Kansas Profile – Now That’s Rural: Dave McCarty, McCarty Family Farms
At a glance: The McCarty family relocated their dairy from Pennsylvania and opened it in northwest Kansas in 2000. Today, the multi-generational McCarty Family Farms includes five dairies, a milk condensing plant and a grain storage facility, as well as 230 employees and more than 32,000 animals.
More information: Ron Wilson, rwilson@ksu.edu, 785-532-7690
Photos: Ron Wilson | Dave McCarty
Website: Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development
Nov. 12, 2025
By Ron Wilson, director of the Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development at Kansas State University
Let’s go to Madison, Wisconsin where the 2025 World Dairy Expo Dairy Producers of the Year are being recognized.
The winner is: McCarty Family Farms. Their record is a remarkable story of growth, commitment, and progress in rural Kansas. Thanks to Ashley Pauls and the K-State Alumni Association for this story from the K-Stater magazine.
More than a century ago, McCarty Family Farms started as a simple red barn sitting on a hill in Pennsylvania. There was no electricity, and the family’s dairy operation involved milking just 40 cows.
At right: Dave McCarty | Download this photo
Four generations later, the McCarty dairy has moved to rural northwest Kansas and has expanded in an amazing way.
Dave McCarty runs this business with his three brothers, Mike, Clay and Ken. He’s proud of the efforts the company has undertaken to prioritize animal welfare and sustainability for future generations.
“We moved from Pennsylvania to Kansas to build something,” McCarty said. “We enjoyed creating things. My family's been that way for a long time. My dad and mom just gave us an opportunity to make it ours.”
McCarty earned a degree from Kansas State University in animal sciences and industry. He first connected with the land-grant university in the late ’90s when his family started looking to move their operations from northeast Pennsylvania to western Kansas.
“K-State had a very prominent, very well-respected dairy extension department,” McCarty said. “(K-State faculty members) Mike Brouk and Joe Harner have been pretty critical in design and development of our operations. So our ties run deep with K-State, and we plan to continue to work with them.”
In April 2000, the McCartys opened their dairy near the rural community of Rexford, population 197 people. Now, that’s rural. Over time, the operation expanded significantly.
The McCartys are also passionate advocates for agricultural education. In honor of their late mother, the brothers opened the Judy McCarty Dairy Learning Center in Rexford to give the public an opportunity to learn more about dairy farming and to watch cow milking in action. In the past year, they’ve hosted nearly 1,800 students and more than 6,000 total visitors, representing 48 states and 37 countries.
“It's a great way for us to be able to tell our story,” McCarty said. He hopes the learning center inspires the children who come to visit to consider a future career in agriculture.
“The industry has changed a lot; we're not out operating pitchforks and shovels anymore,” he said. “We're running iPads and downloading the latest app. Displaying that and highlighting that certainly helps to get the younger generation excited and involved in what we're trying to do.”
“We have the ability now to go to the refrigerator and look on the bottom of a cup of yogurt, and I can tell you where it came from, and I can tell you what processing plant, and I can tell you if it came from our milk,” McCarty said. “When you have identity with a product, you certainly change the way that you do it. When I put it in a cup and I know it came from my place, I see my kids, or your kids eating it, I have a different level of responsibility,” he said.
The McCartys partnered with the Danone company and constructed a milk processing plant on-site at the farm, which McCarty says is extremely rare in the industry. They now deliver their product to the Danone plant in Fort Worth, Texas.
Today, McCarty Family Farms includes five dairy farms, a milk condensing plant and a grain storage facility, as well as 230 employees and a total herd population of more than 32,000 animals. For more information, see www.mccartyfamilyfarms.com.
For more information about the K-Stater magazine, which is a quarterly magazine for K-State Alumni Association members, see www.k-state.com/join.
It’s time to leave the World Dairy Expo where the McCarty Family Farms has been recognized as Dairy Producers of the Year. We commend Dave, Mike, Clay and Ken McCarty and their father, Tom, for remarkable entrepreneurship in agriculture.
It sounds like they’ll keep milking ‘til the cows come home.
Audio and text files of Kansas Profiles are available at www.huckboydinstitute.org/kansas-profiles. For more information about the Huck Boyd Institute, interested persons can visit www.huckboydinstitute.org.
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K‑State Research and Extension is a short name for the Kansas State University Agricultural Experiment Station and Cooperative Extension Service, a program designed to generate and distribute useful knowledge for the well‑being of Kansans. Supported by county, state, federal and private funds, the program has county extension offices, experiment fields, area extension offices and regional research centers statewide. Its headquarters is on the K‑State campus in Manhattan. For more information, visit www.ksre.ksu.edu. K-State Research and Extension is an equal opportunity provider and employer.