Filming life on the farm

FREEVILLE, N.Y. — It is not every day that 50 film professionals and a former “Saturday Night Live” star from Los Angeles spend a week on a dairy farm in rural New York. However, for Beck Farms LLC, November 2023 brought just that scenario as they were the hosts for the documentary mini-TV series “Dairy Diaries.”

“It was this classic commingling between city mice and country mice,” said Tyler Beck, one of the owners of Beck Farms “(There was) two worlds, this (film) production world, coming together with on-farm agriculture, and it was pretty wild to see everyone interact. … It was a once in a lifetime deal that was fun.”

Beck Farms was chosen out of 80 dairies across the U.S. that applied to be the host for “Dairy Diaries.” The show was sponsored by the U.S. dairy community and several dairy industry organizations.

Beck dairy farms alongside his brother, Austin, their semi-retired dad, Russ, managing partner, Jerry Coller, and their employees. The Beck family’s farm is split between two locations near Freeville. One dairy houses 800 cows milked twice a day in a double-8 herringbone parlor. The other dairy, where the TV series was filmed, houses 1,200 cows milked three times a day in a double-20 parallel parlor.

The documentary TV show featured Vanessa Bayer, who was on “SNL” for seven seasons, spending part of a week learning how to be a dairy farmer. Throughout the five episodes of the show, Bayer milks and feeds cows, helps haul manure, hangs out with a veterinarian, rides along with a milk truck driver, helps out at a dairy processing plant and learns about the latest innovations in dairy from Dr. Joseph McFadden, a faculty member at Cornell University.

The Beck family’s proximity to Cornell University was an advantage of their location, plus all the owners at Beck Farms are alumni.

The show is lighthearted as Bayer jokes and asks lots of questions. Miranda Abney, vice president of consumer marketing with MilkPEP, said Bayer’s curiosity helped take the series to the next level.

“She was asking the questions that … the everyday person, … wanted to have answered,” Abney said. “She had such a good rapport with everyone, and was really able to get people to open up and be really natural and engaging.”

The show was not scripted. Instead, each episode had a topic and overall themes, and then Bayer, the Becks and the other dairy professionals on the show shared their story organically.

“It allowed us to speak free flowing, and tell people authentically about what we do,” Beck said. “That was very helpful not having to memorize lines, or to have everything be tightly managed.”

The show’s humor was an intentional choice Abney said as a hook to connect to their target audience of younger millennials and older Generation Z.

“They expect entertainment and storytelling,” Abney said. “They’re not really interested in spending time with your content if they’re not going to be entertained while they’re learning. So, we really took an edutainment-type approach.”

The series premiered on Roku in April 2024 with standout numbers. Roku reported it generated 72% video completion rate, the highest they had ever recorded at the time for a mid-form, 10–20-minute, brand-funded episodic series. The episodes, which ranged in length from 9-11 minutes, with one 16-minute episode, had an average of nearly eight minutes of watch time.

Alison Stelzer, a business lead with GALE who worked on the project with Abney said having the show follow Bayer, a new farm visitor, gave the show strength.

“The fish out of water type of format is always compelling, because … it’s almost like a transformation,” she said. “You want to see where they started with their point of view and where they ended up.”

Though free flowing, most scenes had multiple takes with a day of filming creating about enough content for an episode Beck said.

“It was probably more exhausting than most weeks I’ve ever done on the farm,” Beck said. “It’s the stress of hoping everything goes right and nothing goes wrong, and they get to see what they want to see. … Going to bed every night, it felt like you worked a 20-hour day.”

Since it was filmed in November, the season of the year and what was going on at Beck Farms was a determining factor for what was shown.

The crew from Los Angeles set up on a Saturday and packed up the following weekend. They brought in three recreational vehicles and portable bathrooms and used the Beck’s old shop as headquarters to store cameras and equipment. To help not disrupt the dairy, they tried to contain filming to one location at a time. Film crew was instructed on how to act safely around the cows.

After watching the show, viewers had improved perceptions of dairy milk and dairy farming according to a Roku brand lift study.

“It was presented in a way that broke down a little bit of the walls that people put up when this kind of information is shared,” Stelzer said. “It disarmed people. … That is hugely indicative of a successful piece with a topic that can be polarizing.”

The series was aimed at renewing interest in milk as a modern beverage Abney said.

“A lot of times people forget about milk,” she said. “We wanted to tell the story about how we are thinking about the future. There are new products and developments. We’re always working on new technologies and on-farm practices that will help contribute to healthier people and a healthier planet.”

Beck hopes the show will make a difference for the dairy industry.

“When we have a chance to speak rawly about what we do and show real footage, it does wonders … on (showing) what actually goes on and what a modern-day farmer looks like,” he said.