MicroDairy Designs and Old Springhouse Farm

My original dream was to milk two jersey cows, make the world’s most expensive ice cream, and market it as “the world’s most expensive ice cream”. I thought I had everything that I needed until I asked my milk inspector and my county extension agent to come and “bless” my project. Instead of blessing my project, they handed me the Federal Pasteurized Milk Ordinance – all 380 pages. We then went looking for equipment that met those requirements and the cheapest system we could find at that time was almost a quarter of a million dollars. I didn’t have the quarter of a million dollars and the equipment that we found was so large that the milk from our two cows would spoil before we reached the minimum processing capacity.

I became frustrated and decided to just build it myself. The first thing I built was a trailer, 12 feet x 50 feet, that included a two stall cow milking parlor, a milk house, a bathroom with shower, an office with lab, an equipment room, a storage room, a processing room and a retail sales area. Then I started working on the pasteurizer. My milk inspector was most helpful and we went back and forth considering many different design ideas. Finally I finished the first unit. He told one of his clients running a small goat dairy about it, and they bought it from me. So I built another one and another of his clients bought that one. At that point I realized that there were many other people needing a small pasteurizing system, and we now have over 600 systems installed in 44 states and 18 countries outside the U.S. For an accidental business, we are having a lot of fun.

We are still a very small business: just me, my wife, and our son-in-law.

Thanks for considering MicroDairy Designs’ equipment for your processing needs,
and have an excellent day!

Frank Kipe

The home of Old Springhouse Farm and MicroDairy Designs

Our Mission: We have two missions for our business:

The first is to demonstrate that very small-scale dairying is economically sustainable in the U.S.

Second, I was born in Zimbabwe and lived in Zambia and Zimbabwe until I came back to the states to go to college. We are working on designs for systems that meet the requirements of developing countries and a portion of our resources go towards that project. We’d like to feed the world one small dairy at a time.