Williamson, NY, is the home of a family farm which has not only won multiple awards for their homemade cheese at the New York State Fair but was also recently awarded a Dairy Food Safety & Certification Grant Award by the Northeast Dairy Business Innovation Center. Middle Road Creamery was one of only 12 dairy businesses across five states to win this award, and they have great plans moving forward.
Middle Road Creamery is owned by Jim and Joann Weinschreider and was started back in 2011. The couple lived in Marion, NY, where they were raising their children. As a stay-at-home father, Jim decided to start a goat farm and bought nine goats. Joann had experience milking cows years prior, but Jim chose goats because “they’re pretty easy on the land.” With small children at the time, he felt goats were safer to be around than cows.
Around 2013, the Weinschreiders moved to Williamson, where Jim built a new barn. The farm came into business as Middle Road Creamery around 2020. They are currently a seasonal dairy, milking 22 to 25 goats, and they purchase cows’ milk from another farm nearby to make cheese in winter. The couple owns a few breeds of goats (Nigerian Dwarfs, Nigerian-Alpine crosses, Saanen, Saanen-Nigerian crosses and Nubians) as well as three hogs a summer and 15 chickens.
They do natural breeding on their farm, as they keep two bucks year-round. The goats kid every spring, and usually have two or three kids at a time. Jim mentioned that one year, one goat gave birth to five at once.
Their milking parlor consists of two stands where they use a bucket milker to milk two goats at a time. The goats are milked once a day and are left to be with their kids the rest of the day.
In addition to selling at farmers markets, goat milk is available on site at the farm. Photo courtesy of Middle Road Creamery
All of the animals are rotationally grazed, switching between one-acre patches of land each week. With four total sections of pasture, Jim makes sure he gives each section about a month off in-between. They also buy local feed from a neighboring feed supplier and hay from a neighboring farm.
Middle Road Creamery earns its profits from the products they sell through the Brighton, Fairport, Walworth and Webster farmers markets. They are highly known for their delicious cheeses, including chèvre, feta, brie and tomme. They also sell goat milk, cow milk sourced from a nearby dairy farm and ice cream.
The ice cream is Jim’s newest project. “It’s kind of a neat new adventure,” he said. He started by taking a class from Cornell this past spring. Additionally, they sell whole hogs, whey-fed pork cuts and the goat kids each year.
Jim is very thankful and excited to have been granted the Dairy Food Safety & Certification Grant Award, and he plans to use it to improve the efficiency on their farm. The farm currently uses a 10-gallon vat-pasteurizer, which is “a labor-intensive process [that] takes a while.” Jim hopes to be able to sell his cheese in the wholesale market, but they don’t yet have the capacity to make that high of a yield.
“The grant we wrote was for a new vac that could do up to 50 gallons, and also for a dishwasher to decrease labor requirements on the farm,” he explained. The goal of the new vat is to “let us scale up our goats a little bit, and then it’s also going to let us do larger batches of cow milk.”
With the awarded grant, Jim is hopeful the new system can be set up and ready to use by November of this year.
Middle Road Creamery has a lot of improvements coming for them soon, but they have other goals to work toward in the future. Jim wants to start getting involved in the wholesale business, but also wants to start making more difficult and time-intensive cheeses such as cheddar once they get the bigger vac-pasteurizer. He also hopes to sell more products and to diversify the farm to make this his full-time job.
Congratulations to Middle Road Creamery for all of their success so far. For more information on the farm, visit middleroadcreamery.com.
To learn more about Northeast Dairy Business Innovation Center funding opportunities, visit nedairyinnovation.com/grants.
by Kelsi Devolve
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