Wellsville ? If you’ve got Will Newhouse’s milk, then you received it the old-fashioned way.

The Wellsville dairyman is peddling milk in a way that hasn’t been seen in northeast Kansas for a generation. It’s bottled in glass jugs and sold locally.

Since opening in May, Newhouse Dairy has sold milk in 25 stores across Kansas. In Lawrence alone, 2,000 gallons per week are sold at Hy-Vee stores and The Community Mercantile. The price: about $2.50 per half-gallon.

“He doesn’t spare the horses – it’s rich,” said Bob Bunyard, a Kansas City, Mo., resident who stops to pick up milk at the Newhouse dairy whenever he’s in the area.

Newhouse is in the vanguard of small farmers looking for ways to prosper by processing and selling their goods locally instead of surrendering profits to a chain of middlemen between producers and distant markets.

Experts say people are increasingly interested in – and willing to pay for – quality food produced locally. They open their pocketbooks for the higher-priced products for a variety of reasons, not least of which is nostalgia for simpler times.

Some call the phenomenon “the slow food movement.”

The movement

Italian Carlo Petrini, dismayed by the appearance of a McDonald’s fast-food restaurant in a central plaza in Rome, founded Slow Food in 1986.

Now international, with 65,000 members worldwide, Slow Food originally focused on food-making traditions that could not be replicated in factories. These included cheese-making, said Lawrence resident Tom King, president of Slow Food Kansas and chef at Raoul’s Velvet Room, 815 N.H.

In the Midwest, the movement has come to mean locally, sometimes organically, produced foods sold from the backs of pickup trucks and the specialty aisles in grocery stores.

Will Newhouse's feet hit the floor at 3 a.m. to operate his Newhouse Dairy in Wellsville. Despite his higher-priced product, consumers are drawn to his milk's straight

It is all about reconnecting people with the food they eat, said Nancy O’Connor, nutrition educator at The Community Mercantile. It’s empowering to eat a tomato grown in land two miles away instead of 2,000, she said.

Slow Food Kansas has about two dozen members in the Lawrence area. Upwards of 75 vendors sold local produce and merchandise this year at the Lawrence Farmers Market. Several more markets have sprung up throughout the area in the past decade, said Dan Nagengast, director of the Kansas Rural Center and co-owner of an organic farm near Lone Star.

The Douglas County Horticulture Assn., a coalition of direct-market farmers, has more than 40 members. And in the Kansas River Valley, the market for organic and locally grown foods could potentially reach $100 million, said David Burress, a research economist for Kansas University’s Institute for Public Policy and Business Research.

Buying the feeling

One reason for growth in the slow food movement is that Americans have more disposable income to spend on luxury foods, said Andrew Barkley, a professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State University.

“Increasingly, people are willing to pay more for food with attributes that they think are important,” Barkley said.

Will Newhouse operates a milk dispensing and bottling machine filling glass bottles with his chocolate milk at his Newhouse Dairy in Wellsville. Newhouse has his product in 25 stores throughout Kansas, where the unusual glass bottles have caught the eye of many a consumer.

According to Nagengast, consumers appreciate the freshness of food grown only a few miles away. They like the sense of community buying local gives them. And they like supporting the local economy.

Though scientists question whether such foods are safer than conventional produce, many people also buy local or organic food because it makes them feel healthier.

Organic foods are exposed to fewer pesticides, O’Connor said. And locally grown food has passed through fewer hands and been on fewer truck beds.

“If we want to talk about the potential for people to access our food system, there isn’t much access if it comes from the farmer to the farmers market,” she said.

Unique and tasty

Newhouse has seen firsthand the willingness to support local agriculture. Despite its higher price, consumers are drawn to his milk’s freshness, he said. The glass bottles spare it the taste endemic to milk in plastic jugs. And the chocolate milk approaches the texture of melted ice cream.

Juan Ortiz of Olathe prepares to carton glass bottles of chocolate milk at Newhouse Dairy in Wellsville.

Sales also have been helped by the product’s quirkiness – especially the recyclable glass bottles that require a $1.50 deposit.

“They all want something no one else has,” Newhouse said. “People want to know nowadays where their product comes from.”

Finding a way to sell his milk in glass was an obstacle to overcome. Until he found a bottle washing machine, something no longer widely used in the dairy industry, his operation was at a standstill.

In Massachusetts, he finally found one – that was 60 years old.

“I don’t know if there’s even a new one in existence in the United States,” he said. “I think it was there when the tea party was.”

And unlike most dairy farmers, Newhouse hears from the people who drink his milk.

He regularly gets calls from customers with questions. Some visit the dairy and linger around the counter to discuss farming, family and small-town life.

“They like to relate to Newhouse Dairy,” he said. “They like to say, ‘I spoke to that person. I know that person.'”

A business move

Newhouse started the dairy because he wanted to stay in the rural community and was tired of driving a milk truck back and forth to Oklahoma.

“I’m doing it to control my market,” he said, “to control my own destiny.”

Before he started processing and bottling milk, Newhouse had a small operation dependent on middlemen. Expansion wasn’t an option. His farm runs to the city limits. So he had to do something different.

“You either have to be big, really extremely big, or you have to find a niche,” he said.

Other farmers are making similar realizations.

In the Lawrence area, farmers are raising fruits and pheasants, organic grains and beef, and making wines and cheeses, chef King said.

King is trying to incorporate more locally grown foods into the menu at Raoul’s Velvet Room. When he was chef at the now-closed Prairie Fire restaurant, he said, 70 percent of the foods he used were procured from producers within a 30-mile radius.

Small niche farmers are helped by proximity to a city and stores where specialty foods can be sold separate from conventional produce, Barkley said.

“I think it’s a time when people in agriculture are looking for something very different,” Newhouse said. “Farmers need to take back their markets.”