Scott and Teresa Forrest

Goshen County, Wyoming

The Forrest family has worked their six hundred acres in Goshen, Wyoming since 1994 when they left their farm in Colorado. It was a hard year for Scott in particular. Development pressure was building to an intolerable level where the family was dairying back in Colorado. Plus, milk prices were pretty bad. Scott figured they’d be better off raising heifers. So he sold the herd he’d been building since 1972, picked up the family, and moved to Wyoming.

They did okay until the heifer market went south in 2002, and Scott really missed the cows. “Back in Colorado, I grew up around my great uncle who had a dairy about three miles from us. He milked a herd of registered Jerseys. That’s where I got my taste for dairying. As I got into high school and wanted to farm, we got some equipment and I started my farming career like that. I remember doing a report in 8^th grade on what kind of career we wanted to get into, and I did mine on dairy farming. I knew that’s what I wanted to do. When we sold out in ‘94, it was the worst day of my life. I hated seeing my cows go. I never wanted to stop milking cows. There are days you question what you’re doing for sure, but they’re few and far between.”

Scott continues to have a soft spot in his heart for Jerseys, though his milking herd of about 120 cows is mixed now, consisting of both Jerseys and Holsteins. Why did he get into Holsteins to begin with? “In the early 80’s I built our Jersey herd up to about 80 head, but we were with a milk processor who wanted volume, not butterfat.” (Typically, Holsteins give more milk since they’re bigger cows, while Jerseys are smaller and give less but richer milk.) The dairy association didn’t reward its producers for richer milk. They just wanted more.

In 1985 Scott’s dad took early retirement from his off farm job and decided to go into the dairy with Scott. They bought 40 Holsteins. Through the years they gradually sold the Jerseys out and by 1994 when they sold their spread in Colorado, the herd was one hundred per cent Holstein.

Scott and Teresa’s oldest child, Crystal, also has a soft spot for Jerseys, since she grew up with them and showed them at fairs. Crystal and her husband Ryan work on the farm full time now with Scott. Crystal has a degree in Agricultural Sciences from the University of Wyoming - Laramie, and taught Ag Science in high school for 6 years before coming back to the farm. Crystal’s youngest brother, Brian, also works the farm with them. The middle Forrest child, David, is a mason in town and helps out when he can.

The Forrests grow all their own feed on the farm. “We try to keep ‘the loop’ closed,” Scott says. “If you’ve got to ship feed in around here, the freight prices will kill you.” Summer of 2010 was particularly rough on them, since a plague of grasshoppers took a lot of their crop. “Conventional farmers didn’t fare so well either,” Scott says. “They’d spray the pesticides on their fields and the hoppers were back a week later. The costs were phenomenal.”

A few years ago, the Forrests might have been spraying, as well, because they were farming conventionally. Back in ’06 the Forrests had just started milking cows again when Organic Valley began looking for organic producers in that area of the west. “They pointed out that we were doing things so close to organic already, why didn’t we think about transitioning? We never used any synthetic fertilizer or other chemicals on our hay ground. We only sprayed the corn.

“I don’t like pesticides. I remember one year David and I were out spraying and we’d come out of the fields with headaches. We both said there’s got to be a better way. It was about that time we heard from Organic Valley. We were certified in May ‘08 and I think it was the best thing we’ve ever done.”

“We were at a meeting recently where they talked about glyphosate [a chemical herbicide that is supposedly one of the most “benign” chemicals and is the active ingredient in Roundup]. The stuff’s getting down into the roots and then staying in the ground even though the manufacturers claim it isn’t. The whole chemical thing is scary stuff.”

Crystal’s been doing a lot of research. As an expectant mother, she’s wary of what she puts into her body. Scott says, “We try to eat organic as much as possible. We grow a lot of what we eat here. We have a garden, we raise our own beef, and Brian has chickens so we have eggs.”

Teresa has an off farm job at a local bank and helps out whenever she can. Scott’s mom and dad have some acreage about three miles away, and his dad still helps out on the farm. “Dad’s 80 years old and still going strong,” Scott says. “I wish he’d slow down a little sometimes, but that would mean he wouldn’t be around as much, and I wouldn’t want that!”