Our Story
Following the devastation in Europe from World War II, my grandparents emigrated from Holland to America for a chance at a new life. My father’s family immigrated to Artesia, CA while my mother’s family landed in Missouri. After arriving in America with nothing, both families ended up in the dairy business and found themselves milking cows in the San Diego area of California. My parents met at church, got married, and worked offsite from the family businesses until an opportunity presented itself to buy their very own dairy in the San Diego area. With six loans from six trusted industry people – including each of their fathers – who believed in their ability to make something of themselves, they started their very first dairy. They obtained their 550 cow, open-lot dairy in 1971 and began to build their family, of which I was the first of four children.
​
From a very young age, I knew that I wanted to be a dairyman when I grew up. Despite urges from my teachers to pursue my skills in math and science in the field of engineering, I stuck to my gut knowing that these skills were just as important and applicable in the dairy business. I attended college for two years and worked abroad for a short time before returning home to work for my dad and meet and marry my wife. Shortly before we got married, an opportunity came up to start our own dairy in the San Diego area, about 45 minutes away from my parents’ place. My dad sold us 150 cows on a “pay-it-back-when-you-can” basis and we worked for four years on the dairy before making the decision that the dairy business was where we wanted to spend our entire lives and that San Diego was not the place to do that. We were just one in a tide of dairymen looking to leave the San Diego area, many of whom were moving into the Central Valley. My parents fully supported our decision and my dad immediately responded by telling me, "let’s do it together", which was good news for my wife and I as we had the energy and ideas, but not the capital needed to make such a move.
We began looking in the Bakersfield area, somewhere we felt was more conducive for “making milk”, which was about 3 ½ hours from San Diego and family. My sister-in-law and her husband had a 3,000 cow dairy in Bakersfield and we were hoping to join them in this area that had lots of land, good water, and lots of feed. After a year and a half of searching, making offers on existing dairies, and on open ground with hopes of building a dairy, we came up empty, simply outbid by people with more capital available or blocked by sellers who did not think we could make it. Finally, I told my dad we needed to look elsewhere and further north seemed like the perfect opportunity. We almost immediately found a piece of ground and made an offer on our current 1,500-acre ranch. It needed a lot of work, especially on destroyed water lines, a lack of good wells, and the proneness of the land to flooding. We planned to build a dairy there that could house a milking herd of 3,200 cows in free-stall barns on a TMR with technology, all of which we did not have at either of our previous dairies. Environmental lawsuits presented themselves and set back the permit and permission process from 1999 to 2004, a five year span of time in which the land just sat there. To try and make ends meet, we bought an old dairy a few miles away and worked it until we were cleared to build and move to our new dairy. During this time, we were able to learn how to dairy in this new area with free-stalls, TMRs, and other aspects that we had not had experience with before and utilize this new knowledge to better plan and design our current dairy.
​
My father and I built the dairy from the ground up, building
everything but the milking barn with our own bare hands alongside our
wives and children. In September 2005, we combined our herds and
introduced them to their new home. We began with one free stall barn
containing 1,200 cows, and in 2007 we expanded and built a second
free stall barn to house an additional 1,200 cows that we acquired
through auctions and neighbors. In 2009, we added a third free stall
barn and put in our second milking pit to create our current double-30
parallel parlors that milk our 3,200 cows 3x a day. Our heifers are
housed on sight and our calves are shipped off until they are 120 days
old and able to return to the home sight. We are actively working to
improve our genetics while maintaining our herd size and have recently expanded through the acquisition of a partnership on a second dairy that milks 600 cows.
​
Thank You,
Simon Vander Woude
Owner--in partnership with Christine Vander Woude (wife)
