Creating a large agricultural industry can be compared to playing 'Civilization': initially, participants (peasants), financial resources (loans), special equipment, facilities, and transportation for delivering goods to consumers are required, along with many small details that are difficult to anticipate in advance. However, the most important factor is the presence of specialists. For three years, Vereshchagin sought to open a dairy farming school in the village of Edimonovo, in the estate of Baron Korff. In 1871, funding for this school was secured. It was equipped with the latest scientific advancements: a livestock yard for 100 heads, facilities for calves and pigs, a Swedish dairy for milk settling, a butter-making facility, cheese dairies, facilities for milk condensation, a building for making green cheese, a cooperage, and a Swedish icehouse.

Children of townspeople and peasants could enroll in the school. The training lasted two years. In the first class, students learned about livestock care, milking cows, feeding calves, fattening pigs, basic milk care, making sour cream and cottage cheese, as well as green cheese and literacy classes. In the second class, they were taught milk care, making butter from fresh cream, Holstein butter-making, cooking Swiss Gruyère cheese, Dutch Edam cheese, Chester cheese, French Camembert, Brie, and Coulommiers, milk condensation, and literacy classes.

Vereshchagin's cooperative activities attracted revolutionary populists, including notable figures such as Alexandra Obodovskaya and Sofia Perovskaya, who served as an assistant teacher in 1878. The left considered Vereshchagin 'one of their own,' although he was not. To maintain his reputation, Vereshchagin organized questionable cheese and butter factories in the estates of skeptics. Even his critic, a neighbor from the village of Igumenka, N.M. Koryakin, inspired by the work of the factory in Edimonovo, organized a cooperative of his own. And the landowner Shirobokov's venture was so successful that it became his main source of income, with his butter sold in two stores in St. Petersburg.

Vereshchagin skillfully captured the sentiments of the Russian 'educated society,' which was characterized by a love for the people: his cooperatives became fashionable. Zemstvos, competing with each other, created cooperatives for shoemakers, blacksmiths, flax scutchers, and tar producers.

During the school's existence from 1871 to 1898, over 1200 specialists were trained, who made a significant breakthrough in the Russian dairy industry during the Stolypin era.

The school was located in the building of an operating dairy factory, and the students were fully supported by the state. Practical classes took place in the factory workshops, and animal husbandry was studied for several weeks in state farms and collective farms in the Leningrad region. The school graduated 10 cohorts, the last of which was in 1957.