Rockview Family Farms has some 90 years of history doing business in and around Downey, having maintained its presence for decades after much of the area dairy industry gave way to development.
Rockview Family Farms’ history goes back to 1927, although the family that has owned the business since 1965 isn’t exactly sure of the precise date when founder Bob Hops started things up in a place then known as Downey City. They’re commemorating the anniversary this month because June is promoted as National Dairy Month in the industry.
Pete DeGroot, the man who bought Rockview in 1965 and eventually passed the business on to his family, arrived in the United States from Holland in 1928, thanks to a sponsor who secured the young man a job and the opportunity to make a new life for himself in Southern California.
“The deal was he had to milk cows for a year,” his son, Amos DeGroot said.
Amos DeGroot is now Rockview’s chief executive and his sons, Ted and Curt, also work at the company. The brothers are the chief operating officer and sales director, respectively. Rockview’s address is on Stewart and Gray Road in Downey, although its processing plant across the street is in South Gate.
Rockview also has processing plants in Commerce and Industry, and its milk comes from cows in Ontario and ranches in the Central Valley and Nevada.
The DeGroots do not release production or revenue totals, but can point to customer relationships that encompass a broad swath of Southern California’s grocery and food service industries: Cardenas Markets, Gelson’s, Grocery Outlet and Rite-Aid are among the retailers selling Rockview products, the DeGroots said. They also supply schools, cruise lines, amusement parks and hamburger chains.
“If you lived in Southern California for any length of time, and eat dairy products at all, I’m sure you’ve eaten our products at some time, at some restaurant,” Curt DeGroot said.
Area dairy farms’ fade out
Rockview Family Farms is among the few dairy businesses left in a county where dairy farms once existed as a signature industry.
Los Angeles County lost its status as the nation’s most productive agricultural county after 1950, according to Los Angeles Agricultural Commissioner’s spokesman Ken Pellman. Even so, the 991 dairies and nearly 105,000 cows inside the county’s boundaries as of 1954 put Los Angeles County in first place in the dairy industry.
Nearly a decade later, more than 100 businesses providing milk and related products filled the pages of the 1962-63 edition Luskey’s Criss Cross City Directory, a reference guide for area businesses. That information comes from the Artesia Historical Society’s records, and probably understates the number of local dairy companies.
“Not all dairymen were willing to pay for this service and are not listed in the classified but would be in the personal section with occupation listed as dairyman,” society historian Wayne Dantema wrote in an email.
At present, there are only 37 facilities inside Los Angeles County with a California Department of Agriculture license to produce fluid milk, sour cream, ice cream and other dairy products. There are nearly 120 other places that can turn pasteurized milk into frozen desserts.
There’s a single commercial dairy herd left in the county, according to Pellman. The cows are long way off from Downey, however, in Antelope Valley.
Artesia Historical Society president Barbara Applebury recalled that during the mid 1950s, labor on a dairy farm was often part of life for other students who, like her, attended Excelsior High School in Norwalk.
“They didn’t get in too much trouble if they fell asleep because they had already been at their jobs milking cows,” she said.
Historical accounts of southeastern Los Angeles County’s dairy industry often point out that Cerritos was known as Dairy Valley at the time of its 1956 incorporation. Cerritos voters adopted their town’s current nomenclature in 1967, following a recommendation from the local chamber of commerce, according “The Story of Cerritos: A History in Progress” by Marilyn Cenovich.
The city that had been founded as Dairy Valley had 118 dairies and roughly 80,000 cows when it formed in 1956, according to Pellman’s data. In 1974, a few years after its name change, Cerritos had but 21 dairies and some 7,000 cows within its territory. The dairy industry essentially vanished from that city by the end of the 1970s.
Cerritos wasn’t the only city to change its name as tract houses replaced dairy farms during the postwar era. Similar developments were afoot in nearby Orange County towns before Cerritos’ vote. Dairyland’s name changed to La Palma in 1965 and Cypress had years earlier abandoned the Dairy City moniker.
“The acres of feedlots had begun to give way to housing tracts,” Cenovich wrote in her account of Cerritos’ history. “By April of 1968, 31 tracts were completed or underway — a total of 2,164 homes. The 605 and 91 freeways were under construction, crossing the community in each direction. Enormous drainage, water, and sewer projects were underway, some interconnected with systems that served Norwalk, La Palma, and Lakewood.”
The transition from farmland to suburbia, as remembered by Applebury, was generally a welcome change to those who had grown up in what was an agricultural part of Los Angeles County.
“I don’t think there was any sadness,” she said. “At that time it looked like progress.”
Family tradition
The DeGroot family took control of Rockview during this transitional period for the area. Pete DeGroot had risen from milking cows for hire and owned his own dairy by the mid-1960s. The DeGroot farm, according to the family, was the largest of Rockview’s creditors. When the company’s ownership started to go under, Pete DeGroot acquired Rockview in a 1965 bankruptcy sale in order to protect his ability to get his farm’s milk to customers.
Amos was 25 years old when his father made the deal.
“I was milking cows myself,” he recalled. “My dad came in the barn and said ‘I just bought a milk plant, and I’m going to need help running it.”
Amos’ sons are proud to keep Rockview within the DeGroot family.
“We’ve had our chances to sell the company over the years, and I think that at times we’ve kind of toyed with it, but it becomes sort of who you are,” Ted DeGroot said. “It’s part of our heritage.”