two years prior for a Jewish farmer who wanted to bottle smallbatch kosher milk. As of 2014, Brooke White, Coager’s daughter, explained he had been in business more than three decades fabricating, equipping and repairing for upstate New York and northern Pennsylvania dairy farms. The goat farmer, who had bought some land but wasn’t sure how long he might stay on it and didn’t want to sink money into a permanent structure, contacted Don’s for ideas. “I need something to milk them in,” Brooke recalls him saying. And then her father’s reply: “What about a shipping container?”
UPCYCLING CONTAINERS In the 1950s, shipping magnate Malcom McLean helped standardize large metal shipping containers – those ubiquitous boxcars seen crossing the country on trains or stacked on giant barges ferrying goods between countries. And as early as 1962, there are patents proposing how surplus containers could be used instead as mobile product exhibition booths. Since then, containers have been converted into housing, classrooms, offices, storefronts – even a California skatepark. Another use catching on in popularity is small-scale dairy production. Coager, his son, Kyle Coager, and Brooke designed and fabricated that first 16-stall rapid-exit milking parlor 12 - NYN July-August 2021
This is a 45 ft container with a VC Van’t Reit 105 gallon pasteurizer, a Milk Plan bulk tank for cooling and a Carriage Machine Shop bottler.
with pipeline and utility room into a COR-TEN steel container, then put it on a trailer to the goat farmer. Later he ordered a second container to be converted into a creamery. “We put the project on our website,” Brooke said, “and we started to get calls.” Seven years later, the Don’s team has kitted out 30 containers for farmers in 11 states and has orders to deliver to five more. Creating a creamery or milking parlor out of a 20-, 40- or 45-foot steel container usually takes 2-4 months and the cost runs between $50,000$120,000. Of the 30 so far, 25 have been for creameries – mostly to process cow milk, but also from goats and even one from sheep. Being smaller doesn’t make the work necessarily easier. “It’s almost like building a building from the ground up,” said Brooke, who explained Don’s has been constructing and designing for permanent on-farm dairy processing structures for decades, as well as selling equipment.
‘WE’LL FIX IT FOR YOU’ “We tell people, you give us your idea, and we’ll fix it for you,” said Debbie Coager, who manages the books for Don’s and has been married to the owner for 46 years.
