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New Orleans Times Picayune

Thursday, April 3, 2003

By: Dale Curry, Food Editor

"CREAM AT THE TOP"

TWO COUNTRY DAIRIES NEAR NEW ORLEANS ARE THE ONLY ONES IN LOUISIANA PRODUCING OLD-STYLE MILK THAT IS NOT HOMOGENIZED, ALONG WITH OTHER NATURAL DAIRY PRODUCTS.

Warren Smith knows about fresh milk because for most of his life, he “drank it right off the cow.” Today is not much different in his rural world in Washington Parish because everything old is new again.

Customers are driving from New Orleans and Baton Rouge onto country roads and tiptoeing around cow pies to get the dairyman’s milk with cream on top—milk that is only eight hours out of the cow when it is bottled.

His Smith Creamery is the second in Louisiana, following Mauthe’s Dairy in Folsom, to produce products that lived only in the memories of most fiftysomethings. That is, milk that is pasteurized but not homogenized, cream that is thicker and quicker to whip, country butter, and in the case of Mauthe’s, Creole cream cheese, a delicacy long appreciated in New Orleans but discontinued by large dairies a decade ago.

“People want to go back to the natural things,” Smith explained. “They don’t want hormones and additives.”

There is one ingredient listed on a bottle of Smith’s milk: milk. And on the butter is only one: cream.

“It’s natural sweet cream, a true cream,” Michelle Hickman, Smith’s daughter, who works as a nurse and in the creamery part time. “It whips faster and stays whipped. It’s thicker.”

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Cows at both Smith Creamery and Mauthe’s Dairy are mostly grass-fed, with only some grain in the diet, a factor to which the farmers attribute the good taste of their products.

Of Smith’s 240 cows, the majority are Holsteins and some are half Jersey. Mauthe’s cows, 10 in Folsom and 80 just across the Mississippi line near Washington Parish, are all Jerseys, which produce milk with a higher butterfat content. Both dairies produce whole, low-fat, skim and chocolate milk. Mauthe also makes a soft herbed cheese and yogurt, and Smith plans to add buttermilk and ice cream to his products.

“I’ve been doing this all my life,” said Smith. “They took me to the barn in a washtub; that was my playpen.”

Years ago, when local dairies supplied their areas with milk, Washington and Tangipahoa parishes constituted one of 30 densely dairy areas in the United States, Smith said. “Everybody around here dairied.” Now, most milk consumed here is brought in from other states, some of it mixed from several states.

Smith Creamery products are well known in the Baton Rouge area, just as Mauthe’s are familiar to markets shoppers in New Orleans and the north shore. Smith’s milk is available in several New Orleans stores including Robert Fresh Market, Meme’s Market, Langenstein’s and the Whole Foods Market on Esplanade Avenue. The Smith Creamery Store at Mount Hermon is open to the public from 1-4 pm Wednesday through Friday and 10am to 4pm Saturday. Group tours can be arranged by calling 985/ 877.4445.

Both Smith and the Mauthes claim that people who are lactose-intolerant can drink the non-homogenized milk with no problem. Smith says more than 400 people have told him they couldn’t drink milk, then tested his milk and came back to report success. They claim that homogenized milk, in which the cream and milk are bound together, is not readily digested as milk that has been pasteurized only.

As yet, the area’s natural milk production is small. “You’ve got to crawl before you can walk.” Smith said. “We’re just about to get on our knees.” Prices are only slightly higher for most supermarket milk---about 24 to 40 cents higher, Smith said.

But it may take some looking to spot the non-homogenized milk at the store. As yet, only a few stores are selling it and some of those are giving it little space. “We’re the new kid on the block,” said Smith.

“These are high-risk taking leaders,” said Richard McCarthy, executive director of the Crescent City Farmers Market, of the Mauthes and Smiths. “They are going out of their way to return to artisanal techniques in our state.”

The families also promote cooking with their products for richness and taste. Here is an ice cream recipe from Smith Creamery, developed by Washington Parish residents Pauline Morris-Creel and Jo Nell Burch:

Delicious Creamy Chocolate Ice Cream

1 / 2 gallon Smith Creamery Chocolate Milk
16-ounce Cool Whip
1 can Condensed Milk

Mix all ingredients together and freeze in an ice cream freezer, according to manufacturer’s directions. Note: To make vanilla ice cream, substitute Smith Creamery whole milk for chocolate milk.

This cabbage casserole was adapted from Cotton Country Collection, a 1972 Junior League cookbook from Monroe, by Jan Smith Tarver, a relative of the Smiths:

Cabbage Casserole

1 large Cabbage, hand-chopped
Onions, chopped
1 bunch Green Onions, chopped
4 stalks Celery, chopped
1 /2 Bell Pepper, chopped
3 cloves Garlic, minced
8 ounces Smith Creamery Butter
7 slices Bread, soaked in enough milk to moisten well
1 pint Smith Creamery Cream
1 /2 cup grated American (I use a little more)

Salt and Red Pepper to taste (I use Tony Chachere’s Original Creole Seasoning)

Italian Bread Crumbs

Parboil cabbage (do not fully cook---just barely parboil as you want the cabbage a little crispy) in salted water. Drain thoroughly and set aside. Sauté onions, green onions, celery, bell pepper and garlic in enough cooking oil to moisten the vegetables. Add the cabbage to the onions (I use a very large mixing bowl instead). Add butter, moistened bread (break apart as you add), cream and cheese. Stir well and season to taste (I use Tony Chachere’s Original Creole Seasoning). Pour half the mixture into a casserole and top with Italian breadcrumbs; cover with remaining cabbage mixture and top with additional crumbs. {I used to do that, but I now add just a little bit of bread crumbs to the mixture (not too much as it will make it dry), mix well and then pour into your dish} Bake uncovered at 350 degrees about 30 minutes or until bubbly. Note: This can be prepared ahead of time, placed in the refrigerator a couple days and then baked when you are ready to serve.

Baton Rouge Advocate

Thursday, January 30, 2003 By: Cheramie Sonnier, Assistant Food Editor

Got Cream?

Smith Creamery’s milk does for old-fashioned taste

Bundled up against the cold, Sandra Smith of Mount Hermon entices customers to her booth at the Red Stick Farmers’ Market in downtown Baton Rouge by offering free samples of Smith Creamery’s milk.

A line forms as she hands out small cups filled with thick chocolate milk and rich whole milk. Her husband, Warren Smith, hauls more milk from their refrigerated truck parked next to their booth on Fifth Street near North Street.

In addition to the whole and chocolate milks, Baton Rouge customers can get skim (fat-free) milk, heavy cream, salted and unsalted butter, and eggs.

While her parents handles sales in Baton Rouge each Saturday morning, Michelle Smith Hickman, a nurse, and her husband, Tommy, push Smith Creamery products at the farmers’ market in Mandeville.

Their "old-fashioned milk" tastes good, they tell potential customers, because it hasn’t been put through too many processes. "We pasteurize; we don’t homogenize."

"Our milk is the next best thing to raw," Warren Smith says back at their creamery store outside Mount Hermon in Washington Parish. "The only ingredient is milk. And, it’s fresh to the customer. We sometimes pasteurize within eight hours of milking the cows" of their own dairy herd.

While their milk is pasteurized to kill harmful organisms, it’s not homogenized, or processed to break down the milk’s fat particles and blend them into the liquid, he explains. That means that on their whole milk, the "cream rises to the top"---and that’s a slogan the Smiths use as a marketing tool.

The United States Department of Agriculture requires whole milk to have a minimum of 3.25 percent butterfat. The Smiths say their whole milk averages 3.9 percent butterfat. "Butterfat is what makes milk taste good. It gives it a lot fuller, richer taste," Warren Smith explains.

Their milk is also free of hormones and other additives, the Smith emphasize.

They describe themselves as "fourth-generation dairy farmers who started a farm-based creamery" last March so they could stay in the dairy business by selling directly to consumers. They were losing money selling their raw milk to dairy cooperatives.

"We call ours a creamery" Warren and Sandra Smith’s son, Travis, points out. "Years ago that’s what they were called. There were no milk processing plants."

Smith says that the creamery has to do so little to the milk that the taste of the milk is preserved.

At Smith Creamery, milk is pasteurized in a vat pasteurizer that heats the milk to 145 degrees for 30 minutes. It is cooled to less than 40 degrees before being bottled.

"No major processor does that any more, " Travis Smith says. "All use high-temperature pasteurization," which changes the taste of the milk.

To make fat-free milk, the cooled milk is run through a separator which breaks the whole milk into heavy cream and skim milk.

To be called heavy whipping cream, the cream must maintain 36 percent butterfat. The Smiths’ averages about 40 percent.

After almost three years of research, the family decided to form Smith Creamery L.L.C. which Travis Smith, Michelle Smith Hickman and their mother, Sandra Smith, as the official owners. Travis, 33, who holds a degree in environmental science from LSU, is president. Sandra Smith, whom her husband, Warren jokingly calls "the big cheese" is CEO.

Warren Smith, 56, is owner of Pecan Hill Dairy, better known as Smith Dairy Farm, which supplies the milk that Smith Creamery uses.

"We buy our milk from him," Travis Smith explains. "He sells his surplus of milk to Dairy Fresh Inc., an independent handler of milk in Hattiesburg, MS. Probably half of the milk is used by the creamery, and the other half goes to Dairy Fresh."

Until last year, Warren Smith and his family produced milk for processing by others. But on March 06, 2002, they processed their first bottle of milk.

They now bottle about 47,000 pounds a month---"a heck of a lot more than when we started," Travis Smith says. "We are doing over tenfold from the first month nine months ago."

There are 8.6 pounds in a gallon of milk.

In addition to the Baton Rouge and Mandeville farmers’ markets, the Smiths sell their products in 44 independently owned businesses---grocery stores, restaurants and produce stores in Washington, St. Tammany, East Baton Rouge, Tangipahoa, Orleans, Jefferson, Livingston, West Feliciana and East Feliciana parishes.

The family "appreciates the locally owned grocers who have given us an opportunity," Sandra Smith stresses.

Warren and Travis Smith drive the delivery routes, leaving home at 4 a.m. and sometimes not getting back until 10:30 p.m.

They also operate a store at their creamery, located directly in front of the dairy’s milking barn off Mount Pisgah Road on a hill east of the Bogue Chitto River. It’s about 3 ½ miles outside Mount Hermon, or about two hours northeast of Baton Rouge.

Warren Smith’s parents, Hardy and Wilkie Smith, run the store. Its winter hours are 1 pm to 4 pm Wednesday-Friday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays.

Also helping out at the creamery when they can are Sandra Smith’s sister and brother-in-law, Jan and Doug Tarver, who hand-churn the unsalted (sweet) butter that is sold only at the Baton Rouge farmers market, and Sandra Smith’s father, Harold Smith. (The two grandfathers, Hardy and Harold Smith are unrelated.)

"If I actually had to pay labor, I would have to go into the hole," Travis Smith notes. "Not one person has gotten one cent. They are doing this to try to help us. It’s truly a family operation."

To start their new business, the family borrowed several hundred thousands of dollars and personally incurred some of the costs. The family won’t discuss exact revenues, but say they broke even in December.

"Most small businesses take three to five years to generate a profit, but if things keep going the way they are, it won’t take us that long," Travis Smith adds. "We are heading in the right direction."

"As we go along, every month we get a little more solid."

Smith Creamery’s biggest seller is whole milk in the 1-gallon bottle. At retail, $3 for a half-gallon and $4.50 a gallon, their whole milk costs more than some other brands. For example, Albertson’s last week sold its own brand for $3.35 a gallon and the Albertson’s price on Kleinpeter Farms Dairy of Baton Rouge milk was $2.49 a half-gallon.

One of the new products Smith Creamery plans to market is whole-milk buttermilk, a Bulgarian-style buttermilk that must have a minimum of 3.25 percent butterfat.

As Warren Smith waits on her, creamery store customer Ruth Thomas tells him, she traveled 90 miles from Mendenhall, MS., to buy his milk because it "tastes like milk used to taste."

THE SUNDAY STAR
Hammond, LA (& Leesville, LA)
January 12, 2003
By: Staff Writer Sylvia Schon

Got Milk: In Mt. Hermon
Smith Family Expands Dairy To Keep Their Business Alive

It has been less than a year since Warren Smith’s family peeled away from the lock-step world of dairy coops and began marching to their own drumbeat.

After nearly three years of research and debate, 11 family members pooled their hopes, resources, time and talents to create Smith Creamery---a small but proud independent dairy business with its own marketing scheme for old-fashioned products.

Instead of only running a dairy herd to produce raw milk to sell to a dairy cooperative, the family now processes their herd’s milk, packages it and markets the end product in their own store, farmers’ markets and anyplace they can get a foot in the door.

"This is the only option we have" said Travis Smith. "If we want to stay in the dairy business, this is the only way we’re going to get it done. We were just losing money left and right. It’s not for lack of work or effort, it’s just the prices are so far down, it’s costing you more to produce than you get paid for."

Smith, his parents Warren and Sandra Smith, his sister Michelle Hickman and her husband Tommy, his grandparents Hardy and Wilkie Smith and his aunt and uncle, Janet & Doug Tarver work seven days a week to keep Smith Creamery going.

Some have other jobs. They come home at the end of the day to roll up their sleeves for a new venture. There’s so much work to be done, and most of it so tightly connected that if one person misses his duties for the day, all feel the result.

After four generations as dairy farmers, the Smiths started their new venture on April 6, 2002. It feels like much longer, Travis Smith said.

"So far we’re making very good progress", he said. "Don’t get me wrong. We’re not where we need to be. But at least you see we’re taking baby steps in the right direction. This is our only way to survive this thing."

This "thing" is the local dairy industry’s struggle. Dairy farmers today are getting the same price for their raw milk that they got 30 years ago, even though costs for almost everything else is far higher.

Many local dairy farms have disappeared while others have tried to grow bigger or increase production in some other way to survive.

Some blame aggressive out-of-state dairy cooperatives for the decline of Louisiana’s dairy industry.

"If you are part of a cooperative, you pay these people to come down here, flood your market and drive your prices down," Smith said. "They have a compact. We don’t. That’s why we get hammered on the price. One day people will appreciate us when milk is $7 a gallon."

The Smith family, eager to keep their way of life, chose to step away from the co-op world and wing it on their own, although they still sell their surplus milk to a co-op and every time it is at a loss, he said.

Smith said they’ve gotten advice from others who have done the same and even with the help it’s an uphill struggle.

"One thing about it, it really brings your family together. You’re either going to kill each or get along, one or the other," he said.

The family is close, however, and despite the difficulties, he sees something he’s never seen in any other workplace.

"Can you imagine working someplace where everybody is trying as hard as you are? We are fortunate," he said.

The Smiths are accustomed to the milk producing end of the business, but marketing, "the new beast" is toughest of all so far, Smith said.

The goal is not only to produce their own product under their own label but also to offer dairy products not usually found on grocery shelves.

That includes old-fashioned butter and pasteurized, but not homogenized milk---the kind "where the cream rises to the top".

The milk is also free of hormone additives. The Smiths claim that type of milk is easier to digest.

They also offer Amish cheeses, jams and jellies brought in from Ohio.

The products are offered at the Smith Creamery store on Mt. Pisgah Road in Mount Hermon, Cream of the Crop in Hammond and at the Farmers Market in Baton Rouge, which has proved to be very worthwhile, Smith said.

Washington-St Tammany Electric NEWS
LOUISIANA COUNTRY
July 2002

"Family Dairy Specializes in Quality Service, Special Products"

Warren Smith of Mount Hermon is a proud farmer who didn’t want to see his family’s dairy tradition end with him because of high costs and little reward for long hours of work. His wife, Sandra, along with his son, Travis and their married daughter, Michelle Hickman, agreed and united their efforts and talents to establish Smith Creamery to keep the fourth generation farm alive.

Smith has been in the dairy business 34 years among the rolling hills and mist-shrouded hollows along Mt. Pisgah Road near Mount Hermon, but he knew that farmers who just milk and sold to a processor operated on razor-thin margins. For a family farm to prosper, it has to offer something extra.

So Warren, Travis and Michelle came up with farm-based Smith Creamery Store at 29184 Mt. Pisgah Road, open Monday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m., offering "fresh, quality dairy products" that are not homogenized, leaving the cream in its natural state. They get a lot of help from son-in-law Tommy Hickman as well as Warren’s parents, Hardy and Wilkie Smith.

"Homogenized milk will not separate," explains Warren "not even after you drink it. Homogenization is not needed to make healthy milk; it’s a process that breaks up fat globules in cream so it will remain suspended and not float to the surface. Homogenized milk is not as readily digested as pasteurized-only milk.

Pasteurization is a heating process to a specific temperature for a specified time to make it suitable for human consumption and improve its shelf life. Cows eat about 90 pounds of natural food a day and drink 25 to 50 gallons of water each day.

Smith Creamery offers fresh pasteurized whole milk, chocolate milk and butter as well as a large selection of Amish cheeses, jams and jellies plus a wide array of locally produced items. The local foodstuff includes Warner Farms Mayhaw syrup, pure honey from Jewell Burch of Mount Hermon, home ground yellow cornmeal processed by Wil-Mar Farms of Kentwood and even his wife’s and mother’s homemade jams and jellies.

The well-known natural Amish Wedding brand of preserves, jellies and cheeses comes from Ohio and Pennsylvania farms.

"We spent two years planning Smith Creamery, investing in a 16 by 30 ft cooler, two 1,500-gallon, 1,000-gallon and 3,000-gallon storage tanks plus a pasteurizer and mixing vat. Our 240-head of Holsteins and crossbreeds are milked next door and it’s piped directly into the processing plant where it is vat pasteurized. "Because its not homogenized, our milk is rich and creamery and can be easily broken down in the digestive system," adds Smith.

Since Smith Creamery opened several months ago, Travis has established a daily delivery route to area markets, including some as far away as Baton Rouge. Smith Creamery products can be found locally at Jack Brown’s Supermarket and Fair City Truck Stop (Chevron) in Franklinton. It can also be found at the Farmer’s Market on North Street in Baton Rouge as well an assortment of Baton Rouge independent supermarkets and stores.

"We do well at Farmers’ Markets in Louisiana and Mississippi. The taste, quality and freshness of Smith Creamery products are what sells it. It’s a farm fresh product," he adds.

For more information or to place an order, call Smith Creamery at (985) 877-4445.

THE BOGALUSA DAILY NEWS
April 28, 2002
By: Andi Cook

"Letting The Cream Rise To The Top"

"The cream always rises to the top." In life, this adage has come to mean that the best always is evident and generally wins out. For the Smith family of Mount Hermon, dairying is the best way of life, the cream of the crop. For them to continue a four-generation lifestyle, they literally have allowed the cream to rise to the top.

Travis Smith and Michelle Smith Hickman, with the help of their father Warren Smith, recently opened Washington Parish’s only working creamery, Smith Creamery. On March 6, 2002, following a year of planning and hard work, the Smith family fulfilled a dream that they hope will allow them to pass on the dairy tradition to another generation of Smiths.

"With the dairy industry as volatile as it is, we decided to try to do something to subsidize the dairy," Travis said. "A dairy is a wonderful way of life, but the money is poor. You sure don’t do it for the money," he admitted with a rueful smile.

Warren said that the price of milk has dropped about $6 per hundred weight in the last few months. At current prices, he is losing about a dollar per hundred weight every time he milks.

"You wouldn’t go to work the next day if your wage was cut by 30 percent," he noted. "We’re getting about the same price today as I did in the 1970s."

But dairymen can’t just refuse to go to work when the price drops. They keep plugging away, hoping to make ends meet. As dairies closed across the parish, the Smiths decided they needed to do something if they wanted to maintain their family-friendly lifestyle. They had read about small creameries that provided fresh milk for local markets. After visiting both small and large operations, the family decided to try the concept in Washington Parish.

While Warren still sells his milk to Dairy Fresh, Travis keeps some of his here and sells it from the creamery. Together, the two man milk 240 cows twice each day. Only a small portion of that milk is sold through the creamery. What is sold here is always fresh.

"We sell a fresh product," Michelle said. "There is nothing put in it or taken out."

The Smiths said their milk goes from the cow to the bottle in about a 12-hour time period. When the cows are milked, the milk goes into a holding tank with a pipe running directly to the creamery. They pump milk to the creamery where it is pasteurized and bottled. The product is taken by truck to local stores around the parish. On weekends, the Smiths take some of their products to the Greater Baton Rouge Farmers Market.

"When people taste our milk, their eyes get big and they say, ‘Wow, that tastes great. I haven’t tasted milk like that in years," Michelle said. That reaction is very rewarding for the Smiths. "We want a good quality product that tastes good," she said.

The taste is better because it is fresh and it isn’t tampered with too much, according to Travis. They pasteurize the milk to kill any barn pathogens, but they don’t homogenize it.

"Homogenization forces the fat globules of cream into the water part of the milk so it won’t separate," Travis said. "I know the scientific explanation, but in everyday terms, that’s what it does. Our milk is not homogenized, so when it sets, it will eventually separate. The cream will rise to the top. The hardest part is getting people to remember they have to shake their milk before they drink it."

Every step of the creamery process is overseen by state agencies. Everything is sanitized endlessly, according to Michelle. Their equipment is all stainless steel. It and the operation are inspected by various agencies.

We’re slow and meticulous," Michelle said. We want to make sure we do it right."

"We don’t break any speed records," Warren added. "But our finished product is worth waiting for."

The Creamery has a store where they sell products, as well as a delivery truck that delivers in the parish.

"Everywhere we have it in the parish, they really push it," Travis said. "We’ve really been blessed."

When the business opened, the Smiths were only having to process once a week. Now they are processing twice a week. They hope to eventually have a large enough market to process milk daily.

They also sell fresh butter and cheese. The Creamery Store also stocks homemade jellies and jams, syrups, honey, cornmeal, and a few other specialty products. Warren’s wife, Sandra, makes one of their jellie, MawMaw’s Mayhaw jelly.

Travis and Michelle are the fourth generation of the Smiths to dairy in Washington Parish. Both Sandra and Warren were Smiths. Sandra’s Dad, Harold R. Smith dairied, as did his parents, Wyatt and Mae Smith. Warren’s parents, Hardy and Wilkie Smith still live nearby and help out in the creamery when they can. Hardy’s parents, Fleet and Martha began the dairy tradition in their family.

Michelle and husband Tommy are working on providing the fifth generation of parish dairy farmers. They have two daughters, Kaitlin, age two and Cassidy, age three months. Travis is still a satisfied single, but joked that he could use a wife with a couple of hardworking teenage sons.

"This is truly a family operation," Travis said. "My grandparents save us a lot of steps. Pawpaw told told me that life is backwards. He said ‘When you get old, you know how to do things, but you don’t have the energy and physical ability. When you’re young like you, you have the physical strength, but you don’t know how to do anything."

Travis and Michelle admit they have a lot to learn. "This is brand new to us," Michelle said. "We’re just getting our feet wet."

They hope to add to the operation as they go, but they’re not in a big hurry.

"We’ve got more ideas than money," Travis admitted. "We can do a "C" job on several things or an "A" on a couple."

Right now, they are concentrating on offering whole milk, chocolate and white, in pints, half-gallons and gallons. They have purchased a separator so that later they can add two percent and skim milk. But those are dreams for the future. Right now, the Smiths are working on phase one of their dream: keeping the dairy viable and offering a good tasting product.

"A diary is a great place to grow up," Michelle said. "We had quality family time growing up. We worked and played together. I worked for eight years as a nurse, but now that I have kids, I want something different. Life is too short. You need to be a family. I want my kids to grow up in a loving family. I want them to know how to work for what they have. I want them to have the same opportunities I had as a child."

Michelle hopes that Smith Creamery will allow her to offer her children what she had. If it succeeds, her children will grow up on a dairy farm and know the joys and the heartaches that come with dairying. But for the next generation of Smiths, dairying will be different. It isn’t every dairy that has a creamery attached.

THE GREATER BATON ROUGE BUSINESS REPORT
July 30- Aug 12, 2002
By: Mukul Verma

"Cash Cow"

Somewhere between Baton Rouge and St Francisville, Warren Smith is riding in a truck with his name on it, delivering creamery whole milk, chocolate milk thick like pudding, and two pound slabs of tasty butter.

His wife, Sandra, sitting at his side, organizes their lives by using a cell phone as the couple travel the back roads to independent grocery stores.

"What time do you get going?" she asks. "Can you call him at 7 in the morning?"

To Warren Smith, 7 a.m. is not early. A dairy farmer moves with nature’s clock. People in the city go home to their flickering televisions and warm beds; Warren and Sandra Smith and their children Travis and Michelle keep working, whether it’s noon or midnight.

It’s about 7 a.m. a day later and the head of the Smith household is lively on the phone. He’s patient, too, knowing that talking up his milk and other products at length is the best kind of advertising. "Word of mouth helps us more than anything."

And that is how he has built his new business, which is packaging and selling some of his milk products directly to consumers instead of a middleman. He’s hoping that shifting into retail is the answer to 12 years of enslavement to wholesale milk prices, which have been so low that Smith and other dairymen have often lost money.

The Smiths have worked in the family dairy since the 55-year-old Warren graduated from high school in Mount Hermon in Washington Parish, where he has lived for nearly his whole life. The only time he lived elsewhere was for military service and a short stint at LSU, where the one class, he said, was larger than his entire high school and more than he wanted to deal with.

Until now, Smith and his family have produced milk for processing by other, bigger dairies. But this year, he started pasteurizing and packing about 10 percent of his 1,200 gallons of daily milk production as whole milk, chocolate milk and butter under the Smith Creamery brand.

His products have been a smash.

"It’s awesome," said Jeremy Hendricks, an urban planner for Mid City Redevelopment Alliance and a lifelong milk drinker. "It’s fresher than milk you get at the store, and you can definitely taste it."

The Smith family first started selling at the Red Stick Farmer’s Market in downtown Baton Rouge this spring. On a recent summer Saturday, a line formed around his tent at the market. Warren Smith hustled milk from his refrigerated truck parked on North Boulevard to buckets full of ice under a tent in the farmer’s market to keep up with demand.

At the market, a steady stream of visitors either rave about Smith’s whole milk or wonder why globs of white stuff floats on the surface of it. With a ready laugh, Warren Smith answers the queries, telling the uninitiated the difference between pasteurization and homogenization. The milk is pasteurized to kill harmful organisms, but it’s not homogenized, or pushed through a machine that breaks down the fat into tiny globules that disappear into the liquid.

Those tiny bits floating on top, he instructs, are fat, the stuff that slips and slides around your mouth to brighten taste buds, making food taste good and people feel guilty.

Milk used to come with bigger globules of fat before agricultural scientists got a hold of it and developed a device that breaks it into small, invisible pieces. On a farm, you could take the fatty cream right off the top of the bottle and spread it on your bread. Warren Smith tells customers this, but some still look uncertainly at the dancing fat on his milk.

"The more you do to milk, the more you alter the taste," he says sounding sour about how other dairies take the edge off the creamy flavor of milk by mauling it in a machine. "We just pasteurize ours and try not to damage the product."

The Smiths have turned the skipping of homogenization into promotion, calling their product "cream line milk."

"They don’t try to compete on price," said Andrew Smiley, head of BREADA, the nonprofit that runs the Red Stick market. "They sell a heritage product. And they have turned that into a slogan and marketing tool----"the cream rises to the top."

Smith and his family started talking about retailing their milk in 1999. Over a decade, Smith and other milk producers were going out of business because the wholesale price hovered around "1.10 a gallon, not high enough to survive. In Louisiana, the number of milk farms dropped over 15 years from 1,000 to 390 now.

To compete, small producers expanded operations, said Gary Cazaubon, who monitors the number of producers and the industry for the state Department of Health and Hospitals.

The Smiths were among those who tried a bigger farm, expanding their herd to 350 cows from about 200. "It turns out that bigger is not always better," said Smith. They built a bigger barn to handle more cows, but the overhead was too much. "We had more cows than we could see to."

Still, Smith’s son wanted to remain in the business, unlike so many others who grew up on family farms only to give it all up and head to the city.

But loving the small town life is one thing; making a living at it, is another. In a management seminar, Travis Smith came up with the correct answer to a question about why he wanted to take over the family business.

"To make money," he said.

It was Travis and his sister, Michelle Hickman, who devised the plan to enter retail. Warren Smith toured micro-dairies in New England for an education about dairies.

The family borrowed several hundred thousands dollars from a local bank and started churning out product. The exact amount of dairy products produced and current revenues are two things Warren Smith won’t discuss.

But based on retailing 10 percent of 1,200 gallons, one can glean that he’s already pulling in an extra $100,000 a year in revenue.

"We are hoping it will be profitable for us," he said. "It takes a business a long time to cash flow because of the plant and equipment.

"At retail, the milk isn’t cheap. It sells for roughly twice the price of generic brands and is pricier than Kleinpeter’s milk from Louisiana, which sold in July for $3.29 a half-gallon at a local store. Still, Mark Calandro of Calandro’s Supermarket says the milk is moving off the shelves, mostly because customers first tried it at the farmers’ market and then searched for it at the store. Smith Creamery has managed to stock the shelves of 40 independent grocers, who welcome local products to compete against cut-throat chains.

The local grocers will have to clear space for more Smith products. Customers have been asking for skim milk, heavy cream, Creole cream cheese and ice cream. Smith is considering adding some of those products.

If he does, he’s likely to give away free samples at the market, a tried marketing tactic to hook customers.

"One person told me "you will have to give a lot of your product away,’ " Smith said. "That’s nothing new for me. I’ve been giving it away all my life, and losing money."