Mistyglen Creamery officially opened its doors a year ago.
However the roots date back to the original Pettit Homestead, next door to the current Mistyglen Holsteins.
Today, the husband and wife team of Tom and Kris Pettit run the family farm.
Kris offers a brief history of the dairy operation on Yorke Line, south of Belmont.
Kris adds growing up on a dairy farm teaches a lot of valuable life lessons.
Like the value of hard work. The importance of community. The beauty and bounty of nature.
And, perhaps most critical, the fickleness of Mother Nature.
With the opening of Mistyglen Creamery in June of last year, the husband and wife team are now taking advantage of the opportunity to show customers and visitors what farm to table really means.
Their milk is processed on-farm, only a couple hundred feet from where the cows produce it.
The farm consists of 235 acres, and Kris notes they generally milk about 50 to 55 cows.
And it’s more than just a creamery. The on-farm retail outlet stocks cuts of beef, fresh and frozen chicken and eggs.
The serious work of finding a way to merge Mistyglen Creamery into their dairy operation faced several daunting challenges.
For Kris and Tom, their robotic barn was struck not once but twice by tornadoes in the span of five weeks.
That resulted in moving the milking cows to a neighbour’s farm for several months.
Rebuilding the barn did have an upside, however, explains Kris.
You can watch a video of the tornadoes and follow the rebuilding process on their website at https://mistyglencreamery.com/about/
Educating consumers and answering their questions is a critical consideration at Mistyglen Creamery.
The goal, stresses Kris, is to make the creamery a destination for area residents and visitors to Elgin county.
However, Kris has a much more ambitious personal goal for Mistyglen Creamery.
Mistyglen Creamery recently won in the Agribusiness category at the Business Achievement Awards, hosted by the London Chamber of Commerce.
You can listen to more of the interview with Kris Pettit below.
