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2024 is shaping up to be a very big year for one Indiana farm family as they plan to greatly expand their dairy operation.
“Dairy farming has been our blood forever and we’ve always had this goal and passion to be able to process our own milk on-farm and make products here,” says Andrew Kuehnert, one of the co-owners of Kuehnert Dairy in Fort Wayne.
The sixth-generation dairy farm is expanding and opening a brand-new Milk House and retail shop in Allen County.
“We’ve been working on this so over a year now, so we are getting very close,” according to Kuehnert. “We are hopefully going to be up and operational towards the end of January or early February. We plan on having a full line of milk products coming out, including glass-bottle milk, cheese curds, butter, and ice cream. Hopefully the cheese curds are up and ready to go. If you come up to our retail store right on the farm, you can look through a big picture window see where our cheese curds are being made.”
Their new cheese curd manufacturing facility is being made possible through a $100,000 grant that Kuehnert Dairy has received from the Dairy Business Innovation Alliance (DBIA).
“With that grant, it’s going to allow us to purchase the equipment that we need to make farm fresh cheese curds right in our milk plant,” says Kuehnert. “It’s also going to help with packaging. Our cheese curds are going to come in pouches that are resealable, so I am very confident that our flavor and our quality of product can be second to none.”
The new Kuehnert Milk House is also part of the plan to continue growing the farm’s agritourism business.
“For the past 11 years, we’ve opened our farm in the fall for seven weekends during our Kuehnert Dairy Fall Festival and invited the public to come out see what we do on a daily basis,” he says. “It’s always been very important for everybody in our family to tell our side of the story and show people what dairy farmers do each and every day for 365 days a year. That’s been a great opportunity for agritourism to show people what we do. We feel like we have built respect and trust with our local community by just being honest and showing what we do each and every day.”
Even though Andrew’s father, Al Kuehnert, passed away in 2021, he says his dad’s memory will continue to live on through as the family farm continues to grow.
“With losing my dad unexpectedly, it was challenging. We had to figure out a new norm for our dairy farm and what we were doing. After losing my dad, that kind of put us on a delay with this Milk House. I think it’ll make him very proud that we get it up and running. We know he’s always up watching over us and taking care of us, so we know we’re trying to live on his legacy.”
For more information, visit kuehnertdairy.com.
Click below to hear the full conversation with Andrew Kuehnert, co-owner of Kuehnert Dairy, as he also shares what it is like to run their family farm with his mother Cindy, brother Nathan, wife Brittany, and sister-in-law Sarah.
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