Our story

Jeff's brother Kurt bought a couple acres from Bobbi Fowler, the matriarch of the Fowler family.  In the early 1940's, Bobbi and her husband Julien Fowler moved to Alaska and homesteaded this farm 20 miles north of the current town of Delta Junction.  By the 1970's, the Fowler family had moved on but still retained ownership of the surrounding 300 acres.

When Jeff and Carol moved to Shaw Creek with their three small children in tow, they could not believe their eyes.  The farm had seven owners in between the Fowlers and the McNabbs.  With each owner, the mess of trash and broken-down equipment grew. The house itself was legally condemned.  It was a flat roof house without running water and limited electricity.  There was an old dairy barn and pastures, but that was it.   Jeff and Carol set to work making the house livable, but it was no easy task.  Their first year in Alaska, they made only $7000.  "If we could've afforded to," Carol later recalled, "We would've moved back to Wyoming in a heartbeat."

Regardless of the challenges, God carried the family through feast and famine.  The first few years saw snowfall that reached up past the roof of the house.  In a few years, Jeff and Carol built up enough capital to start up Shaw Creek Meadows, one of the many dairy farms in the state at the time. The family milked over 100 Holstein dairy cows. They hayed in between daily milkings.  Dad trucked the milk to Northern Lights Dairy in Delta Junction to be bottled. It was hard work but fulfilling work.

As time went on, it became less cost effective to take the milk to the local dairy in town.  Jeff and Carol started looking at taking their milk to the state run Mat-Su Dairy in Palmer.  But in the early 2000's the state closed the Mat-Su dairy, collapsing the Alaskan dairy industry in one fell swoop. 

Stress was high, and Jeff and Carol had no clue how they were going to make it.  They now had four children, but the two oldest were out of the house.  By 2004, all but two Holsteins were sold.  As Jeff and Carol struggled to make ends meet, they started breeding the Holsteins to McCollum's Galloway/Angus bulls, transforming the cattle herd.  A few years after the dairy closed down, an opportunity to lease land to a gold mine came up, and Jeff and Carol saw it as a gift from God.  A few years later Carol got the front gate security contract, which she has kept for almost 20 years.

Today, Jeff and Carol are still involved with farming and have been instrumental in building the Shaw Creek Cattle Company.  The Galloway Angus cattle they bred their Holsteins to almost 20 years ago serve as the foundation for our herd.  Their youngest daughter Hailey is heavily involved with the Shaw Creek Cattle Company and brings new genetics in through artificial insemination.  She and her husband Casey also own the towing company JC's Towing & Recovery.