Artisanal flair builds business

Crafting quality dairy products opens door to a future on the farm.

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Published on July 25, 2024

Cows & Co. — Maartje Murphy in the aging room of her dairy-processing facility. Photo:
Maria Rue/Impact Social

When Maartje Murphy was growing up on her family’s dairy farm near Carrington, North Dakota, she had no desire to join her brothers in the family business. Instead, she wanted to work as a nurse, and that’s what she did after graduating from university and marrying her husband, Casey Murphy, a physiotherapist.

Somewhere along the way, she began to reconsider her earlier notion. Murphy started to appreciate the benefits of farm life. “I began asking myself a question: What’s a way for me to be a part of the dairy without being involved in the actual processes of caring for and milking the cows?” she says.

Fittingly, her birthplace — the Netherlands — inspired the eventual answer to the question. Her parents had left a dairy farm there to develop a dairy in Canada. From there, they moved to North Dakota to build from scratch a new dairy. Their frequent trips home to the Netherlands to visit family exposed Murphy to the gifts of her Dutch heritage. She translated these into the artisanal cheeses and gelato that she and her husband now process and market through their on-farm enterprise called Cows and Co. Creamery.

Wave of the future

Inspiration for the business came from Dutch cheesemakers. “The Netherlands have lots of artisanal cheesemakers, who also make gelato,” Murphy says. “I remember sitting outside a shop eating gelato and having this amazing feeling that’s hard to describe. I wanted to bring that feeling back to North Dakota.”

That feeling was wrapped up in Murphy’s sense that artisanal, “homestead” food products were the wave of the future. She realized consumers increasingly sought to know the source of their foods.

Also, as she herself experienced in the Netherlands, she wanted to give consumers an experience of farm life. “My goal is for people to come here to the farm and see how Gouda cheese is made and how cows are milked,” she says. “I want people to see how farms are being run today. I want people to have the opportunity to enjoy farm life, even for just one day.”

While Cows and Co. Creamery offers that experience to consumers now, it took time for the Murphys to develop their business to that point. They started small. In 2018, while both worked full-time at their respective medical professions, they transformed the family’s garage into a small facility for making gelato. Murphy and her mother, Conny van Bedaf, had spent a week in Italy learning to make the frozen dairy dessert resembling ice cream.

At first, they made gelato on special order to serve at weddings. Word of mouth spread the news of their business, Duchessa Gelato, and demand grew. Soon they were filling enough special orders to deliver their product to cities throughout North Dakota.

As demand for gelato grew, so did the Murphys’ vision of the products they could make from the milk produced by the dairy. Gouda cheese topped the list, and Murphy spent a month in the Netherlands learning how to make the semi-hard cheese. Her training complemented her mother’s early apprenticeship in cheesemaking in New Zealand.

Hand in hand with gaining skills, they developed the infrastructure needed to process and market their products. “We bought a small, picturesque dairy farm near my parents’ farm,” Murphy says. “The farmstead had a pole barn sitting in the right spot for what we envisioned doing.”

They outfitted the 50×80-foot structure as a dairy-processing facility that also includes temperature- and humidity-controlled aging rooms for the Gouda. It also houses a café where on certain days, guests can eat the specialty foods served by Cows and Co. Creamery, a business name reflecting their expanded offering of dairy products.

A grant from the North Dakota Department of Agriculture Agricultural Products Utilization Commission provided the Murphys with financial assistance to develop the infrastructure needed to process and market products made from the family’s dairy. The grant is awarded to agricultural enterprises adding value to farm products.

Demand for their offerings continues to grow. “From the start, we’ve just continued to build our customer base,” Murphy says. “We’ve relied primarily on word of mouth, along with postings on Instagram and Facebook. From the beginning we’ve tried to do the best we can in making a good product and providing good customer service. People remember their first experiences with us.”

That commitment to excellence landed Murphy a spot on the 2021 Forbes list of 30 Under 30 in the Food and Drink category.

“Our café is open only a few times a month, typically every other Saturday and every other Thursday evening; people have to check our website for the schedule,” she says. “When we’re open, we have as many as 500 people come to the café. They can pick up the Gouda or the freshly made gelato they may have ordered in advance from the website, and they can sit down in the café and eat our specialty foods like gelato, cheese curds, or macaroni and cheese.”

Customers come from all over North Dakota and surrounding states to visit the creamery.

The Murphys also deliver their products to locations in 10 cities to serve customers placing orders on the website. In addition, they opened a business in Fargo. “The shop in Fargo is a fresh gelato scoop shop,” says Murphy. “We also sell homemade stroopwafels and have cheese and gelato to go.”

Cows and Co. Creamery now employs both of the Murphys full-time, along with van Bedaf and three additional individuals.

“My goal remains for our customers to come to the farm and enjoy farm life,” Murphy says. “I couldn’t have asked for a better life than what I’m experiencing here. We’re happy and grateful to have the business that we have now and for the potential opportunity we’re going to have in the future.”

Big dream

Cows and Co. Creamery presently consumes and adds value to just 1% to 2% of the milk produced by the 1,500 cows in the family’s dairy.

“But our small business is building the foundation for what could become a larger family enterprise,” Murphy says. “My brothers and husband have a long-term goal of processing and marketing dairy products from all of the milk.

“My family is passionate about producing high-quality milk, and they should be the ones earning the rewards from selling the good products made from that milk. It’s a big dream and another reason I do what I do.”