What Losing the Farm Taught JR Burdick About the Food System
How an 11th-generation dairyman lost everything, stood back up, and rebuilt a food-sovereign future with raw milk, community, and rebellion.
The first thing you notice about JR Burdick is that he speaks in long arcs — not soundbites. He doesn’t give you neat answers or tweet-sized solutions. He gives you generations, and inside those generations you can hear the sound of something America keeps trying to bury but refuses to die: the small family farm.
And like many of the rebels I meet, JR didn’t just inherit a farm. He inherited a fight.
He’s the 11th generation of a Michigan farm family that once believed the same lie most farmers of the last 70 years believed — that the industrial system, the co-ops, the government programs, the boom years, the green revolution, and the land-as-asset model would carry them into a stable future.
Instead, it nearly swallowed them whole.
The First Loss
(“We were moved off the farm by Christmas.”)
JR’s father was a dairy man through and through. In the late 70s — just before the 80s farm crisis — he bought the farm of his dreams. But when interest rates shot to the moon and asset values tanked, the Burdicks became one of thousands of families crushed by a crisis no one saw coming.
The government called the note > He had 90 days > He was 28 > The farm was gone.
JR was nine years old when he watched his parents lose everything.
What stuck with him wasn’t just the loss — it was the silence afterwards.
The depression.
The identity collapse.
The way the adults pretended to be strong while the kids pretended not to notice.
He told me: “That’s the part everyone misses when they talk about the farm crisis. The families.”
His dad eventually climbed back — buying another small farm in 1990. And for a while, life steadied.
But the wounds stayed.
The Second Loss
(“We had stray voltage killing our herd and a court battle we couldn’t escape.”)
Fast forward to the 2000s.
A wind-turbine project was built near their dairy, and suddenly cows weren’t breeding back. Milk production fell. Animals got sick — neurological issues, stress behaviors, unexplained deaths.
Stray voltage.
A phrase most consumers will never hear. A nightmare most farmers can’t afford to fight.
The Burdicks sued the power company — and that lawsuit dragged on for seven years. Seven years of lost production. Seven years of financial bleeding. Seven years of emotional carnage that nearly destroyed JR’s relationship with his kids.
He told me: “I almost lost my oldest son because I couldn’t let it go. I was fighting the electric company harder than I was fighting for my family.”
When the legal dust settled, everyone lost. The lawyer fees, the herd collapse, the equipment failures — it gutted them.
Then came loss number three.
The Move to Missouri
(“I thought I was done with dairy forever.”)
His mom died suddenly of cancer…
His father suffered a catastrophic heart event soon after…
The farm in Iowa had to be sold.
JR took a job in town and tried to leave farming behind…
But farming has a way of dragging you home — sometimes gently, sometimes by the throat.
When his dad moved to a small farm in Missouri, JR followed to help.
“Just temporarily,” he told himself.
He didn’t realize he was walking into the darkest chapter yet.
The Tornado
(“All the barns were gone. Tractor parts were spread over 160 acres.”)
On, May 6, 2023 a tornado leveled the Burdick farm.
Barns gone. Equipment gone. Heifers wandering loose. Power lines ripped out. Tools scattered like gravel. His sons hiding in the basement as chicken coops exploded across the yard.
JR remembers shining a flashlight across the wreckage and thinking,“I don’t even have a hammer to start fixing this.”
Insurance helped — kind of. About 60% of what was needed. The rest? “You eat it,” he said.
Still, he kept farming.
But what broke him wasn’t the tornado…it came a few months later.
The Final Straw
(“They stopped picking up my milk.”)
On December 2022, the co-op showed up one day and said:“It’s voluntary.”
They pushed a 30–40 page corporate program onto JR — including ESG reporting, third-party audits, carbon capture questionnaires, and “employee protocols” despite the fact that JR has no employees.
He refused to sign, so the co-op stopped picking up his milk. No warning. No discussion. Just gone.
Six months of zero income while still milking cows twice a day.
JR spiraled, and starting…drinking, avoiding calls from the bank, letting milk go down the drain….
Then came the moment everything changed.
His wife stood in the doorway and said: “You are the man who would charge hell with a squirt gun. And you’re going to lay down and take this?”
She didn’t yell. She didn’t threaten. She called him back to himself.
Then he stood in front of his kids on Christmas and apologized — for the years he let the farm consume him, for the seasons he wasn’t emotionally present, for the ways the system hardened him.
His oldest son, six-foot-four, wrapped him in a hug and said,“We’re here for you, Dad.”
That was the moment JR knew: He wasn’t fighting for a farm anymore. He was fighting for a future — one his grandkids could stand on.
Raw Milk Saved Him
(“I’m not farming anymore. I’m caretaking.”)
JR didn’t enter raw milk because it was trendy.
He entered because it was the only path left that didn’t require selling his soul.
And along the way, something deeper happened: “I realized I wasn’t a farmer,” he said. “I was an extractor. Now I’m a caretaker.”
He learned to see soil again. To read the grass. To let cows live long lives instead of being culled by industrial quotas. To talk directly to consumers instead of institutions.
And when a grandmother buying milk told him,“My granddaughter keeps saying your milk is fire,”. JR realized he’d found something even the co-op couldn’t take:
Relationship. Community. Meaning. A reason to fight.
Raw milk didn’t just change his economics. It restored his identity.
Where He Is Now
(“I want to be the guy who proves the model wrong.”)
JR isn’t shy about it: He wants to show young farmers another way — a way out of the death trap of consolidation, co-ops, fixed-cost bottlenecks, and corporate capture.
A way where farmers don’t need permission from processors to survive.
Where the consumer becomes the community again, not an afterthought in the institutional supply chain.
Where milk goes from cow to neighbor — not cow to system.
He knows the road will be long. He knows he’s still rebuilding. He knows the system won’t go quietly.
But he also knows this: “If I’m fighting for my future generations, there is no finish line. Only the next step.”
And every jar of raw milk that leaves his farm is one more step toward the future industrial agriculture fears most:
A free, sovereign, resilient countryside.
Thank for reading, Viva La Regenaissance!
-Ryan Griggs, Founder/Owner