Meet the Staff

Elizabeth (Liz)

I’m a co-owner and the main operator of Stars Farm. I was raised in Palisade and went to the Front Range for college, where I received a degree in Physiology from CU Boulder. During my college years, I started to seriously consider changing my future career from a medical field to something involving cows. Why cows? Because I like cows! Simple as that. After I graduated, my husband, Jiayi, suggested I reach out to a nearby raw milk farm to see if they needed any help. So, I reached out to Johnson’s Acres. They invited me to come out one Saturday evening in January 2018, and the rest is history. I remained there until the dairy’s sale in January 2023. Now my family is here on our own lil’ dairy!

Jiayi (Jay)

I’m the other co-owner of Stars Farm and the main dreamer of the future of Stars Farm beyond the cows (maybe camels?). When Liz was still in college at CU Boulder, we would help out at the historic Sawhill Farm outside of Boulder. We helped with the Sawhill family’s farm and house chores on weekends in exchange for the quiet time leaning on the fence observing their beef cattle grazing on the pasture and dreaming about our future farming life. I hold a PhD candidacy in Computer Science from Colorado School of Mines and currently work as a software development lead at a local company. I have more than ten years of experience in robotics, computer vision, and augmented reality, and more than five years of experience in managing a small software development team. My own farming experience is rather brief, only three seasons of growing vegetables at a half acre garden since 2020, but I did start it from scratch with the owner on his 5 acre property near my previous home in Lakewood, CO. My passion for farming started on my grandmother’s small farm in Shanghai, China when I was a child, where she grew a lot of vegetables for the family and raised some chickens. Her farm has been long gone as a part of urban development in China. I also had a small backyard at my childhood home where I got to build a microscale irrigation ditch network to water the vegetables and the trees I grew. I was able to pour water at the head of the ditch and see the water flowing through the network and passing in front of every plant in the garden. Those are some fond memories that I still hold onto till this day, and I work hard to make sure that my children grow up with their own memories that they will cherish when they look back in the future.