Gary and Lacey Hansen are working to attract new business to their Mulino farm in Clackamas County.

MULINO — Dairy farmer Garry Hansen of Lady-Lane Farm has always been an idea guy.

This attribute has served him well since March 2020, when COVID hit. It helped position him to open new income streams quickly and has changed the course of his entire operation which, until four years ago, produced only milk.

Garry and his wife, Lacey, run the Mulino dairy that he started in 1992 south of Oregon City.

They began bottling their milk in 2009 and for many years transported their Garry’s Meadow Fresh milk to four Portland-area farmers markets and enjoyed a decent wholesale business.

“Once we were in all the New Seasons stores, we were able to cut down on the markets,” Garry said.

They retained a spot at the Beaverton and Portland State University farmers markets until COVID hit in 2020.

“No one was going into stores, and we soon had a big surplus of milk,” Hansen said. “We had to figure out something else to do.”

They added direct sales — as direct as they could get.

“We put a small Coca-Cola cooler on a tabletop in the barn and people started coming and buying milk,” he said. “They could walk around the farm and look at the calves and chickens; it was very well received.”

But those sales didn’t cover the extra milk influx, so they started separating the cream and making butter.

They also went to more farmers markets and added home delivery.

“We still had to address our issues around cash flow, and for a period of time we were in six different farmers markets a week,” Hansen said. “To our surprise, the markets did extremely well for us.

“We had only one wholesale account whose sales went up and that was a home delivery company I helped start, and their sales went up tenfold,” Hansen said.

“They started expanding rapidly and have since gone out of business.”

Meanwhile, he was researching ice cream and by October of 2020 the dairy was making its own.

Just months later they got into cheese production.

Then they built a 72-by-48-foot store, which they called “the Farm Stand.” They now sell butter, ice cream and cheese to retail customers at the new facility and at farmers markets. They recently added their own beef and pork to the farm store, which offers a variety of other goods.

“We sell every cube of butter we can make and that’s not a product we can offer cheap,” Hansen said. “Our ice cream is doing extremely well; we’ve got some great recipes that people have compared to Tillamook.”

Their new dipping cabinet can hold 24 flavors; packed ice cream is sold in pints and half pints.

They’ve taken advantage of agritourism and the marketing behind that, Hansen said. “We’re close enough to the Portland area to take advantage of the opportunity for people to come out here and spend some time on the farm.”

The Hansens offer tours, field trips and events; their recent Easter shindig was a big hit.

“I caught all kinds of flack for spending so much time learning about ice cream,” Hansen said. “Come to find out ice cream is probably going to be the focal point of our new building, especially in the summertime when we start scooping it.”