By Karin Sinclair, Carson Valley Meats Founder
My goal with the Storke Dairy is to turn it into a working ranch again. I want the hay fields to be up, and cattle in the pastures and animals in the barns as well as this processing facility. You won’t even know there’s a processing plant there because it will all be internal. But the ranch itself, I want it to be a working ranch.
I keep saying they’re not making any more dirt, so it’s a really big thing to preserve the ground that’s there. The history of the Storke Dairy, is a really big thing because it meant so much to the family and it was a real hard decision for them to close it up and move. So, I want to revamp that and bring it back. The same with Carson Valley Meats. The history of Carson Valley Meats is still a big deal in the Valley, and the people we spoke with, some were teary-eyed about the idea of bringing it back through providing locally produced food products to our community. If we can revamp the histories of both of those, I think that’s a really big thing. There’s a lot of good things that people used to do, and if we can learn from them, we can preserve them.
Bringing back the history of the place is big to me. If you listen to the prior owners of that dairy and how sad they were to leave it, if you can bring that back and make it better…. that was always something I was taught. If you borrow something, you return it in as good, if not better, shape than when you borrowed it. And that’s what I want to do. I want to bring that back.