
"He has never had a broker. Never had a distributor. Now he sees AI agents as the key to getting more real cheese and butter to the people. As a result, he's got something else, much to his surprise: a company that runs on artificial intelligence."
"Larry Peter grew up in Sebastopol picking prunes, grapes, and raspberries to pay for school clothes and bicycles. His father worked a green chain at a lumber mill for 40 years and never stopped talking about the dairy farm that he wished he'd raised his kids on. Larry got his first taste of the industry in high school, washing bottles and feeding calves at Miller's Dairy for $35 a week."
"When the cow margins got tight, he started a potato operation, then a pumpkin patch. When the county told him he couldn't run retail out of his dairy, he bought the schoolhouse and started making cheese out of it in 1995. Then in 2004, Petaluma Creamery - a cooperative that 475 local farmers had belonged to - shut down after 91 years of continuous operation. Larry came down to buy a cream separator and ended up buying the whole facility."
Larry Peter built a dairy and cheese business through direct, independent buying and production. He started in the industry washing bottles and feeding calves, then worked for years while saving money by riding a bicycle and paying cash for multiple properties. He used leveraged property ownership to enter dairy farming, later adding potato and pumpkin operations when margins tightened. After county limits blocked retail from his dairy, he bought a schoolhouse and began making cheese in 1995. In 2004, when a local cooperative shut down, he purchased the creamery facility and later shifted toward using AI agents to increase production and distribution of real cheese and butter.
Read at Fortune
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]