A Dairy Tale: Clark Farm Creamery
Kyle Clark is something of a jack of all trades. On any given day, you’ll find him changing tractor tires or monitoring the health status of a pregnant cow, rewiring a refrigerator or developing a winning marketing strategy. In high school he ran his own sugar bushes (that’s insider lingo for a maple syrup operation). Yet through it all, he is first and foremost a dairy farmer.
“It’s cliché to say, but it’s in your blood,” says Clark. “I always wanted to make my grandfather proud.”
The fifth-generation farmer is doing the work his forebears have done for nearly a century at the family farm in Delhi, New York, a now 630-acre parcel pieced together around a 1907 barn built by his great-great-grandfather. At Clark Farms Creamery, the Clarks turn out batch-pasteurized milk with a sweet, some say “cooked” flavor that will ruin you for all other milks (you’ve probably had it in a latte at Prospect or experienced its magic in the gelato at Fellow Cafe). Though they have struck deals with small mom-and-pop groceries, shops, and farm stands in the area, many fans also purchase the milk from a lone refrigerator on site.
“I’ve had people visit family in Florida or South Carolina, and they say, ‘Don’t come if you don’t bring Clark’s chocolate milk,’” says Clark, who manages the production and works alongside his grandfather Peter and father Tom (the third and fourth generations Clark, respectively). “Dozens of parents have told me their kids won’t drink other milk. That makes me work harder than anything. It’s like you’ve made a customer for life.”
There’s a big reason behind the fanaticism: All aspects of the milk’s production are handled on site. Though the land has been used for traditional dairy farming over the last 114 years — that is, farmers milked the cows, then sent it off to be processed elsewhere — the 26-year-old Clark had an idea while studying dairy business management at SUNY Morrisville: Why not resurrect, expand, and automate the historic creamery that once stood on the family farm, thereby keeping the whole operation in house? So, inspired by a stint at the dairy plant on campus, he spent the next four years reading up on regulations and requirements and sourcing used equipment from across the country.
“A lot of dairy farmers don’t know where their milk goes; you see it at the farm, and then you see it in the store, and there’s this gap in the process,” explains Clark, who saw an opportunity to establish complete quality control under a single-source model. “We oversee everything from what the cows eat to how we bottle the milk.”
But while Clark has become the force behind the property’s reinvention, it’s the 200 resident Holstein cows that keep the whole enterprise humming. “Everything we do is for them,” says Clark. “All of these buzzwords you hear — organic, grass-fed, regenerative farming, sustainability — these are things we’ve been practicing forever. Because even if all you cared about was money, your number one job is to take care of your cows.”
Take care of them he does — sometimes in ways that resemble the methods his grandfathers used, other times in ways that are completely out of that world.
“Dozens of parents have told me their kids won’t drink other milk. That makes me work harder than anything. It’s like you’ve made a customer for life.”
“There’s almost no such thing as a typical day,” says Clark, who has used GPS to plant crops and temperature sensors to gauge bovine activity. “Cows get milked twice a day, 365 days a year with no exception. They’re fed and cleaned up every single day; we’re trimming their hoofs and working with a nutritionist to design their diet. They live a very good life.”
By Clark’s calculation, happy cows make the best tasting milk, but that’s not even what drives him. Right now he’s processing about 25% of the milk the farm produces — that’s about 3,000 gallons a week — but the goal is total self-sufficiency. “What we do is extremely humbling,” he says. “Delhi used to ship more cream and milk out of that train depot than anywhere else in the Northeast. We want to honor that history. We want to be the ones to bring some of that community back.”
Find @clarkdairyfarms in Delhi, New York.
www.clarkdairyfarms.com
By Jennifer Fernandez
Images courtesy of Clark Dairy/Craig Salmon
Volume 7
