Cream of the crop: North Canaan dairy farms trace a rich history

NORTH CANAAN — Before daybreak over the rolling hills of the Northwest Corner, Sandy Carlson was down in the milk parlor at Carlwood Farm: the last remaining dairy farm on Canaan Valley Road.

“I don’t eat breakfast until after my cows,” she said.

As recently as the 1960s, dozens of dairy farms lined Canaan Valley Road, with many more operating throughout the rest of North Canaan.

The farms may be mostly gone, but the ones that remain are hopeful for the future.

Against all odds, there were more milk cows in North Canaan in 2023 than ever before. Just four dairy operations remain in the small farm town: Laurelbrook Farm, Elm Knoll Farm, Canaan View Farm, and Carlwood Farm.

Combined, their barns house over 2,000 milk cows.

The federal Department of Agriculture’s 2022 Dairy Data report showed that in the last 50 years, Connecticut’s dairy cow population has dropped from about 57,000 in 1972 down to 18,000 in 2022.

Over 10% of the state’s remaining milk cows reside in North Canaan.

Canaan History Center’s Kathryn Boughton said the town’s lactose legacy can be traced back to favorable land evaluations in the 1730s.

“Canaan, when it was sold at auction in New London in 1738, had the highest price-per-acre of all of the five towns here because it had the best soil,” she said.

In the 18th and early-19th centuries, farming in the region was necessary for self-sufficiency. During this period, milk was highly perishable and the surest way to obtain fresh, safe milk was to own a cow.

Boughton recalled about 25 active dairy farms on Canaan Valley Road as late as the 1960s, all of which operated on a much smaller scale than today’s farms in the East Canaan section of town.

Even up to the time when I was born, there were a lot of farms,” said Boughton. “My great-uncle, who farmed very much as his father had farmed at the time of the Civil War, had 12 cows and that supported a family of five people,” she said.

It was not until the mid-19th century that dairy farming became a viable business venture. Large dairy farms with delivery services did exist, but few found success until pasteurization was discovered in 1862.

Arguably the first successful large-scale milk business in the nation was opened in Burrville, Connecticut, in 1851 by entrepreneur Gail Borden.

Borden held a patent on “milk extract” and used this to create condensed milk. A journal entry made by an unidentified Shaker in June 1853, provided courtesy of the Canaan History Center, described Borden’s business model and the process of evaporating milk:

“Inventor of patent milk extract wants our folks to take up the business of making. Be kind of an agent for him. Does down a few gallons of milk in our Laboratory this eve. Pays $7 & half dollars for the milk & privilege. The process as I understand consists in boiling away all the watery principle from the milk. Bottle it up & twill keep forever if you don’t throw it away. Whenever you want it to use add 3 fourths hot water and let it cool. Makes first rate new milk!”

Fueled by demand in the Civil War, in 1862 Borden’s company was producing an average of 16,000 quarts per month. At the turn of the century, the company went public and in 1901 Borden’s company opened a facility in Canaan.

Situated near Union Station in North Canaan, the location offered easy access to New York via the railroad and dozens of dairy farms in the area contributed to milk production.

The beginning of the 20th century also saw the departure of many local crop farmers who went West in search of cheaper land that was better suited to farming.

“They discovered they could make a better living on green fields than they could on New England stone,” said Boughton. “They were all moving out to Ohio.”

In the coming decades, the region’s iron ore industry faded into oblivion and left an economic void in North Canaan. A surplus of available and affordable land created new opportunities for would-be farmers.

“The last furnace went down in ‘23. That was a very dirty, nasty business and the farms were fallow for a while,” said Boughton. “[Farms] were selling for a dime on a dollar and so you begin to get people coming in from the city.”

In the 1930s and 1940s, the opportunity attracted several new farmers to North Canaan who took up dairy farming in town. Each remaining dairy farm in North Canaan today can trace its origins to this period.

Robert and Dottie Jacquier founded Laurelbrook Farm in East Canaan with 18 cows in 1948. Today, their grandchildren Cricket and Bobby Jacquier operate the farm, which now houses well over a thousand milk cows and employs 22 non-family members.

“We milk 1,400 cows three times a day,” said Cricket Jacquier. “Two guys can do 200 cows an hour.”

Like the other three remaining dairy farms in North Canaan, Laurelbrook is an Agri-Mark Cabot Creamery Cooperative farm. Cricket Jacquier is chairman of the board at Cabot.

Laurelbrook grew from about 500 cows in 1991 to become one of the four largest dairy farms in Connecticut.

“In 1992, right after I graduated, we had to make a decision whether we were going to stay farming in East Canaan or we’re going to move to Western New York,” said Cricket Jacquier. “We made a big decision then. Our roots were from here, and we were just going to make it work.”

Laurelbrook has begun to diversify its operation in recent years with a focus on environmental sustainability.

“My brother and I now own and operate Laurelbrook Natural Resources,” said Cricket Jacquier as he showed the composting tents behind Laurelbrook’s corn fields. “These are manure solids. All of this composting is sold to landscapers and nurseries in the area.”

To survive into the next generation, Cricket Jacquier said diversification will be key.

He credited Laurelbrook’s success to adapting to a changing milk market and above all else, happy cows.

“The better you take care of your animals, the more milk they produce,” he said.

Just down the road, David Jacquier, son of Robert and Dottie, owns Elm Knoll Farm. Elm Knoll houses over 300 milk cows in its barns.

After growing up on Laurelbrook Farm, David decided to pursue his own venture in 1968, while he was still in high school. His operation started in a rundown barn just down the road behind the Blackberry River Inn. He had just three cows.

“That barn up there was abandoned in the Depression, so there were no cows in there since the mid-30s,” said David Jacquier.  “By the time I left Blackberry in ‘70, I came down with 65 or 70 cows.”

While still a student at Housatonic Valley Regional High School, he ran into trouble with gym coach Ed Tyburski after cutting class to tend to his cows.

“It was almost impossible for me to be there by 7:30 because I had three hours of work before, and I got a little bit torqued off at Tyburski,” he said. “I told him I didn’t have time to play his cow pasture pool.”

He purchased the East Canaan property he is on today in 1970 and created Elm Knoll Farm. Initially, his primary source of income was from crop sales to nearby dairy farms.

“Through the 70s and 80s and almost through the 90s I could make more money selling corn silage than I could milking cows because we had a lot of farmers,”  he said “Then in 1994 to 2000, a lot of farmers went out.”

He said the exodus of dairy farmers in the 1990s was caused by a sharp drop in profitability, particularly for smaller operations.

“I dealt to the guys that were milking 30 to 40 or 50 cows,” said David Jacquier. “[Now] everyone’s got to be over 200 to 300 cows to cash flow, unless you have other incomes.”

Today, all of Elm Knoll’s profits are generated from dairy sales. David Jacquier and his right-hand man Logan Cables said they intend to maintain that model into the next generation.

“We’re the only dairy farm in the state of Connecticut that milks cows and that’s the only income,” said Jacquier.

“I’ve been doing this my whole life so I don’t know anything else,” said Cables.

Cables, 20, has worked at Elm Knoll for about eight years and intends to buy Elm Knoll from David  Jacquier within the next few years.

“I’m hoping I can make it another two or three years then I’m going to turn it over,” said Jacquier. “But do I really want to sell him a dead horse?”

Jacquier said if Connecticut wants to maintain its dairy farmers, it will require external support. Assistance programs at the state level exist, but David said the farmers have not received their due.

“Every land sale in Connecticut, $15 goes to the dairy farmers. But it never gets to us,” he said. “Eight million dollars goes in the general fund and it never comes our way.”

If dairy farming is to survive in Connecticut, help will need to come from Hartford, he continued.

“All we’ve got to be is honest on the money. If you want open space, every town, 169 towns say they want it. You got to get Hartford to understand ‘give us the money,’” he said.

While thankful that the program exists, David Jacquier said dairy farmers need more advocates both in Hartford and on the farm. He credited Ben Freund, a neighboring farmer, for representing dairy farmers when fighting for state assistance.

“Ben Freund was the one that did 95% of the work,”  said David. “We wouldn’t have the million and a half or two million that we’re getting right now if it wasn’t for Ben.”

Eugene Freund, Ben’s father, moved from the Bronx to North Canaan in 1949 and took up farming with his wife Esther. He bought land in East Canaan the following year and now, over 70 years later, approximately 275 dairy cows call Freund’s Farm home.

“The cows in this barn have been part of my family’s multi-generational legacy,” said Amanda Freund. “These are the great-great-great-great-granddaughters of the cows that my grandfather started milking in 1950.”

The Freunds — Ben and his brother Matthew — sold their herd to Ethan Arsenault and his business partners, Lloyd and Amy Vaill, in September of 2022. The trio rents barn space from the Freunds and Arsenault oversees dairy operations on location, renamed Canaan View Farm.

“This has always been my dream. My family’s always been in ag,” said Arsenault. “Personally, I’m very hopeful that we have a bright future ahead of us and that we stick around.”

The Freunds have taken steps to adapt to a changing industry in hopes of thriving into the next generation. CowPots is one such venture that repurposes manure into biodegradable garden planters.

“Fifteen percent of the manure is still in fibrous form and we separate that out,” said Matthew Freund. He added that the final result is “biodegradable, plantable containers that replace plastic.”

The Freunds set environmental sustainability as a top priority and installed solar panels to power the farm’s operation. They have also begun to process methane into biogas to offset the use of propane and heating oil.

“I think that we have to start to realize that climate change is real and that we have to be very aware of what we’re doing on this planet,” said Matt Freund. “We want to leave the next generation, you, something better than we started with.”

Canaan View also has five robotic milkers in its barn, streamlining dairy production on site and providing real-time data and metrics on herd health.

“The mantra with robots is ‘let cows be cows,’” said Arsenault. “When they come in the robot it spits out grain, so that allows us to individually cater to the cow’s nutritional needs.”

The milking robot tests dairy as each cow is being milked and provides Canaan View with live data on the health of each cow.

“We really focus on the cow here and that’s what I like about the robots and all the data I get from them,” said Arsenault, who added that the time saved from robotic milking allows him to spend more time “keeping the cows clean, happy and healthy.”

Of the estimated 25 dairy farms in the 1960s in Canaan Valley, an area that reaches to the Massachusetts border, just one remains: Carlwood Farm.

Carlwood began when Doug Carlson purchased a 42-acre plot in Canaan Valley in 1941. Doug’s son, Doug Jr., inherited the farm at the age of 16 and expanded the operation to about 140-acres.

Sandy Carlson took over the business after her father, Doug Jr., died in 2018. Today, Carlwood Farm milks about 50 Holsteins and Jerseys and has approximately 75 young stock.

Carlson said her relatively small dairy farm has survived by following the blueprint laid out by her father, and his father before him.

“We never had the desire to get bigger, so we don’t have a lot of overhead,” said Carlson. “We didn’t purchase a lot of big fancy equipment because we didn’t need it. My father’s thing was ‘use it and then reuse it’. You make do with what you have.”

She said nearly all milk produced at Carlwood is sent to Connecticut-based companies, with occasional shipments to the Agri-Mark Cabot processing plant in West Springfield, Massachusetts.

Carlwood farm is entirely family operated and Carlson’s daughter, Sheri, has begun the process of taking the farm into its fourth generation.

“Sheri and her husband Greg recently purchased [the farm] and they also have a daughter, Hallie, that’s three and she is around here all the time,” said Carlson.

Carlson said increased regulation in recent years has made it particularly difficult for small dairy operations to stay afloat. She noted considerable documentation requirements that add extra hours to an already busy life on the farm.

“This is something new in the past five years or so. It’s more paperwork. I have enough paperwork to do on a daily basis just opening my mail, paying bills, cow records, and deciding who I’m going to call to order grain from and what fertilizer. I’m just totally overwhelmed sometimes,” she said.

In the winter of 2023, there were five dairy farms in North Canaan. Segalla’s Farm on Allyndale Road began in the early 1900s and became a certified organic farm in 1997.

Segalla’s Farm closed down earlier this year after owner Rick Segalla was faced with financial and health problems.

“I lost my organic marking during Covid, and I had a heart attack last September,” said Segalla. “I was running out of feed. It just wasn’t a paying proposition anymore.”

The roughly 120 cows from Segalla’s Farm were sent to Indiana and New York.

Segalla’s Farm is the most recent North Canaan dairy operation to close the barn doors and drive its cattle West.

As for the four remaining farms, successors have already been identified in hopes of keeping the milk flowing for years to come in North Canaan.

Cricket Jacquier, owner of Laurelbrook Farm, showed how a newly installed plate cooler instantly reduces the temperature of milk from 100 degrees down to 36 for transport. Photo by Riley Klein

A robotic feeder autonomously roamed the barns of Canaan View Farm dispensing feed to hungry cows. Photo by Riley Klein

David Jacquier, owner of Elm Knoll Farm in East Canaan, stood alongside his right-hand man Logan Cables as the duo prepared to harvest corn silage in the fields that surround the barns. Photo by Riley Klein

Cricket Jacquier, owner of Laurelbrook Farm, showed how a newly installed plate cooler instantly reduces the temperature of milk from 100 degrees down to 36 for transport. Photo by Riley Klein