MIDDLETOWN - Randy Sowers is betting $790,000 that the processing plant and retail store he has built on his Frederick County dairy farm will help him break the economic cycle that has done in so many of his colleagues.
He's counting on long lines of consumers driving up to his operation - the first of its kind in Maryland - and paying a premium price for bottled milk and other farm-fresh products that, he said, "taste at lot better than what you can buy in the stores."
"There's no doubt about it, we are putting everything on the line," the 47-year-old farmer said as he sat on a green folding chair in the back room of his South Mountain Creamery store on Bolivar Road, a few miles west of here. He laughed and added: "A lot of people ask, `You sure you're not crazy?'"
The store stocks a variety of dairy products, included whole, skim and 2 percent fat content milk. There are bottles of chocolate- and strawberry-flavored milk.
There's yogurt and an assortment of cheeses, including smoked cheddar, Swiss and Portelet.
And lots of flavors of ice cream, which has proved to be so popular that the store was nearly sold out Monday morning, the day after last weekend's grand opening.
The Creamery offers something else that many baby boomers haven't seen since they were kids - home delivery.
"My husband, Paul, thinks this is the best-tasting chocolate milk he has ever tasted in his life," Karen Walker, a Middletown resident, offered as she wrote a check for the milk and eggs that she had bought. "The milk is so fresh. You can look out the window and see the cows being milked."
S. Patrick McMillan, an assistant to the state agriculture secretary, said the South Mountain Creamery is a unique operation in the state. He said it is an alternative that other farmers may need to boost their profits and pump new life into Maryland's rapidly declining dairy industry.
Maryland has lost 30 percent of its dairy farms since 1991, due primarily to the low price farmers are paid for their milk.
"Farmers have got to look at adding value to their products," McMillan said. "It's a way they can make more money and survive the downturns in the milk industry."
South Mountain Creamery is an operation that will be watched by every other dairy farm in the state, said James Hanson, an agriculture economist with the University of Maryland, College Park.
