This is Max and this is Amelia. I think I got it right. And we're here at Grace Harbor Farms. Grace Harbor Farms makes a variety of goat milk products, also other dairy products.
And from their soap, lotion to skincare products, you can find those in more than 100 stores nationwide. We didn't have any money. We didn't have anything in mind.
We just had two goats and we made some soap. But we lost the business. Tim and Grace Lukens started the farm back in 1999 with just two goats. And their story is incredible. They've gone through ups and downs with bankruptcy due to some something that happened.
We'll share about that. And they've just risen back out of that crisis in an incredible way. But when people came and said, why don't you make cheese or milk and stuff? I said, no, why do I want to do that?
Dairy farms are dying like flies. I mean, why do I want to do that? Started making yogurt. Yogurt was fantastic.
Yogurt took off. We ended up with a lot more demand than we could meet. Thanks to their success, they now buy milk from two other farms. but they also maintain a grade A dairy farm on their property. This is it.
This is a mini grade A goat dairy. You can do it for cows. It'd be slightly larger, but the concept is the same.
And farming in general is a really complicated business. So that's why we made this into a two episode series. This is part one. Make sure you come back and check out part two. Question about what budget you had in mind when you started out.
When you started out. How much money was it? We didn't have it. How did you spend it?
We didn't have any money. We didn't have anything in mind. We just had two goats and we made some soap. We went to the mall. When we went to the mall, the kiosk rents were expensive, but we were selling enough soap, we thought, to pay that, which we did.
We made it sort of. But we had no, we didn't start with a budget. We didn't start with a plan. We just went. Yeah, when we started it out, we didn't buy the goats with the intention of building this business.
We had no concept at all what would happen 20 years later. So when we decided to make soap, it was because, hey, these goats are kind of fun and we like them. And so let's see if there's a way we can turn this hobby into a business. That was kind of my orientation.
I wanted to make a business out of it. And Grace's sister, Christy, lives over in Port Angeles area, said, hey, I've got this friend. And gosh, they sell like, I think they sell $100 a weekend in soap at the farmer's market. We went, oh, okay, that'll do it. So Grace learned how to make soap.
And that's how we got in the farmer's market. It's been a while since I've pet a goat. That's cool.
So Dave, what about starting a farm? As people are watching this right now, they're wondering, man, this is exciting. Goats, milk, food, products. What are some steps they need to take to make it happen? Starts there.
If you want to start a farm, I recommend getting a goat or a cow or something, right? They literally start with one. Yeah, sure. One or two. I mean two is great because then they got a friend but I mean we'll show you literally how we started.
This is actually a prototype dairy we started again on site where our creamery is. That little goat right there and the other ones out in the field they're all specific breeds that can breed year-round so that's some nerdy goat talk and goat people will like that. But if you want to start milking goats grade A status you need a goat milk parlor right. So come on into the office here and you can put a goat on each side.
You can milk them. We even have our official sign here. It's very awesome.
So we will milk these goats into a bucket. It's a closed bucket. It's going to go each goat into the same bucket and capture the milk and come on through here. Part of a grade A goat dairy is you have to have a milk house that's separate. Your milking parlor has to have an enclosed room or ceiling.
So you saw that in there. So this is the milk house. You can wash everything separately in here.
It's clean. There's no manure or anything. Then one of the main things is you have to get your milk below 45 degrees within two hours. Comes out of the animal about 100 degrees roughly.
And so this is a mini Bolt tank. Look at that. Hey, there's your bottles.
Yep. This is it. This is a mini grade A goat dairy. You could do it for cows. It'd be slightly larger, but the concept is the same.
It's not that complicated. It's natural to overcomplicate things. I'm surprised. I thought it was going to be a lot more to it, but you've got one room, you've got a goat, and you've got room two.
Absolutely true. So it may not. Keep it simple, people. It's the KISS method, right? Right.
Well, the farmer's market was very successful. People were telling us, oh wow, this soap is great. It's the best thing I've ever used on my skin. And can you figure out how to make some lotion? So I did.
I figured out how to make some lotion. And by the end of the farmer's market season, people were saying, oh, where can we find you when the farmer's market season gets over? So we rented a kiosk at Bellas Fair Mall. We're selling soap and lotion in the mall.
We were there for two and a half years through three Christmas seasons. And we made a lot of soap to pay the rent. It's expensive in those places.
And you have to keep it manned all the hours that the mall is open. But we launched a business. But as soon as people see the sign that says you're doing goat products, they say, do you make cheese? And no, we don't make any cheese.
But when people came and said, why don't you make cheese or milk and stuff? I said, no, why do I want to do that? Dairy farms are... Dying like flies.
I mean, why do I want to do that? But after about a year, people kept coming back, coming back, coming back. And we went, oh, maybe they actually will buy this stuff.
So Dave, thanks for being with us. My pleasure. You're now the man in charge. I am.
That's what they tell me. How does that make you feel? Stressed at times. Sleeping well at night?
Yeah, no, it's good. It's good. That's awesome.
Standing here, it smells incredibly good, filled with essential oils. That's where it all began. I wanted to ask you about your product line. A couple of things. How do you come up with it?
And then labeling. Do you do that here? Do you use someone else just so we can better understand the process?
Yeah, so we've come up with everything ourselves. Grace has actually been the main formulator for especially the skincare. She did all that basically herself.
And then when we started the dairy product side of everything, she's done most of it. And then I've helped in the last couple of years formulate some products and get stuff going. Everything's bottled, made in-house. With the skincare side, the only exception to that is the bar soap.
Making bar soap is actually slightly dangerous. So that has been outsourced to a local company. Local meaning just across the Canadian border, but they're just a few miles from us here. So beyond that. Everything you see, including all the food products and stuff that we'll look at later, that's all done here.
What about soap that's dangerous to make? When you make soap, you deal with lye. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it can burn you.
And if you add it too fast into your liquid soap mix, it can actually kind of blow up. Interesting. Yeah. There's tricks of the trade.
Better hand it over to people that are doing it on a mass scale. Know what they're doing. We added the bottled milk thing and added cows. It just expanded this way. So we started with this, and then it went like this.
We had a big crisis, and we kind of folded for a little while, but we recovered from that. And that's when David and Tim decided, let's make yogurt. And we had a really good relationship with our customer base in Seattle. We had started just with a little bit of cheese and then these other things. And so they would practically take anything we wanted.
produced. So they bottled, started making yogurt. Yogurt was fantastic. Yogurt took off.
We ended up with a lot more demand than we could meet. So we had to make choices on how we're going to get enough milk because we were milking 12 or 15 cows here and 70 goats. A bunch, yeah. Much too much for this property to handle.
So at that point, we literally farmed the animals out to other farms and we just became a processing business. And at the same time that we had the E. coli crisis, we split the businesses.
And we have a skincare business, which is called Grace Harbor International. And we have a dairy business, which is doing business as Grace Harbor Farms. And we did that for two reasons, which both turned out to be a smart thing to do. The first reason was in case we ever had a crisis again, the whole thing wouldn't go down.
That we would still have, on either side, if there were some kind of a crisis. the other business would still survive. And the second one was if we ever wanted to sell one of them, we'd still have the other. Yeah, we actually make all the skincare stuff right here.
So come on over. Let's check it out. All right. So this is the brains.
It's not a lot of room. Nope. It's lean.
It's lean. I saw Paul Akers on your channel. It's lean, man. I love it.
Yeah, no, it's good stuff. You guys are going after the model. Yep.
That's definitely part of it. So what happens here? Walk us through a quick process of...
really what's here to be honest with you the quick process is in everything within the lotion world gets made just in a in a five gallon pot basically right so it gets melted there's our little burners over there little melters everything gets melted added together mixed up um msm creams are number one seller and that is actually somewhat complicated on a science or chemistry style uh thing so grace has been really good at that about that and formulating it, figuring out how to have people create, you know, mix it based off of her recipe and stuff. So once it's all mixed together, which most of it's, I mean, you know, it's on in there because of the label, but then how we actually get it to bind together and stay together and stuff, that's kind of a sort of a secret. But as soon as it's done there, then it gets bottled just immediately.
So they set up tables here and this is, this was made today. So it's actually still a little bit liquid, but it's really cool setting up. And then you label it right here.
I see the label. You got it. Label rolls there. Label rolls there gets labeled.
And then the last step is gets boxed up. So whether it's getting shipped across the world. I mean, we've literally shipped international to many different countries or it's just going down to the local Bellingham co-op.
That's amazing, man. Are you sharing your story? some format that people gravitate you know these days people love the story of low pool and where you come from how it started if so how are you doing that and is that a big part of your success as well would you contribute it to your success we i we don't have a formal way of doing that right now but we tell the story individually with and people and you're exactly right people love the story yeah stories stick i hear that from time to time and i try in my newsletters to have some story each time.
The newsletters go out every once a month right now. Just recently hired a guy to help us with social media. So he's starting to tell the story a little bit more there.
David does a good job with Facebook and things like that, getting the story out. Those are the way that stories get told now with video and like what you're doing. Yeah, that's good. That's a question for you guys. If you currently operate a farm, small, large, mid-scale.
If you can share with us how you're effectively sharing your story for Tim and Grace and for them to take that to the next level, I think that would be really cool to hear your experience and your success and how exactly are you sharing your story? How has that impacted your bottom line and really your service? Are you selling online?
If so, what platforms are you using? What are your plans to grow in that space as well? Yeah. For the food side, it's a little harder just because refrigeration, you know, all that good stuff. So we do sell to a couple retail partners that do pack food boxes.
So they sell online and we're a supplier to them. So I don't know a ton about that food world selling online. The skincare side, we do sell online. That's our primary sales funnel from our own website.
So we've done that for years, but then now everybody's on Amazon, right? So we've done the Amazon thing. It seems to be good.
Amazon's getting a little harder to deal with too because if you claim pain relief or anything, you know, I mean, it's going to maybe get flagged that you're making some sort of healing claim or something of that sort, right? Interesting. So there's some things to, some hoops to jump through, so to speak. But yeah, I mean, it's the wonderful age that we're in is YouTube, right? You can learn just about anything on YouTube these days.
And so we've done a lot of that. There's so much we can talk about. And that's why we're going to share this in two episodes. But please ask questions, subscribe, hit the bell button so that you don't miss any videos from us. We've got a lot more coming, and I hope that we're getting better each time.
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