A recent Google review for Huckins Farm in central New Hampshire is a testament to the dedication of Matty Huckins, her family and their employees to their land, their cows and their community.

The review reads, “Huckins Farm is an absolutely stunning gem hidden off the main road. Even if you don’t buy anything, seeing all the cows out in a beautiful field with mountains in the background is a scene from old New England. Their eggnog-colored fresh raw Guernsey milk is also a treat.”

Since 1906, the Huckins family has been on their hillside producing milk, whether it was hand milking into buckets or in the parlor installed in the ‘70s. Matty married into the farm in 1989 when she wed the late Gordon Huckins. She embraced the farming lifestyle, producing wholesale milk while juggling parenting and a career as a teacher.

Gordon too worked off the farm, first in construction and then as the director of Public Works in New Hampton, NH.

In the Northeast cattle showing community, the family was and still is well-known for their line of prize-winning Guernsey show cows.

In the early 2000s, Gordon’s health began to deteriorate, which eventually led to a heart transplant. He passed away in 2005, less than a year after the surgery. During this time, Matty continued teaching, but the pair decided to move the milking herd of about 25 Guernseys and Jerseys to Echo Farm in southern New Hampshire.

They did keep heifers on the farm, however, and in 2009 Matty decided it was time to get the milk flowing again. She started milking Maggie, her one remaining Jersey. Her motivation to milk was in part to honor the Huckins family and her love of the cows, but she also hoped to manifest a dream she and Gordon shared – to put an agricultural easement on the property. It was her understanding that that would be difficult to do if there wasn’t some sort of money-making enterprise on the farm.

By 2016, Matty was direct marketing raw milk from five cows, utilizing a portable milker. Then she got word from Echo Farm that they were transitioning to robotic milking and the smaller-framed Jerseys and Guernseys would have to go.

“All of a sudden, I went from four to five cows to 18, so we had to put the parlor back together and begin putting milk in the bulk tank,” Matty said. Her stepdaughter Catherine, husband Bruce and two granddaughters were instrumental in putting the pieces of the dairy infrastructure back together.

The free-stall barn and herringbone-6 milking parlor, built by Gordon’s father in the 1970s, were in good shape. Katherine’s husband replaced the roof, and since there were fewer cows, they repurposed a section of the barn to accommodate processing, storage and a small farm store. Rather than exclusively selling raw milk from the farm, they began producing yogurt and soft cheeses and selling them at farmers markets.

Then came the pandemic, and demand for their products skyrocketed. They pulled back from farmers markets and decided to focus on growing their retail relationships and their farm stand. Currently, they sell their products to about 35 different farm stands, natural food stores and other food retailers.

Jerseys, Guernseys and goals for the future

Even with an eye on the future, old traditions remain strong at Huckins Farm, including selling milk in reusable glass jars. Photo courtesy of Cade Overton

The creamery is fairly simple, with two cheese vats (60 gallons and 15 gallons), a few walk-in coolers and a commercial dishwasher. Processing occurs nearly every day of the week with the help of Matty’s granddaughter Melissa and many part-time employees. Fluid milk sales and cream account for about 50% of their sales, and they remain fully committed to selling milk and cream in returnable glass jars.

The other half of their sales come from their yogurt and fresh cheeses. They make plain (“unadorned,” as Matty likes to say), maple and vanilla yogurt and a product Matty dubbed “Yo Cheese.”

“It’s a spread like a cream cheese, but it’s made from our plain yogurt and hangs in cheesecloth overnight,” Matty said. Yo Cheese comes in four flavors: plain, roasted garlic, herb and a flavor of the month. Fresh cheddar cheese curds, salted feta, ricotta and kefir round out their offerings. In the past they’ve made aged cheeses but currently do not have a full-time cheesemaker.

Their products are particularly rich and flavorful because of the high butterfat of the Jersey and Guernsey breeds but also because of the deep yellow color of the milk, often attributed to Guernseys. The herd averages around 750 lbs. of milk per day with a rolling herd average of 5.34% butterfat. Each milk cow gets about 16 lbs. of grain daily.

During the grazing season, the cows are rotationally grazed in quarter-acre fixed paddocks. The 20 milk cows have one rotation, and the bred heifers and dry cows are in a separate rotation. Since they are grazing fewer animals than Matty and Gordon did on their 132 acres of pasture, some opportunistic weeds – Asiatic bittersweet, multiflora rose and thistles – have become problematic. Matty hopes to install a high tensile fence around the perimeter of their grazing system. This will make it easier to deploy the use of polywire to create variable sized paddocks.

In winter, the animals are housed in the free-stall and fed a combination of dry hay and haylage. Until summer of 2023, a neighbor would put up forage on some of their ground, but 2023 was so wet in the Northeast that Matty purchased large square bales from Canada.

Although Matty enjoys her retirement from teaching, she’s still often up late into the night collating orders, checking on fresh cows and making a plan for her crew for the next day. She’s also been thinking a lot about the future of the farm since no one in the family is currently interested in operating it as a commercial enterprise.

In 2023, Matty, with the help of her son Jeremy, achieved her and Gordon’s goal to protect the Huckins Farm in perpetuity by placing an easement on 128 acres, managed by the Lakes Region Conservation Trust. The agricultural land easement allows the land to be used for agricultural and forestry activities but not subdivided or developed. In time, Matty hopes to find someone who would like to continue the farming tradition on the property.

“We’re looking for someone to perhaps work with me and with the family. If they’re interested in dairy, then they would learn the dairy business. If they want to do some other type of farming here, they’d be welcome to do that. We would not sell the land, but we might sell the business and the infrastructure that goes with the business,” she said.

There’s no doubt that Matty, with her detailed oriented nature, will have a sharp eye for a person or family that can carry the Huckins family tradition forward with the same respect for the land and New England traditions that the Huckins family has embodied for over 100 years.

by Sonja Heyck-Merlin