Like his father and his grandfather before him, Shep Ysselstein’s life revolved around milk production.
Gunn’s Hill, near Woodstock, Ont., has been a dairy farm since the 1800s, and since the Ysselstein family bought it in the 1960s, the daily routine is to feed and milk the herd of 130 Holsteins morning and evening.
“We produced milk and they just trucked it away and it was hard to know where it was used. It’s blended into the pool and some of it goes to bottled milk and some goes to cheese plants,” Mr. Ysselstein explains. But he started thinking of an alternative when he took a break from the farm to earn a business administration degree at an agricultural college in Iowa.
He has four other brothers and two had already moved away from the farm to pursue other careers. He’d seen many other family farms get sold because the younger generation didn’t want to put in the hours it takes to make a living farming.
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