Same land. Same family.

The first Schoch dairy was in Bauma, Switzerland, in the middle of the 1800s. Two brothers, Adolph and Ernest, carried the trade to California and bought dairy land outside Salinas in 1944 — that farm is still going, run today by their grandsons. Dave's father, Hans, followed his uncles over in 1955 and worked in the valley alongside them, until he went looking for a place of his own. He found 78 acres in Helvetia — Oregon farm country settled by Swiss immigrants a century earlier and named for Switzerland itself — and bought it in 1966. The family had crossed an ocean and a continent to land somewhere that already felt Swiss.

Dave grew up on that ground. He was driving tractors at seven and milking alongside his father through his teens. Then he left, became a mechanical engineer, and spent five years traveling for the firm — and never stopped thinking about the farm. He and Casey married in 1990 and went into partnership with his parents. They raised four sons here, and all four have shown their own dairy cows at the county and state fairs.

Teaching people about it has been part of the job for more than forty years. We've loaned cows to local kids for their 4-H projects and walked hundreds of preschool and grade-school classes through the barn.