From Wheat to Mozzarella: How a Wyoming Ranch Built a 6,200-Cow Mega-Dairy

Out on Wyoming’s eastern plains, a family outfit from the speck-on-the-map town of Carpenter just built one of the biggest dairies in the Mountain West — and it’s helping supply the mozzarella that lands on your Pizza Hut pie.

Welcome to Burnett Enterprises, a 6,200-cow “mega-dairy” milking roughly two-thirds of all dairy cattle in Wyoming. On a typical day they run 800 cows an hour, pushing out around 66,400 gallons of milk daily. Tankers haul the milk south to Leprino Foods in Colorado, where it’s transformed into mozzarella for Pizza Hut. If your slice stretches, odds are good a Burnett cow had something to do with it.

The Burnett story starts with wheat, beef cows and a dad who thought his sons were nuts. In the early 2000s — amid the mad cow scare — Jerry Burnett was running a traditional cow-calf operation with sons Jeff and Jay when they floated a whopper:

“Let’s build a mega-dairy.”

Jerry’s first reaction? You can’t possibly milk 3,000 cows in a day. Still, he agreed to take a tour of big operations. One visit led to another, and then to a deal: by the following Monday, the family had bought into a nearby dairy and was milking 400–600 cows. The door was open.

The Burnetts have a phrase — “Average goes broke” — and they ran the numbers to make sure they weren’t average. After initially ramping to 3,000 cows with about 50 employees, their accountant (who benchmarks dairies nationwide) showed the math: cost per pound of milk looked best closer to 6,000 cows. So they doubled the herd — to 6,000 cows with only ~54 employees — and kept going to 6,200. Throughput, staffing and margins all improved.

The result is a high-volume, data-driven dairy that the family says is pioneering innovations they believe could ripple across the industry — everything from optimizing milking flows to tightening logistics across the massive herd. The Burnetts aren’t shy: scale is the strategy.

None of this was inevitable. Jerry insisted both sons go to college — “not because a degree makes you smarter,” he likes to say, “but because it forces you to think differently.” That mindset led the brothers to test new lines of business when the ranch alone couldn’t support two more families.

First up: sugar beets. Within two years, they were Holly Sugar’s largest grower in Torrington. With fresh capital, they started a custom feedlot—until mad cow disease (2003) torpedoed demand and customers pulled out. The pivot to dairy came fast: a Thursday conversation with a neighbor running a combined feedlot-dairy; a handshake; milking by Monday. Then the stepwise climb to 3,000, then 6,000+ cows.

Their rise comes as the US dairy sector keeps consolidating. Back in the 1970s, America counted ~648,000 dairies; by 2022, that number had plunged to ~24,470, with most surviving herds topping 2,500 cows. In Wyoming’s Star Valley, once wall-to-wall dairies, Shumway Farms is the last one standing — saved by a direct-to-consumer pivot under the state’s Food Freedom Act. The Burnetts chose a different route: go big, go efficient, and lock in a reliable buyer for industrial volumes of milk.

That buyer is Leprino Foods, the mozzarella giant that turns Burnett milk into cheese for Pizza Hut. It’s a tidy fit: predictable, high-capacity milk supply feeding an equally high-capacity cheese line. In a business where price swings and perishability can crush margins, having a built-in outlet for 66,000+ gallons a day is the kind of stability that lets a family farm plan — and keep hiring — over decades.

Why it worked here

• Numbers over nostalgia: The family sized the herd to where the per-pound economics penciled.
• Education as leverage: College pushed Jeff and Jay to challenge assumptions—and spot pivots fast.
• Speed to scale: When the feedlot crashed, they didn’t tinker; they switched lanes and scaled.
• Anchor customer: A consistent, high-volume buyer means the milk never sits.

The Burnetts’ rise doesn’t erase the headwinds in dairy — volatile prices, tight labor markets, and a nation drinking less milk than it used to. But it shows one way to survive: either get much smaller and sell directly to your neighbors — or get much larger and plug into a national supply chain. The Burnetts chose door number two and built a machine that hums.

So the next time you pull apart a molten slice and watch that cheese stretch, remember: there’s a sprawling, 6,200-cow operation on the windswept plains near Carpenter helping keep that mozzarella flowing — born from a “crazy” idea, a few rapid pivots, and a family willing to bet big.

The original story by Renée Jean for Cowboy State Daily.