Milk-based side hustle adds farm revenue

CHETEK, Wis. — Lackluster milk prices and tight profit margins have inspired Brittany Olson to create additional revenue streams for her family farm.

Olson, and her husband, Sam, along with their son, Titus, milk around 30 Holsteins and Jerseys at Berglane Farm in Barron County near Chetek.

“We’ve been low on cows for a while now,” Olson said. “We were a little too overzealous culling the herd the first couple of years; then in 2022 we lost a bunch of spring calves that would have calved in last year. That, coupled with the high cost of replacements, has left us about 20 cows short.”

For several years Olson has been cultivating two small businesses — Photography by Berglane and Mammary Lane Body Lotion — in addition to freelance writing to diversify the revenue streams for her family and their farm.

As dairy farm margins tighten, Olson said making and marketing her lotion is filling a gap.

“Like most dairy farmers, we have some big checks we need to write out at the end of the year,” Olson said. “I have a goal of selling $20,000 in lotion during the holiday season, from Nov. 12 through Christmas. It’s not an impossible goal, we’re well over halfway there.”

Olson began experimenting with making milk-based lotion from the milk produced by their cows late in 2018. The endeavor was slower to take off than she would have liked, Olson said.

“In 2018, once again milk prices were low and I had recently left my off-farm job,” Olson said. “I needed something to actually have some income coming in. I started with soap, but quickly learned I had neither the space to cure it for six weeks, nor the patience. I found that lotion I could make one day and ship it the next.”

While she had been looking for a side-hustle, Olson said she was disappointed in the receipts of the earliest days of Mammary Lane Body Lotion.

“2019 through 2023 was really slow,” Olson said. “There was a point I thought I would just give it up. I had enough going on with dairy farming, my photography and freelance writing, and our son (who) was born in 2022.”

However, in 2024, armed with an idea Sam came up with, she gave retailing her milk-based lotions one more chance.

“Sam had the idea to make a rose-scented lotion, complete with a memorable name, a nod to my love of 1990s country music,” Olson said. “I launched and marketed Two Dozen Roses, as a limited-edition scent for Valentine’s Day. I did not expect the response I got from that — suddenly I was shipping lotion all over the country. That is the point where Mammary Lane really snowballed and took off. And this year has just been insane, too.”

Her lotion sales are seasonal, Olson said, with little lotion being sold from May through September.

“That actually works out very well for me,” Olson said. “The slow months for lotion are the peak season for my photography business. It’s nice that one enterprise picks up where the other leaves off.”

After the success of the initial run of Two Dozen Roses, Olson was determined to capitalize on the momentum.

“I really just kept talking about the lotion, as much as I could, on social media,” Olson said. “I have found my best response on Twitter. I’ve learned the Facebook algorithm changed in late 2021, and I don’t have nearly the reach I used to there.”

As the venture continued to gain steam, Olson began refining her process and improving the recipe she used to make her lotions.
She pasteurizes the milk on the stove-top, prior to making lotion, to increase shelf-life.

“I wanted to make sure that milk was the primary ingredient,” Olson said. “I scaled back slightly on the shea butter and coconut oil but kept the emulsifying wax and preservative — you can’t work with milk and not have a preservative. There was some trial and error, but I finally got the precise recipe I like — it’s about two-thirds milk — and the lotion is shelf-stable for six months.”

Olson has created more than a dozen different fragrances for her lotions, including seasonal scents.

“Fresh Cut Hay is No. 1 the most popular,” Olson said. “Lilac is really popular, as is honeysuckle. People like to order unscented lotion, too, because they are wary about fragrances in skincare products.”

As her sales have ramped up, Olson has looked for ways to streamline her production and shipping processes.

“I don’t keep a set inventory of stock on hand for any scent,” Olson said. “I keep about three dozen jars of plain, unscented lotion on hand and add the fragrances as the orders come in. That way I’m never truly out of stock of anything, unless I’m actually out of a particular fragrance.”

As her sales ramp up in the fall, Olson said she typically begins making batches of about four dozen jars at a time. As the holidays near, that number grows to 10 dozen jars — which takes about eight quarts of milk in total. She is making a batch of lotion at least every other day to sustain her sales.

Besides retailing on her website, Olson wholesales to several small stores in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Oklahoma.

“I’ve shipped lotion to 40 of the 50 states,” Olson said. “Most of my lotion is shipped outside the state of Wisconsin. The most well-known customer I have had so far is Max Armstrong, he ordered some on the website the other day. That was really cool.”

While Olson embraces the many hats she wears to keep her family’s farm going, she said she longs for a world that acknowledges the value of the dairy industry and its farmers.

“I’m a full-time everything; you have to be, to make things work these days,” Olson said. “With low milk prices, high inputs and high dairy cattle replacement prices, the market is pretty much telling people to get out, and I don’t blame anyone who makes that decision, but at the same time, I don’t like that that is the message.”