Season 2 - Episode 1 Nick Carter (Host - Market Wagon CEO) (00:00): Today we're gonna have a conversation with a farmer and her teenage daughter, who are two key parts of the family owned New Horizon Farm and Dairy, as well as Happy Cows Creamery. They're in southwest Ohio, located about halfway between Cincinnati and Columbus. And as they so eloquently put it, the milk you get from them today was just grass two days ago. But it almost didn't happen. If not for a business plan that was drawn up by a 16-year-old girl, the farm would've likely suffered the same fate as the dozen other dairy farms around him, which have gone out of business in the past 10 years. Welcome back for the second season of the podcast. I am so excited to share the Bickel story with you today. Nick Carter (Host - Market Wagon CEO) (00:40): Welcome to More Than a Mile, a local food podcast from Market Wagon focused on connecting you to local food through farmer stories from across America. I'm Nick Carter, your host, a farmer and CEO and co-founder of Market Wagon. We are your online farmers market with a mission to enable food producers to thrive in their local and regional markets. Food is so much more than just nutrients and calories. It's actually the fabric that holds us together. Thanks for joining me for this episode of More Than a Mile, and thank you for buying local food. That's one critical step in making an investment in food for future generations. I am really excited today to be joined by Jackie Bickel and Maggie Mathews. We are gonna be talking about what turns out to be a story of kind of how a teenager's question and ambitious business plan, breathe new life, and another generation into a family farm. With now the expectation that it becomes a third generation farm. So welcome to the podcast, Jackie, More than a mile, New Horizon farm. Jackie Bickel (New Horizon Dairy) (01:43): Yes. Nick Carter (Host - Market Wagon CEO) (01:43): Yeah. So this was started by your father-in-law, right? Almost 60 years ago? Jackie Bickel (New Horizon Dairy) (01:48): Yes, it'll be 60 years next year. Nick Carter (Host - Market Wagon CEO) (01:51): Okay. And while for over half a century he operated the farm under normal business conditions, it sounds like in the last decade or so, things really, really changed. Right? Jackie Bickel (New Horizon Dairy) (02:04): They did. For decades, my father-in-law, my husband and his two brothers operated essentially a commercial dairy farm where we shipped our milk through a co-op. They came and picked it up by the semi-load every other day. We received pay based on the hundred pound weight, which was established by, you know, federal order. And about 10 years ago, the milk industry went upside down for a variety of reasons. Consumer demand declines, commercial dairies kept getting bigger, family farms kept getting smaller. And with the economy the way that it was, we, at one point we were receiving payment for our milk t hat was the same payment my father-in-law was receiving back in the 1980s. So Nick Carter (Host - Market Wagon CEO) (02:57): Wow. That's not how that's supposed to go Jackie Bickel (New Horizon Dairy) (02:57): . Right, exactly. Yeah. And we knew the demand was there. We just, we couldn't understand it. And my husband was just, he was getting very frustrated and we were talking about an exit strategy, not something that my father-in-law wanted to see happen. Wow. But, you know, putting pen pencil to paper, it just was not, it was not working. Nick Carter (Host - Market Wagon CEO) (03:22): Now the whole, was the whole family aware? Was this a family affair and family conversations around what could happen with the farm? Jackie Bickel (New Horizon Dairy) (03:29): Well, in 2015, my father-in-law retired and he passed the operation down to my husband. So we rent the land off of the family partnership and we still operate the dairy. 2015 prices were great. It was shortly after that where it started the downturn and we did have conversations with my father-in-law. He didn't wanna see it happen. We were looking for other alternatives. We downsized the herd. We started renting out part of our tillable ground to other area farms to farm themselves to keep our expenses down. And it just, it wasn't gonna work. And Maggie came home from an FFA field trip one day. She was on the dairy judging team, and she's like, I have an idea. And of course, we were not interested because we were very focused on what we were going to do. Nick Carter (Host - Market Wagon CEO) (04:29): And she was 16 years old at the time, right? Jackie Bickel (New Horizon Dairy) (04:33): Yep. Just turned 16. Nick Carter (Host - Market Wagon CEO) (04:34): Yeah. Was, was there an aspect of let the adults in the room figure this out? Jackie Bickel (New Horizon Dairy) (04:41): You know, my husband is very hardheaded and I can publicly say that because he's very proud of his hardheadedness. And you know, all he's ever known is ...
