The Past, Present, and Future of Florida Milk

A year after Hurricane Ian thrashed Dakin Dairy, word came that the Myakka City farm was up for sale after 23 years in business. Many of Florida’s family-owned dairies have folded due to market disruption and climate events. But here in our backyard, the sale of Dakin Dairy tells a hopeful story. Not only will the property stay a dairy farm, it’s staying in the family.

Jerry Dakin is the youngest of four sons who all followed in their father’s dairy-farming footsteps. By the time Jerry purchased 350 acres on Betts Road to start a dairy of his own, his brother, Cameron, had raised four sons on a dairy farm nearby: Jason, Garrett, Grant, and Ethan.

“When Garrett and I were little, Mom fed the calves and we were Mom’s helper,” Jason recalls. “And then when Mom had Grant and Ethan, we fed the calves while Mom was raising them.”

Back then, Cameron Dakin Dairy was one of hundreds of dairy farms in Florida, and a family could support itself on the husbandry of a small herd. But by the time the boys were all grown, the Florida dairy farmer had become a rare breed. Grant estimates that Florida’s number of active dairy farms has sunk to the low thirties. While the number of farms has dwindled, the average herd size has boomed. When Jerry’s nephews closed on the sale of Dakin Dairy in May, they brought the headcount of cattle in their care to 10,000.

With close to 160 combined years of living and working on the family farms, this new crew of Dakin brothers draws on the wisdom, experience, and grit of two generations of Florida dairymen.

“My dad and all his brothers all had their own separate ways, and they all made them work,” says the youngest brother, Ethan, “but I know they would have never been able to work together.”

Jason, the eldest, adds, “It was always a competition, and they all had their own methods. We’re just the same way, just all four of us working together.”

While Jason works as a general operations manager, overseeing the day-to-day business of milk production, breeding, and herd health, his younger brothers specialize. They call Grant “the brains,” leaving him in charge of bookkeeping, finances, facility design, and mechanics. Ethan is working to update the dairy with leading-edge bottling technology that extends milk’s shelf life without affecting the taste.

As for Garrett: “What goes into the front end of the cow and comes out the rear end, that’s me.” He continues, “We were raised to work together. Don’t get me wrong—we’ll cuss each other out there in the fields. But at the end of the day, we’ll also go have a beer together. We know that it’s just work.”

Dakin Dairy’s new owners are focused on bringing the farm back to operating at full capacity with ambitions to diversify the product line, imagining fresh cheeses, yogurts, and ice cream bases on the shelf alongside Dakin’s famous chocolate milk. Dakin Dairy also sponsors and partners with local schools to ensure youth in the area have the opportunity to work with animals and gain hands-on experience to further careers in agriculture or veterinary science.

“Agriculture is very hard to get into anyway, and we know if we don’t get the youth interested in it, this will just fade away, and it’ll look like Miami out here,” Ethan says. “They’ll grow azaleas and palm trees.”

“The community knows we’re not gonna build houses, and if we do, it’s gonna be for our employees,” Garrett says. “A lot of the neighbors are glad because we are in church with the community, we are at school with them, we are at the football game—we get so much support from the community because we are the community.”

Dakin Dairy: 30771 Betts Rd, Myakka City
DakinDairyFarms.com