Think about the first lick of an ice cream cone on a hot summer day. The sweet creaminess. The chill. The surprise of a swirl of lemon curd or roasted strawberry or maple. Chasing the melting ice cream with your tongue, as it starts to drip down the cone.

It’s pure joy.

That’s the joy that Holly Rippon-Butler wants to share with as many people as she can.

Rippon-Butler makes high-quality, custard-style ice cream with local ingredients from the Adirondacks and Upper Hudson regions of New York State. She lives and works with her parents on her family’s third-generation dairy farm and shares her Farmers Cone Creamery creations at local retailers, farmers markets and festivals.

“It’s energizing that we’re buying local milk and eggs and berries and mint from friends,” Rippon-Butler said. “It feels like a collaboration or a celebration of the farmers and food producers we’re in community with.”

Starting in 2019, she has spent weekends traveling an hour and a half away to make her ice cream at the Hub on the Hill (now Essex Food Hub). The Hub provided the rare and perfect combination of a commercial kitchen, cold storage, retail sales and receiving space for ingredients. Rippon-Butler could even store the 800-pound machinery she needed to make ice cream. The Hub welcomed this start-up ice cream producer with a day job advocating for young farmers.

Rippon-Butler still works in agricultural advocacy and policy strategy, but she wants to spend more time scooping ice cream. With her business partner Lisa Malmgren, Rippon-Butler hatched a plan to build their own production facility at the family farm.

They applied for a USDA Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure (RFSI) grant in June 2024, which is federally funded and administered by the state of New York and the Farm and Food Growth Fund. The grant aims to build out the middle of the supply chain.

“Money to build infrastructure for food businesses can feel really difficult to get,” Rippon-Butler said. “This grant was the first thing that was accessible to me as a small food business that needs a solution for our growth.” 

RFSI allows businesses like Farmers Cone Creamery to grow, purchase from local farmers and fill a growing consumer demand. “Our customers care so deeply about the ingredients,” Rippon-Butler said. “I think people are excited that this product tastes really good and is homemade.”

Scooping at festivals, the partners see enthusiastic customers who return with family and friends. “Seeing people be so excited that they could get this ice cream and having people come back three days in a row for it—we have some super fans,” Malmgren said. 

Farmers Cone Creamery applied for the RFSI grant to build their own facility in June of 2024. But federal funding ground to a halt, leaving in limbo Rippon-Butler, Malmgren and their hungry customers.

Funding was released a year later, leaving Farmers Cone Creamery scrambling to build in a shortened timeline, during which building material prices increased and tariffs jostled equipment markets.

While RFSI grantees like Rippon-Butler are scrambling to catch up and meet project budgets in a new reality, other farmers across the country are still on the hook.

Rippon-Butler sees these challenges for fellow producers with Essex Food Hub, where she now serves as board president. At Essex Food Hub, a second RFSI grant will build out a commercial kitchen at the Hub’s new home in Westport, giving more entrepreneurs like Rippon-Butler the space they need to pursue their dreams.

After all, Rippon-Butler made her first ice cream for friends out of a garage in 2017. She spent “literally all” of her money to buy her $5,000 ice cream machine.

She certainly didn’t have the resources for her own cold storage or commercial kitchen. “There are producers who are at a really small scale who have no way to make it legal, people who wouldn’t have even gotten beyond the dream stage,” Rippon-Butler said. “It will encourage people to dream and think about how they could use local product.”