Alumni Spotlight: Scott Hoffman ’12

Family Cow Farmstand

Not all students, in fact very few, come to work at the college farm with prior farming experience. Scott Hoffman, class of 2012, and now owner of Family Cow Farmstand, is no exception. Prior to his first year of college, Scott had little experience or exposure to farms. He grew up in a small, northwestern Pennsylvania town that had a few conventional dairies in it, but other than that, his farming knowledge and experience was limited. In reflection on his mindset after his first year of college, he says “I definitely didn’t want to be a farmer — I had no good examples to look up to!”.

Scott applied to work on the farm the summer after his freshmen year because he simply needed a summer job and the neuroscience internship that he applied for didn’t pan out. He says he remembers his interview with Jenn very clearly, down to the clothes he wore for it — to think that interview changed the course of his life!

“The farm became my home at Dickinson — it by degrees morphed from just a job to the focus of my academic career and today, 7 years later, I do very little that isn’t directly related to farming.” While at the farm, his favorite chores were anything that involved driving the tractor because “it was still foreign and macho to me at that point”, not to mention the largest thing he had driven until the farm was an 11 passenger Dickinson van. In terms of harvesting, his favorite activity on the farm, to this day, is bulk harvesting, from garlic to winter squash to potatoes to watermelon, just knowing that the job involves a lot of people “pulling a lot of calories out of the ground all at once, that’s very gratifying.”

Hoffman says the college farm helped create the lens through which he sees the world, that lens being “farming and society’s relationship to food and the people that produce it.” In his senior year of college, he changed his major from neuroscience to biology so that he could take more on courses that would allow him to spend time looking at agriculture academically. The subject of his senior thesis for biology were the hub ponds that exist on the college farm today, home to thousands of American toads and beneficial insects. As you might have guessed, the hub ponds became his favorite spot on the farm.

After graduation, Scott became an apprentice on the farm. He then went to on a draft-powered sheep dairy in New York, where he learned how to work draft horses. He then went to Essex Farm in upstate New York, where he was a butcher and drove horses. After spending a year and a half there, he decided to try and start his own farm business with his then-girlfriend-now-wife, which turned out trickier than expected, and so he went back to working at Essex Farm.

It was while he was at Essex that his wife heard about the opportunity to buy the dairy business that they now own. They bought the diary from another Dickinson grad, who had bought it from the original owner. Family Cow has been a raw milk dairy since 2008 and they currently have 12 cows that they milk twice a day. Keeping the herd size small allows them to focus on the health of their cows and the cleanliness and safety of the product they are selling to people.

The cows are 100% grass-fed and during the grazing season the cows get moved to a new paddock every 12 hours, or after each milking. In the winter, the cows eat grass hay and balage (which is fermented grass hay). The cows do most of the harvesting of the grass while on pasture, which is all the time except for when they are being milked. All Scott and Aubrey (Scott’s wife) do with the cows do is milk them in a very clean manner, the milk is then bottled in half gallon jars and cooled down very quickly, then it’s ready to sell!

The milk is the dairy’s only product and they currently have 130 CSA customers and also sell to the walk-in customers from the farm store on site. Five days a week, they deliver milk to Burlington, which is only 20 minutes away. So all-in-all, the milk doesn’t travel far at all before getting to the customer.

Aside from the cows, Scott and Aubrey also raised 800 pasture broilers that they processed on-farm this season. They say that the biggest thing they learn (every day) is how much they don’t know. There are always new things to learn and different problems to solve, but it’s that excitement that keeps them going.

For the future, they look forward to continuing learning and growing. They hope to eventually get draft horses on site to help with vegetable cultivation for the full-diet CSA they are planning, but for now, they will be using tractors to cultivate. Wish them luck, as they just recently planted garlic for the spring!

The pictures above are of their herd, a calf named Almond, and a heifer named Pistachio who is due to calf in about a month and who has the coloring of a Holstein but is mostly Jersey.