Highland Farm and Calkins Creamery have a lot of history and produce delicious artisan cheese sold in stores all over the northeastern United States.

Meet farmers in the Northern Poconos and learn their stories!

In part three of a three part series on farming in the Pocono Mountains, Chris Barrett talks with Bill Bryant from Highland Farm near Milanville.

Calkins Creamery specializes in fine, artisan cheeses, using only the freshest milk possible from their very own herd of registered Holstein cattle. The dairy farm and creamery is part of an Agrolegacy through Wayne Tomorrow.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Chris Barrett
This farm is a dairy farm, but you also have a creamery, right? So before we, before we started the interview, we really were talking a little bit about how that's a little bit different. And he talked a little bit about how you had successions of barns here and all those kind of things. He tells just a little bit of the history of your farm, which is really neat.

Bill Bryant
The farm started in the 1840s by my great great grandfather. His name was Acel Dan. He was the original owner. The original deeds go back to a guy named Shields, who was an agent for William Penn Sons. So that's where it goes back. They basically cleared the land here in the 1840s, 1850s.
Chris Barrett
You, you could trace us back to William Penn.

Bill Bryant
(Well)

Chris Barrett
that's amazing.

Bill Bryant
Penn Sons owned big tracts of land in eastern Pennsylvania. Eventually, land agents divuted out like big chunks of Wayne County. So the cows really didn't come until late 1800's. And that's when my great grandfather married Dan's daughter and the farm became a Bryant farm and not a Dan farm. Burton's son, Dwayne took over, and then he started in with the cows and he was like one of the earliest people in the area to have purebred Hallsteen cows. We have a certificate in the house where he became a member of the Hallstein Association. Then my father, his name was Donald, he was the youngest of Dwayne's children. So Donald takes over the farm next. I came back in the 70's and formed a partnership with my father and we farmed together till he passed away. And then I I took over in the late eighty's. And then we had a barn fire in 2002. So we camped out at a neighboring farm for a year while the new barn was built. Then my son Zach decided to come back, and then we formed a partnership and that's how we're operating today.

(Music)
I wake up in the morning in this great blue state golden fingers.

Chris Barrett
So, we're here at Highland Farms with Bill Bryan, and he's been telling us a lot of great things about how long the farm has been here, what it's like to have a dairy farm. There's a creamery on property, which is really, really cool. So Bill, if we could I wanted to kind of get back a little bit too. We were talking a little bit about the cows. How many cows are you milking now? And are they all Holsteins?

Bill Bryant
We have about 100 milk cows now. They're primarily registered Hallsteens, although we do have a token amount of cross breeds. They have some Jersey in them, they all have Hallstein in their pedigree, but for some one reason or another, cow got bred to a different breeds.

Chris Barrett
And what's the difference between the other breeds on Holsteins? Are they better cows for milk? Is there a better quality?

Bill Bryant
Well, Holstein is the predominant breed in the United States. They used to have a slogan that they fit the farm, fit the market. They're  a bigger cow, they give a lot of milk, and they just kind of, like, took over. But the other breeds are called the protein breeds. Jerseys. Ashers guernseys. Brown Swiss. They usually give less milk, but they have higher butterfat and higher protein. But what we've done here is we've bred the Hallsteens to high protein, high butterfat bowls. So we have butterfat and protein that approaches that of the colored breeds. Because if you're going to make cheese, you need protein and butter fat because you get more cheese out of the milk.
Chris Barrett
How many gallons do you produce a day? And you have to milk them every day, right?

Bill Bryant
They probably produce 700 gallons a day. We have machines. We're not as automated as you can be, but we have it around the barn pipeline, and then we hang the milker on the line and it goes directly into the tank, goes up into a stainless steel line and then flows around the barn and goes into the tank.

Chris Barrett
How often do they have to be melted?

Bill Bryant
They have to be melted at least twice a day. Some places milk three times a day.

Chris Barrett
So, I want to test two. You have a creamery. How did that happen? How did that all happen?
Bill Bryant
Our daughter, who was living in California at the time, working in the food industry, and her husband was in the food industry, too, weren't real thrilled about living in California once she got here. I think it was kind of in the back of her head that wanted to do a creamery. The question was whether she was going to do ice cream or what she was going to do. And the creamery was built in 2006, the first cheese made in 2007, and the cheese just, like, took right off. People would say, well, what did you do to market it? And we did nothing to market it. It was all word mouth.
Chris Barrett
The difference between a craft produced cheese and your arts and cheeses, what is the biggest difference? Probably everything. But.
Bill Bryant
First of all, the milk can't be any fresher than it is. They're taking it right from the tank almost as soon as the cows make it and making cheese out of it so it has no chance to deteriorate. So you got fresh milk to begin with. Everything is more natural, and it's just a different kind of a cheese.

Chris Barrett
So, the cheeses that are sold here, are they sold anywhere in the market, in stores? Or do you have to come here to get it?

Bill Bryant
A small percentage is sold here because we're really off of the beaten path. You got to want cheese pretty bad to find us. The PS one week, a small van goes to Philadelphia. The next week, the van goes to New Jersey. New York City. In New York City. A lot of high end restaurants use our cheese and they go through, like, a broker, a distributor down there. But most of the cheese, though, is sold through small shops.

Chris Barrett
What's the most popular cheese?

Bill Bryant
We had three dogs here, and every time somebody came to the creamery, the dogs would greet them. So they named one of the cheese as a three dog dill. And that's a pretty popular cheese. But we have we have the hard cheese spreads. We have a farmer's cheese that's kind of like kind of like a cottage cheese that people make cream cheese things out of and we make dips out of it. And that one actually just won a big third place and a big competition in Wisconsin.
Chris Barrett
In Wisconsin. (Wow)

Bill Bryant
She's got some first places with the cheese and national and international competitions.
Chris Barrett
(Wow)
Bill Bryant
But we do a lot of different cheeses, which is kind of different than other small creameries, maybe concentrate on two or three cheeses, but we have a pretty broad spectrum. One thing that is funny with the seasons is when the cows go out to grass in the spring, the taste of some of the cheeses can change because the cows are eating the fresh grass.

Chris Barrett
Oh, wow

Bill Bryant
They go out all summer. But when the grass is lush like the end of April 1 May, the milk actually gets a yellow color to it and it changed the flavor of the cheese. The one cheese go back to the seasonal thing. A funny one is we make a cheese called Vampire Slayer, which is a cheese that has garlic in it.
Chris Barrett
So, hang it around my neck (Laughs)

Bill Bryant
It's a good cheese, but she has a problem with that in October keeping the cheese shop supplied in New Jersey because they all buy it for Halloween.

Chris Barrett
Oh, yeah, for like Halloween parties and stuff. That's really neat. So, in the winter, do you feed them hay?

Bill Bryant
In the winter, the cows get well all year long. Even when they're out on grass. They get supplemented with something called a total mixed ration. We take all the ingredients the cows eat and mix it together. So every bite they take, they're getting a nutritionally balanced diet. And all year long we feed silage corn silage, which is the corn stalk and the year ground up.
Chris Barrett
Do you grow some of that air of the corn?

Bill Bryant
Corn, yeah, we grow the corn. We grow that silage here.

Chris Barrett
Silage. I'm sorry, what does that mean?

Bill Bryant
Silage is in silence. It's gone through the fermentation process and it ferments and that preserves it. Early in the spring, we chop the grass and put that in a silo, or what they call an egg bag, a big plastic tube. So we feed a lot of that all year. But we do put up a lot of dry hay, and every day they get dry hay. In the old days, that was pretty much their entire diet, but now we've supplemented it with other kinds of they're still getting the grass, but it's in a different form.

Chris Barrett
Bill hows farming. Well I should say how's dairy farming? Right? How has that changed in the last 20 years?

Bill Bryant
I was born in 1950, and in 1950, this township, which is it's called the mascus Township, Wayne County. There were more dairy cows in this township than any township east of the Mississippi River, and there were probably 2000 dairy farms. I mean, when I grew up, every place on the road there were dairy cows. And nationally, this is a good statistic, too. I just read this the other day. In the past five years, half the dairy farms in the United States have disappeared, gone from 60,000 to 30,000 in the last five years.

Chris Barrett
Is it go? Is it conglomerates that are dairy farming now, or

Bill Bryant
Those small farms have gone out of business and the whole dairy industry has moved to the Southwest. It kind of blows my mind because they say they say they can't afford to send a milk truck around to pick up milk at these small farms that are widely dispersed, but yet they're willing to make all the dairy products in the Southwest and truck them all the way across the United States to the market on the East Coast. But it kind of all boils down to technology. There's a lot of technology out there.

Chris Barrett
So to kind of wrap up here, where do you see this farm in the next five to ten years? And the creamery itself, where do you see that going?
Bill Bryant
It's kind of scary, I guess, because some of the experts will say that in ten years there'll be none of these farms. They'll all be gone.

Chris Barrett
(Wow) We hope not. We hope not.

Bill Bryant
They say that. But you have the consumer out there that wants to buy local, but the whole system is geared to almost prevent them from buying local.

Chris Barrett
It seems like you're bucking the trend here, I mean, with your creamery and you're really doing a lot of great things in Wayne County.

Bill Bryant
And it's kind of a joke that will be the last farm in Wayne County.

Chris Barrett
Well, I hope you're always here, and I hope the rest of the farms are always here too, Bill. But thanks for being with us today. You were great to provide us this time at Dust, which we really appreciate. And this is the third part of our three-part series in farming in the Pocono Mountains. Farming that you really didn't think you'd expect to find here, but it is here. This is a dairy farm, which is different than the other two folks that we talked to. They have a creamery on site artisan cheeses, which are amazing, that are sold in many big cities throughout the Northeast. So, for Bill, I'm Chris Barrett for PTN, the Pocono Television Network. You've been watching Pocono Perspectives, and as always, thanks for watching.