A Hail Mary That Paid Off: Terry DeGroot's Path to a New Kind of Dairy
In 2017 Terry DeGroot left the Navy and came home to Kersey, Colorado, to a family dairy operation that was struggling. His father had run things by the book for years — milking a peak of 1,000 Holstein cows, doing everything the conventional model called for — but the farm had still turned a profit in only three of the previous ten years.
Terry knew something had to give. While his mom and sister took on outside work and Terry used his Navy education benefits to attend school full-time, the family started weighing a much bigger change than they’d ever considered before.
By 2019, they made the call: sell off the Holstein herd entirely and start over with just 14 Guernseys. Terry has called it their “hail Mary.” It was a full reset, not an adjustment — new breed, new herd size, new everything.
That risk paid off through a partnership with Origin Milk, an Ohio-based dairy brand working specifically with small Guernsey operations to get their milk onto grocery shelves. For Terry, that partnership reflected something bigger than just finding a buyer — it was part of realizing his family couldn’t do everything alone anymore, and that finding the right partners, whether for processing, marketing, or rebuilding their website, was as important to the farm’s survival as any decision made in the barn.
That same hands-on instinct still shows up in how they run things day to day: Terry and his family process their own milk, using a slow, low-temperature pasteurization method and skipping homogenization, so the cream separates naturally. Milk testing plays a central role here, too — “it gives me a real picture of the cows,” Terry says, and he leans on that data to manage for fat-corrected milk rather than volume alone. A high-producing cow means little to him if she isn’t also delivering the components to back it up, so he uses testing results to keep Colorado Cow’s whole milk balanced at its 4% butterfat target. The herd has since grown past 150 cows, and Colorado Cow products are now sold at Whole Foods and Natural Grocers locations across the state.
The pandemic brought another test in 2020, right in the middle of an already massive transition — and the family met it the same way they’d met everything else: by adapting. With normal sales channels disrupted, the DeGroots opened an on-site farm store, and it’s since become a real part of the business, selling milk, gelato, kefir, and ghee directly to their community. The family is now working on a new facility where visitors will be able to shop, see the animals, and see firsthand where their milk comes from.
