If you are at all interested in organic yogurt, you probably have seen a relative newcomer to the market taking off at rocket speed in the dairy section of any number of health food stores. Painterland Sisters Skyr-style Organic Yogurt is now in stores like Natural Grocers, Whole Foods, and Sprouts despite having only come on the market in March of 2022. The Painter Sisters, Stephanie and Hayley, are now selling 75,000 cups of yogurts/week, and as successful millennials have an incredible social media following helping them with their raising of additional funds for even greater expansion.
Luckily the sisters are part of a much larger farming operation, Painterland Farms, a 5,000-acre (2,200-ha) organic farm in Tioga County, Pennsylvania, representing part of the 4 generation working on the farm. With their father, mother, brothers, grandmother, uncles and cousins all chipping on various aspects of the operation, Hayley and Stephanie are busy making waves in the dairy industry as younger women with a vision on how to make a place for themselves at Painterland Farms, and how to sustain it long into the future. They also have a vision of how to support the dairy and farming community in their area so there will be more farming for generations to come in Pennsylvania and throughout the Northeast and mid-Atlantic.
Growing the Brand Through Vision
Stephanie and Hayley always knew they wanted to come back to the farm after going off to college (Susquehanna State University for Stephanie and Iowa State University for Hayley). “My goal was to come back to the farm, but we needed to make the milk more profitable,” says Hayley. “That’s why we started the yogurt company. Our mission was to sustain our farm. We milk 400 cows twice a day and produce about 100,000 pounds of milk/week. We produce 75,000 cups of yogurt/week and we are currently using about a third of the farms’ full production to do that. We use 40,000 pounds of milk/week from our farm, and the rest of milk we use comes from the other farms we have agreements with in the area.
“Milk prices with the smaller Northeast cooperative we had been with since 2003 when we became a certified organic farm were up and down. We wanted to take the future in our own hands so we tried some other cooperatives but it didn’t work. Then in September 2022 the cooperative we were with went out of business. They told us they weren’t buying any milk from us starting immediately. We had no notice. At that time our yogurt company wasn’t big enough to use all the milk from our family farm.”
Prior to that catastrophe, Hayley and Stephanie had been headed down the cheese road for the milk value-add options, but then they came across Reykjavik Creamery in Newville. The creamery is run by a 10- generation skyr yogurt maker and the Painter sisters were immediately attracted to all the positive qualities of Skyr (pronounced skeer) yogurt. In regular yogurt making, a lot of whey protein is lost in the traditional process of making yogurt. The Reykjavik Creamery uses ultrafiltration equipment (to strain the water out) which keeps all of the whey protein which is typically lost in traditional techniques so that the skyr has 10% protein rather than the 5% protein of traditional yogurt. The process also means that the product is lower in sugar (aka lactose). The sisters then went the extra mile to make their product completely lactose free by adding a lactase enzyme during the milk culturing process.
With a unique product that would maximize the value of Painterland Farms’ milk, the sisters were ready to build the Painterland Sisters brand focusing on five flavors: plain, vanilla bean, blueberry lemon, strawberry and meadow berry (a product named after Stephanie’s daughter). They did the market research to see which flavor were most popular and put their twist on the flavors as well as promoting their regenerative, organic practices to their three target markets: millennial moms, healthy athletes, and the Gen X and Baby Boomers who are all attracted to the organic product that is high in protein and probiotics.
They started out selling locally in March 2022, first getting into stores through distributor John F. Martin. Currently they are selling their products in 45 states in stores like Whole Foods, Sprouts, Natural Grocers, Giant, and Albert’s Organics. The US organic yogurt industry accounts for $1.5 billion dollars and the Painterland Sisters are focused on capturing 20% of that market.
Within their first year of business, they reached $1.3 million in sales.Their ability to grow their brand is based on a sound business model of reliable, high-quality milk from their family farm, which in turn is turned into a high-quality value-added product at a local creamery. The storage and distribution of the milk necessary to grow this fast-paced business is handled by none other than Organic Valley—another reputable brand.
When the cooperative they were selling their milk to folded, Organic Valley stepped into the breach, thus providing stability and a steady source of organic milk to be used by Painterland Sisters yogurt. “Organic Valley came in to stabilize the situation” says Hayley. “We told them we needed milk for our yogurt production and we reached an agreement where our farm would sell them all our milk and then buy back what we needed for the yogurt.
“By 2025 we will be using all our own milk and using other farmers’ milk as well. A lot of farmers are looking for stable markets, and Pennsylvania has more young farmers than any other state. There is an opportunity here to get our grazing lands back to production if there are good markets for the milk. Having other farmers is critical. If you don’t have your neighbors, you don’t have people to service equipment or be a part of the agricultural community. It’s a whole Northeast problem.”
Finding Balance, Growing Sustainability
In 2023 Hayley and Stephanie heard through their connections at PASA (Pennsylvania Association of Sustainable Agriculture) that HMI Educator Ian Mitchell-Innes was coming to do an on-farm workshop and would the Painters be interested in hosting it? “Given the way we are laid out and the fact that we are grazing our dairy cattle, they thought we would be interested,” says Hayley. With a strong desire to learn anything that would help them improve their grazing, Hayley and Stephanie said yes.
“What we learned from Ian was how we could manage our pastures even more efficiently,” says Hayley. “Our soil is not nutrient dense because we have a lot of shale. He got us to think about how we can use our land the best and not overwork ourselves. We had to ask ourselves how do we work together better? There are lots of different visions of sustainable farming, and we do a lot of mechanical processing, and we have a lot of family members who work together to develop feed for our farm and other farms. There are other farms that are a lot more mechanized. After having Ian here, I felt a lot more empowered about our decisions to pursue the technology we have. I feel like it’s the right level for us because we are considering the cycle between us, the land, the cows, and our community. Some people focus so much on one thing.” One example of appropriate infrastructure investment was the upgrade in the milking parlor in 2014 to allow them to milk 150 cows/hour.
Hayley says that the focus on profit over production was another concept Ian drove home. “So much of the newer practices to improve sustainability seem to only focus on soil health,” says Hayley. “But, you also have to animal health. Ian confirmed for us that you need to keep animal health in mind. You can invest in a lot of technology or practices to get big results, but we are looking at the biggest bang for the buck by working naturally with what you have. Someone else might have greater yields but is it good for the cows and the community?
“We transitioned to organic pretty quickly in 2003 because we were already doing it anyway. Where we live there is a lot of fresh water, grass and hills that make it difficult for people to live or for row crops to be grown.. It’s great grazing land, but we are losing cow numbers in Pennsylvania because of the older farmers retiring or dairies going out of business. Grazing is good for soil, but we are losing the animals to do it. Right now, we are losing 1,000 acres/day in Pennsylvania that is converted into brushland. Grazing is a regenerative solution to mitigate this and to allow for natural carbon sequestration.”
The Painterland Farm herd includes Holsteins, Jerseys, Swiss, Guernsey, Dutch Belted, and some dual-purpose breeds like Milking Shorthorn and Lineback. Clinton Painter, Hayley and Stephanie’s father, heads up the grazing program at Painterland Farms. They haven’t always moved the cattle, but have been doing some type of rotational grazing since 2010. The current shift in grazing strategy is to try moving the cattle every three days. They run the milking herd all as one herd and raise the dry cows, heifers, and steers on separate farms and they are grazed all year long. The dairy herd has a mix of organic feed and silage grown on the farm, as well as the grass. Hayley estimated that the dairy herd’s diet is 90-98% grass depending on the month. With a focus on animal health and welfare, the dairy cattle usually have a lifespan of 7-8 years, far above the industry standard.
While milk is often the biggest cash crop in any month, the organic feed, corn, wheat, oats, hay, and sorghum sileage are all major income streams. Painterland Farms’ steers and cull cows and heifers are sold as organic beef to privately owned butcher shops, Nicholas Meats. “Diversity is a big piece of our holistic management,” says Hayley. “We try to keep our assets more fluid which allows for more cushion and options.”
While Hayley lives on the farm, she and Stephanie are consumed with expanding the market for their product and procuring more investment money. But, life on the farm keeps her grounded in her passion for the work. “I’m most passionate about the cows,” says Hayley. “I wouldn’t love this farm if the cows weren’t here. I feed the calves every other Sunday and get to do some of the milking and I’m involved in some hobby enterprises. I love helping with haying when I can. We all pitch in; it's a dance, all working together with baler, trucks and tractors.
“Working on the yogurt company is for my future and for my kids. Stephanie and I do have to do the bulk of the sales pitches and make all the decisions, although we have the best team imaginable and are continuing to grow our internal team. When the company is more stable maybe we’ll have others do different parts of the business. Right now, every little decision is so important. We expect to have gotten to the right scale for profitability in 2025. We are still on an extremely steep growth curve. Fundraising is a whole other job, but we have to do that as well. The standard thinking is that brands don’t last longer than 5 years before someone buys it and wants to kick out the original management and make things cheaper. We are fighting that model and coming up with new, yet old, ways of doing business. We feel like we are helping rural America have more of a voice. We want to share our way of life on a Pennsylvania farm where we get to raise our kids with our business, and preserve that way of life by staying with our family, the land, and the animals.
“We are also a part of the Chesapeake Watershed and we are making an effort to improve our management because of the effect of the land on the watershed. We need to be able to showcase things like walkways for cows and manure handling protocols so we can lead by example for our country.”
Hayley notes that the rest of the family is behind the business that she and Stephanie have been working so hard to develop—not just to create roles for themselves on the farm, but to sustain all aspects of Painterland Farm and all the families that are supported by it. “The rest of the family are really proud of what we’ve done,” says Hayley. “It’s really opened up the conversation about what this farm could be for this community.”
Stephanie and Hayley acknowledge that they are doing a lot of things differently with developing a “new” product, but, ultimately, they are connecting to their roots and building their brand from those roots. As millennial women they have captured a huge amount of interest and market in a short amount of time, articulating values that reflect those of their farm, family, and community, while answering a call for a product that speaks to the value of multiple generations of consumers for healthy food that support healthy land and animals, while addressing larger issues like climate change mitigation and the disappearance of farmland. That’s a lot to offer in a cup of cultured milk and Hayley and Stephanie have been able to pull it off with production practices that reflect those values.