Alicia Halbritter, the forage/ livestock agent at the Duval County Extension, is not surprised to see smaller ventures fading away, yielding to larger co-ops that have modern, efficient methods and access to better distribution channels. In his mind, Wainwright estimates about 10 area dairies have folded in the last year or so. The parent company felt, however, the dairy was too small and too old to be viable, and Gustafson’s Dairy’s Green Cove site was shuttered for good in 2013. You can still see Ma and Pa Gustafson’s faces on milk cartons, even though Southeast Milk took over their dairy in 2004. Carl Wainwright, whose family now runs Live Oak’s Wainwright Dairy and Creamery, worked at Gustafson’s at one point in the 1950s. The local KKK actively encouraged boycotts of the dairy and burned a cross on Dinsmore property.Īgnes and Frank Gustafson’s dairy was a Clay County mainstay, operating for over 100 years in Green Cove Springs. Staunch Jacksonville civil rights advocates and desegregationists, the Johnsons were chased from the retail side of the business in 1959 by white supremacists. Open from the early 1900s through the 1980s, Dinsmore was owned by the Johnson family. As all-inclusive grocery stores came into fashion, Skinner Dairy tried to innovate with drive-through “milk houses.” If you’re not a native who shopped at one in the past, drive around the area today and you can still see Skinner buildings with their distinctive pitched “butterfly” roofs, as some of them still stand, though these days they are home to other shops.ĭinsmore Dairy did not go out of business for the same reasons others did. The Skinner family’s dairy farm ran on large land holdings in Jacksonville from the 1950s to the 1990s. And, interestingly enough, Metro Nightclub in Jacksonville’s historic Riverside neighborhood also resides in a former Foremost Dairy building. The town of Penney Farms is now home to Penney Retirement Community. Reinhold had huge success at the helm of Foremost. He was bought out by Paul Reinhold, who was one of the first to use industrial refrigeration to freeze ice cream. Penney’s dream of an idyllic and self-sufficient farming community was shattered by logistics issues and the Great Depression. Part of this land became Penney Farms and included Foremost Dairy (named for one of Penney’s prized bulls). Penney heavily invested in Florida real estate, including 120,000 acres in Clay County. So what happened to all the dairy farms that dotted the Northeast Florida landscape in the 20th century? Many regional family farms succumbed to land development and fickle prices or were gathered into the fold of Southeast Milk (a large dairy cooperative created in 1998 when two Florida milk co-ops merged and which now handles most of the milk marketed in the state). Fact checking with Mark Hudson, the Florida State statistician for the USDA, showed that 125,000 Florida dairy cows produced over 2.5 billion pounds (roughly 300 million gallons) of milk in 2016. Citrus and tourism may garner the headlines, but our milk production volume is tops in the American Southeast and typically ranks 18th to 20th in the nation. Milk is Florida’s sort of “secret” three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar industry. As people moved from farms to cities, it became necessary to mass produce, improve quality and automate milk production as the popularity of the beverage and its byproducts increased. Cattle were not bred specially for dairy purposes until the 1800s.
European immigrants brought cattle to provide their families with meat and dairy products throughout the 1600s. The First Coast saw the first cattle to set hoof on the continent, via Juan Ponce de Leon’s final voyage in 1521. Quick! What’s the first animal that comes to mind when I say “Florida”? My informal poll of 10 friends and family tallied five alligators, one manatee, one dolphin, a spoonbill, a snake and even one vote for team jaguar (my mother-in-law thought I meant mammal).
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