Kyra and Gus Tafel, owners of Meadowsweet Farm in Hawley, launched a fundraiser to replace the former Sidehill Farm milk bottles with their own. STAFF PHOTO/PAUL FRANZ

Kyra and Gus Tafel with their daughter, Roanan, 5, and dog, Mojo, at their Meadowsweet Farm store in Hawley. The couple launched a fundraiser to replace the former Sidehill Farm milk bottles with their own.

Looking to raise money for new milk bottles and renovations to its farm store, Meadowsweet Farm in Hawley turned to GoFundMe.

In just two weeks, owners Gus and Kyra Tafel surpassed their $5,000 fundraising goal.

“We’re both very, very surprised,” Gus Tafel said. “We hate to ask for the help.”

The couple moved to the Forget Road farm from upstate New York in 2019 after buying Sidehill Farm’s dairy production operation. Sidehill Farm owners Amy Klippenstein and Paul Lacinski were looking to focus on their yogurt business rather than land and herd management. Now, the Tafels sell Meadowsweet Farm milk to produce Sidehill Farm’s yogurt.

For nearly three years, Meadowsweet Farm sold its raw milk to customers in glass containers with the Sidehill Farm logo, but Massachusetts law requires raw milk products be labeled with the name, address and ZIP code of the farm that produced it.

“We recently got a new milk inspector,” Tafel said. The inspector informed him Meadowsweet Farm could no longer use the Sidehill bottles, even though the farm uses the same land Sidehill did. The farm has since sold its milk in plastic bottles, which Tafel said are more expensive.

New glass bottles with the Meadowsweet logo will cost more than $3,000. The farm’s $5,000 goal will also cover the repair of a display cooler and chest freezers.

Contributors to the GoFundMe praised Meadowsweet’s milk, calling the farm “a great resource to our community.”

“Just stopping to buy milk and yogurt reduces my stress level, and drinking that great grass-fed raw milk keeps me feeling great,” contributor Steven Howland wrote.

The fundraising effort comes after a difficult transition through the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The last few years have been really tricky,” Tafel said, citing a summertime drought and the rising cost of feed, fuel and plastic bottles that has put a strain on the farm.

“Our feed situation was pretty rough,” he said of the past two summers.

Tafel expects the price of milk sold in plastic bottles at Meadowsweet Farm to rise from $8 to $11 per gallon.

This year, the farm hopes to expand its offerings to include vegetables, put up new fencing, reduce its plastic usage and reseed pastures.

“We really can’t thank everybody enough,” Tafel said of the GoFundMe contributors. “We need the boost.”

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