Our Story
Darrell Sinagra started working for a dairy farmer in Husser, Louisiana at 14 years old. Darrell went to and from the dairy 5 miles from his home at 4:00 AM on a pitch black road in rural Louisiana on a 1983 Honda three wheeler.
Darrell kept up the hustle of milking cows for the farmer throughout high school, and a few years after graduating he married his high school sweetheart, Cassie. As newly weds, Cassie was in college at Southeastern Louisiana University and Darrell began buying his own cows, so he could build up a herd of his own.
In 1997, after Cassie finished her degree and had a job teaching 2nd grade, they decided it was time to buy their own farm. They signed the dotted line of a loan that was bitter sweet. It was enabling them to work their own land and raise their own cows but what also came with the loan was sleepless nights and twisted stomachs for the recently married couple in their late 20s who just committed the next 25 years of their lives to an unstable farming income.
In the 26 years since they signed that dotted line, they have experienced countless peaks and troughs but are still farming on the same land they moved to nearly three decades ago. During this time, Darrell and Cassie raised and homeschooled their two children, Miles and Makenzie, on the farm. As you can see from the pictures, Darrell and Cassie didn’t waste any time enlisting the help of their children around the farm.
Having grown up seeing the difficulties of farming first hand and the rate at which small farms were vanishing around the country, Miles planned to have a very different career path than his father. After graduating high school, Miles moved to New York City for college. He graduated from college in 2022 and began working a full time job in Manhattan. Roughly six months into his first 9-5, Miles realized it wasn’t for him and that his farming roots ran deeper than he realized. One evening Miles was sitting in his apartment in Brooklyn and called his dad and said, “Dad, we need to buy a pasteurizer. I want to move home and start selling milk directly to consumers.”
A few months after this call, Miles moved back to Amite, Louisiana to begin a new farming adventure like his parents had done back in 1997. Being familiar with the dairy industry and the dire circumstance farmers have been put in over the past few decades, Miles knew he had to do something different. Miles believes the way to fight against massive corporations and to keep families from losing their farms is to sell natural products directly to members of the community like farmers did for centuries.
Miles’ mission is to revitalize the relationship that once existed between farmers and consumers by offering local, natural, nutrient-dense products. He would not be able to do this without the tremendous help from Makenzie and their parents. That’s exactly why we’re called Sinagra Family Dairy. We each play a crucial role, and from the pictures, you can see it’s been a family affair since day one. While many farms claim to be family owned, we are proudly family owned and family worked.