Dotterer-Pyle tells her truth on dairy

Dairy farmer Katie Dotterer-Pyle jokes that she’s stalked consumers a time or two in the grocery store. “If they’re buying milk, I’ll thank them, and say I’m a dairy farmer. But if they’re buying soy or almond juice, I’ll ask them why,” she said. (Photo by Jamie Clark Tiralla)

UNION BRIDGE, Md. — Katie Dotterer-Pyle doesn’t look like a dairy farmer. Or so she’s been told.
But she’s never been anything but a dairy farmer.
The 33-year-old grew up on a family farm near Penn State University, the oldest in the third generation of dairy farmers on her father’s side.
She interned at another Pennsylvania dairy farm while she was finishing her bachelor’s degree in business.
That’s where she met her husband, David Pyle, who is also a third-generation dairy farmer from Vermont.
“I ask, ‘What do I look like?’ and they say, ‘A normal person.’ [And I say] that’s what a dairy farmer is, a normal person,” said Dotterer-Pyle.
She and her husband own Cow Comfort Inn Dairy in Union Bridge, Md., where they milk about 400 cows, mostly Jerseys, twice a day.
She said the total number of animals the dairy has doubled when you count the calves and dry cows, and heifers that they keep on another farm nearby.
Seventy percent of their production is contracted to Land O’Lakes Inc., a Minnesota-based agricultural cooperative.
And though Dotterer-Pyle insists that she is a “normal person,” the numbers indicate otherwise.
As a whole, U.S. farmers only make up 2 percent of the population. And dairy farmers are a small fraction of that total.
Unstable milk prices and decreased consumer demand for fluid milk, has made dairy farmers even more rare.
According to the USDA, the number of dairy farms in the United States has decreased by 30 percent over the last decade.
On top of that, Dotterer-Pyle is a female dairy farmer.
“Consumers still think a farmer is a man wearing overalls and holding a pitchfork,” she said.
“Within agriculture, no, I don’t think we need to make a point that women are special. I haven’t met a male dairy farmer yet who won’t admit how much his wife does to take care of the farm and the family,” said Dotterer-Pyle.
However, she added that she thought it was, “important for consumers to understand that women in agriculture aren’t just farm wives.”
The gender stereotype is just one of the misconceptions that Dotterer-Pyle thinks consumers have about agriculture, though.
“I live for the lightbulb moments. I love having authentic conversations about agriculture with complete strangers,” she said.
Dotterer-Pyle jokes that she’s stalked consumers a time or two in the grocery store.
“If they’re buying milk, I’ll thank them…and say I’m a dairy farmer. But if they’re buying soy or almond juice, I’ll ask them why,” she said.
Usually, consumers aren’t sure why they’re buying an alternative, Dotterer-Pyle said. Mostly, they’ve just heard negative rhetoric about milk, or that plant-based options are a healthier option.
She said she asks consumers why they don’t ask a farmer for information. Most commonly, they tell her it’s because that they don’t know any farmers.
“We’re still not doing a good job of getting our message out there. I want people to know where their food comes from, as cliché as that sounds,” Dotterer-Pyle said.
Even though Dotterer-Pyle and her husband are both in the third generation of farming families, she said they are very much first generation farmers.
The couple briefly returned to Dotterer-Pyle’s family farm in Pennsylvania, quickly deciding it wasn’t the best fit.
In 2009, they started their own dairy herd, bouncing between Virginia and Pennsylvania.
But what they really wanted was to put down roots and start their own dairy.
Wanting to stay close to family, Dotterer-Pyle said they narrowed their search to the East Coast, but they weren’t necessarily set on a specific place.
Ultimately, they settled on Maryland where there was an opportunity to buy an existing dairy farm.
The couple established Cow Comfort Inn Dairy in Carroll County in 2013.
Starting a dairy business was challenging by itself, Dotterer-Pyle said, but adjusting to Maryland life was also challenging.
“LEAD Maryland changed my perspective and attitude about the state,” she said, of her experience in LEAD Maryland Foundation’s Class X.
“Being able to see the diversification from one end of the state to the other has opened my eyes. And I couldn’t have made the same connections in Maryland agriculture without this opportunity,” she added.
Dotterer-Pyle calls herself a “typical millennial” and said she has embraced social media as a way to connect with consumers as well as her fellow dairy farmers.
Years ago, she started a hashtag, #AskAFarmerNotGoogle, encouraging consumers to ask farmers questions about agriculture instead of the popular Internet search engine.
On her farm’s Facebook page, Dotterer-Pyle uses video to show consumers what happens on a dairy farm. She said one of her most popular videos, with more than 375,000 views, explains how they milk cows at her farm.
Dotterer-Pyle also started the Dairy Dance Off, a viral video trend where dairy farmers post videos of themselves dancing in their barns and milking parlors.
“It wasn’t abnormal for me. Dancing is something I do all the time. We have bluetooth speakers everywhere on the farm,” Dotterer-Pyle said. “I was doing some mundane chore — things were stressful in general — and I thought, you know what, if this makes one person laugh, it’s worth it.”
But the video did more than make one person laugh.
After she posted it on her personal Facebook page, Dotterer-Pyle said she immediately got a message from her dairy farmer friend, Jessica Peters of Spruce Row Farm in Meadville, Pa.
Peters challenged Dotterer-Pyle to a “dairy dance off.” And so, the pair filmed themselves, each dancing to Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off.”
With some savvy editing skills, Peters spliced the two videos together and they posted it on social media.
It was an instant hit and has amassed more than 200 comments and been shared more than 1,000 times.
“The best part was getting messages from complete strangers — farmers from all over the world — who thanked me for doing that,” Dotterer-Pyle said. “They would tell me they hadn’t laughed that hard in months.”
The dairy dance off video may have been all in good fun, but the topic was a serious one, she said. And Dotterer-Pyle doesn’t sugar coat the truth about what it means to work in the dairy industry today.
She tells people: It’s hard.
In February, Dotterer-Pyle posted a live video to the Cow Comfort Inn Dairy’s Facebook page, explaining her farm’s financial situation and crisis that dairy farmers were experiencing.
Feeding cows at her farm costs $25,000 per month, she said — almost $1 millon a year.
Those costs are remaining constant along with the farms other expenses, Dotterer-Pyle explained, while the farm’s income is going down.
In the video Dotterer-Pyle said while getting $10 less per hundred gallons of milk might not seem like a lot, it works out to about $65,000 in lost income per month.
“It is hard. I look at my friends who go on these vacations…a dairy farmer doesn’t get to take a vacation…I can’t afford to remodel my kitchen…This past year has been stressful and I’ve had moments where I’ve thought about doing something else,” Dotterer-Pyle admitted.
But, she said, “I go out to the barn and look into all those big brown eyes and know…there’s nothing else.”
Most farmers wouldn’t think about being that transparent. But for Dotterer-Pyle, it was important to spell it out.
The video was shared almost 5,000 times and has more than 600 comments ranging from other dairy farmers thanking her to consumers asking how they could help.
And while social media is a quick and convenient way for her to stay connected, Dotterer-Pyle said she still prefers the one on one interactions.
“Farm tours are my favorite. I haven’t had one yet that was under two hours. People come here and don’t even realize how many questions they have,” Dotterer-Pyle said.
With her husband’s encouragement, Dotterer-Pyle said she recently began charging for farm tours — $6 a person.
“I should probably charge more. [My husband] keeps telling me that my time is valuable and he’s right. People pay to go to the aquarium or a museum. This is an experience too,” she said.
Dotterer-Pyle does have an off farm job as a part-time Spanish teacher for middle and high school students. Her second bachelor’s degree is in Secondary Spanish Education. She considers herself lucky to have a part time job with benefits that gets her back to the farm by noon.
Looking forward, Dotterer-Pyle said there are a number of things she’d like to accomplish, one of them being an online Spanish language course for farmers.
“Ag is in my blood. It always has been and it always will be,” Dotterer-Pyle said. “I love the farm, but I feel like there is more out there for me. I would like to make a bigger impact than what I’m making now.”