ST. PAUL, Ore. — River Road Pastures is the latest addition to the farming operations of the longtime organic dairy, Sar-Ben Farms.

River Road Pastures counts Susan and Steve Pierson, along with their children, Ryan, 34, and Kevin, 36, with Ryan’s wife, Morgan, 34, as principals in the five-generation family-run operation.

“We have five family members that all manage things together,” Morgan said. “We’re just kind of dipping our toe in the water with this business venture, River Road Pastures.”

They sell beef they raise and ice cream made from the milk produced by the 350-head Sar-Ben Farms organic dairy herd.

They market it onsite and at local farmstands and farmers markets.

Moving from conventional dairy production to organic in 2005 was a “sharp learning curve,” Susan, 59, said. Her husband, Steve, 69, noted that “most people who go organic find that it’s economically a significant advantage.”

Now, two decades later, economics again have become the necessary agent of change in the farm’s business operations, this time with the addition of retail beef sales and ice cream.

The family is looking at Angus, Charolais and crosses with Jerseys and Holsteins for their beef products, and say their 14% butterfat ice cream is “combined with butter instead of spun-off cream, which makes a really rich and creamy product,” Ryan said.

“We are diversifying now, raising more beef cows along with the dairy cows because we wanted to get fresh, safe and delicious meat to our community,” Morgan said.

River Road Pastures has processed two cows and sold the majority of that product.

“Now we’re scaling up,” Ryan said, “but we’re not going from two cows to 200, but from two to maybe seven, and then if that goes well, from seven to 10, then maybe 10 to 20 and so on.”

The main goal at present is to try to “dip our toe into diversification, just going at a slow rate, because we do have a business of milking cows every day,” she said.

River Road Pastures is trying to create products for local farmers markets and also be open on the weekends at a stand on the property just off River Road near downtown St. Paul.

“People ask us, ‘How far do you want to take this?’ and we simply say we don’t know, but come grow with us,” Ryan said. “We will take it as far as the customer allows us.”

He said: “We do individual-customer custom cuts, not quarter- or half-beef sales. We don’t want a customer who can’t have a freezer and lives in an apartment” to be excluded from the locally grown movement.

“We’re doing this so it’s available to anyone,” he said.

“We need to know the interest in it,” Morgan said, “and how to price it and sell it. We’ve had people come in and buy $500 and some come in and only buy $20.”

“We basically tell them, be patient, because it takes 18 to 24 months to raise a beef animal,” she said. “We want to be fair to ourselves as well as our customers, and we’re just learning as we go here with it being such a learning curve for us.”

“All our lives it’s just been producing the product,” Ryan said. “Now it’s how do you get the customers in the door and how do you get the product out?”

“We’re looking at this as a three- to five-year business experiment just to see how it goes,” Morgan added. “Can we grow this and develop it into something that is an asset to our business and if it does, great. If it doesn’t, we just keep on milking cows.”