"Life According to Cruze Farm Girl and the Buttermilk Evangelist" presented by Earl Cruze and Colleen Cruze Bhatti, Cruze Farm

(photo credits below)

A Farmer's Guide to Living Out Your Passion

Join us for a special Valentine's edition of The Legacy Centre Speaker Series with two East Tennessee treasures! The charming and sweet father-daughter duo of Cruze Farm, Earl Cruze and Colleen Cruze Bhatti, are revered across the region and beyond as the Buttermilk Evangelist and Cruze Farm Girl for their farm fresh delights and winsome personalities.

Especially famous for its buttermilk, Cruze Farm has been credited with starting a buttermilk revival, which has garnered attention from the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler Magazine, Garden and Gun, Southern Living and a host of other publications, including the ever popular Southern Foodways Alliance video documentary of Earl Cruze extolling the virtues of buttermilk.

Patriarch Earl Cruze and his wife, Cheri, have been milking cows and producing their buttermilk goodness in East Tennessee for 30 years. It is a fifth generation family tradition that started with Earl's grandfather and great-grandfather, who sold buttermilk from horse-drawn milk wagons. Now, the Cruzes are one of the only family farms in Tennessee to process and bottle their own milk. When their daughter, Colleen, stepped into the business, she helped bring her dad's buttermilk gospel to another generation with remarkable results. To her credit, for example, Cruze Farm Milk Bar at Market Square is a local hot spot for the creamiest ice cream, delicious biscuits, buttermilk "shots," and the most adorable farm girls you ever did meet!

"It's really turned out better than we ever dreamed it would." says Earl.

On February 13, Earl and Colleen will talk about life, love and work from a farmer's perspective, a guide to living out your passion and sharing what you love to the next generation. And you can count on an entertaining lesson on the virtuous qualities of buttermilk... You know Earl cannot help himself! Because when you love your job, you never work a day! It's simply the Cruze way.

We cannot wait for you to hear the charming story of what makes Cruze Farm, "A Farm Forever." The Cruze family radiates the kind of authenticity the business world not only needs but craves, which is evidenced by the widespread attention they have received locally and nationally. Get a sneak peek in this WBIR episode of Your Stories.

Sweet Treat Notice: We're in for a real treat! Literally. Colleen is bringing some milk and ice cream to taste. Yum!

Meet Our Speakers: Earl Cruze and Colleen Bhatti

A fourth-generation dairyman, Earl Cruze began bottling his own milk in 1981 with his wife, Cheri, but his love affair with milking cows began as a child. Born in 1942, Cruze got an early start on the family farm. At eight years old, he would wake up at 4 a.m. to milk the cows. Ten years later, he joined the Air Force and upon his return bought his first piece of property at the young age of 21.

Eventually, Earl was able to purchase a 575-acre Knoxville property, now known as Cruze Farm, located in the Riverdale community on the French Broad River. With hard work and determination, Cruze Farm now produces 2000 gallons of milk a day. They milk grass-fed Jersey cows and bottle their own whole pasteurized Jersey milk, real churned buttermilk, light milk and chocolate milk. Their cows are on pasture 365 days a year and are never given hormones. Their dairy is a state approved and inspected milk processing plant, one of the only family farms in Tennessee to process and bottle their own milk.

Cruze Farm buttermilk is revered by culinary connoisseurs and country folk alike as the best available. As Earl explains, he is carrying on the family tradition, “My granddad made buttermilk before me, and I’ve tried to adopt his way of making it. It would be described as the milk left over when you churn butter.”

For decades Earl has spread the buttermilk gospel across East Tennessee. Known affectionately as the Buttermilk Evangelist, Earl enthusiastically shares the good qualities and healing powers of buttermilk, “I just don’t think people are knowledgeable enough about buttermilk; they don’t know the good qualities about buttermilk… You see other people getting old, but buttermilk makes you feel young. Buttermilk will make your complexion better. It will change your outlook on life. My feeling is it’ll make you live longer.”

Cruze has devoted his life to dairy farming. His passion for industry and tradition serves as an inspiration to many. Both Earl and Cheri were awarded the 2008 Ruth Fertel Keeper of the Flame Award.

Hear more from Earl about his upbringing, beliefs, and buttermilk vision in this entertaining video documentary from Southern Foodways Alliance: Watch Video

Colleen Cruze Bhatti, 27, wears many hats these days…daughter, wife, business owner, Cruze Farm Girl, Buttermilk Ambassador. And as if that weren’t enough, she recently gave birth to precious Amery Francis. Hard work and determination is in her blood though. At a young age, Colleen fell in love with dairy farming. After graduating from the University of Tennessee with a Bachelor's degree in agricultural science, she returned home knowing that life on the farm was her dream too and has worked hard to prove it to her dad.

"I had a goal and that was to sell all our milk locally that we were milking from our cows, because we had a surplus of milk at the time," says Colleen. In no time, she accomplished that and more! A successful entrepreneur in her own right, Colleen has helped spread her dad’s buttermilk gospel to a new generation with remarkable results.

Not only does she frequently wake up at 3 a.m. to pasteurize and bottle milk or tend to the farm's 60 Jersey cows, Colleen runs her Cruze Farm Girl ice cream business that she launched from her father's recipe, which admittedly has been tweaked a time or two!

Inventive and bold, Cruze enjoys experimenting with unique ice cream flavors inspired by the tastes of the season, such as kale, blackberry, let’s never split, salty caramel, sweet potato with marshmallow, egg nog, and buttermilk lime cardamom. To Colleen, the ingredients are as important as supporting local farmers. "We try to use as many local ingredients in our ice cream as we can," she says. "We use eggs from local farms and honey from our neighbor. If we can support each other, it works out well."

As the family’s buttermilk ambassador, selling golden buttermilk biscuits, buttermilk ice creams, and flavored buttermilks like fig and strawberry from the Cruze Farm food truck and milk bar at the Market Square Farmers’ Market in Knoxville every Saturday, she has made a name for herself and her sweet lot of cleverly dressed farm girls, who invite you to try a “shot” of buttermilk.

You can find Cruze Farm Girl ice cream along with the farm's unhomogenized milk, real churned buttermilk and chocolate milk at local farmers' markets, independent grocery stores and food cooperatives. Colleen also has introduced her farm's products to many local restaurants, which proudly use those products in their dishes.

"I think she's brought a lot of energy to their brand and she's just such a great face of the business," says Kristen Faerber, former co-owner of Just Ripe, a downtown grocery and cafe that carries and uses Cruze's products. "…It's not a very glamorous endeavor to be a farmer and she does all the hard work of farming, but she's also able to put a great product out there and a great face and personality to go with it and I think that's good for local food."

All of this success does not go unnoticed! Cruze was included in the Business Journal’s 40 under 40 Class of 2013 in addition to being spotlighted in the New York Times, Southern Living, Garden and Gun, and a host of other publications.

Photo Credits: Earl Cruze bio photo by Simply Southern; Colleen Bhatti bio photo by Brian Wagner of NY Times; Collage/Row 1: Garden and Gun, Cruze Farm Facebook (CFfb), CFfb, Conde Nest Traveler; Collage/Row 2: Simply Southern, CF blog, CFfb, Knoxville Magazine; Collage/Row 3: Dixie Pixel, Southern Living, CFfb, CFfb

Coffee, light breakfast, and TLC served.