High Lawn Farm Tour Stop for AJCA-NAJ Annual Meetings
High Lawn Farm LLC will be a tour stop during the annual meetings of the national Jersey organizations on Friday, June 21, 2024.
High Lawn Farm in Lee, Mass., is among the oldest Jersey herds in the country and known the world over for its genetic contributions to Jersey genetic advancement.
Called “the cradle of the breed” in a January 1990 issue of the Jersey Journal, the farm in the heart of the Berkshires is credited as one of the greatest examples of cattle breeding ever witnessed – certainly one of the single most successful endeavors of the 20th century. When herd owner, Marjorie Field Wilde, was named Master Breeder in June 1977, at least one-third of the top Active A.I. bulls were either High Lawn bred or the result of High Lawn breeding.
Mrs. Wilde, a great-granddaughter of William H. Vanderbilt, grew up in New York City and spent summers at the High Lawn estate, a wedding present for her parents. The mansion (not open to the public), a stunning example of Georgian-revival architecture, was designed by the New York architectural firm of Delano and Aldrich and completed in 1910. Mrs. Wilde and her husband, Colonel H. George Wilde, purchased the estate from her father in 1935 with the passing of her mother.
When the Wildes assumed ownership, they set out to grow the milk bottling business established by her parents in 1923 by expanding the herd and improving production. Processing and distribution of milk became – and continues to be – the main business enterprise of the farm.
Today, High Lawn Farm is owned by the next generation of the Wilde family. The farm processes milk from the Registered Jersey herd as fluid milk, cream, half and half and eggnog. It became an All-Jersey producer-distributor in 2008 and was among the first to use the Queen of Quality label on its products. High Lawn Farm also processes butter, cultured ghee, farmstead cheese and ice cream and sells beef from its herd of Angus-Jersey crosses. The business has capitalized on consumer fads offering trendy cheese and charcuterie boards that can be enjoyed at a picnic table on the farm with a backdrop of cows on pasture. It also offers a sponsor-a-calf program that allows customers to name a calf, visit and bottle feed her and receive a copy of her registration certificate.
High Lawn Farm maintains a small fleet of trucks to deliver products from the Berkshires to Boston and sells to retail outlets in Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York and Rhode Island. Milk is on the menu at several elite colleges, including Williams College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Leslie University and Emmanuel College.
The crew at High Lawn Farm takes pride in processing methods that contribute to high-quality products. Milk is low-temperature and batch-pasteurized to maintain flavor. Butter is slow churned in small batches and shaped by hand. It is available as unsalted, sweet butter; sea-salted butter and cultured butter, which includes cultures like yogurt and is often hard to find. Premium ice cream is made with 16% fat, the highest amount possible, and a low 30% overrun (churned air), which leads to a rich, creamy product.
In recent years, some buildings have been restored to look as they did 100 years ago while simultaneously incorporating modern technology.
A new state-of-the-art milk processing facility was built in 2015 and the farm began making cheese three years later. The facility was equipped with computer controls for every step of processing and a new loader and conveyor to reduce manual labor. The Farmstead Creamery was opened in 2020. The quaint little building that sits beneath the iconic, architecturally impressive clock tower is the former processing plant, which had been used since the 1920s. Visitors can also learn more about the farm at an on-site museum.
In 2013, High Lawn Farm installed a robotic management system. Cows are milked with Lely Astronaut robots and housed in an open-air, climate-controlled barn equipped with a Lely robotic barn cleaner and cow brush and heated water mattresses. Cows are seasonally grazed and fed a ration that includes corn, alfalfa and grass grown on the 1,500-acre farm.
The herd is enrolled on REAP and has an actual herd average of 18,392 lbs. milk, 878 lbs. fat and 713 lbs. protein. The High Lawn Farm herd has been on DHIA testing since 1923 and on performance programs since 1943.
Most of the herd traces to the animals sourced from several New England breeders beginning in 1918 after the original herd was sold for health reasons. When the Wildes took over, four principal cow families comprised the nucleus of the herd. Outstanding females were occasionally purchased as well to improve bloodlines. And in an era that predates A.I., the selection of the mate for those cows, the herd sire, was paramount. Among the latter High Lawn Farm purchases was Welcome Volunteer in 1946. His mating with Siegfried Military Secret resulted in one of the breed’s most impactful early sires, Welcome High Lawn Torono. His grandson, Observer Chocolate Soldier, is one of just 10 bulls to be recognized with a special issue of the Jersey Journal. With the January 1990 genetic evaluations, 49 of the top 50 bulls on the list of Active A.I. bulls descended from “Torono.”
Other impactful sires bred by High Lawn Farm include Generator HL Earl and Forest Midnight, heavily used in the 1970s, and HL Duncan Pepper, the first bull to be sampled by New England Jersey Sires Inc. A female of influence was Sooner YC Ginger, a maternal sister to “Pepper.” She was eventually in the donor dam programs of Sunset Canyon Jerseys in Beaver, Ore., and Sun Valley in Tillamook, Ore., and has 39 registered progeny. A prolific favorite at High Lawn Farm was Midnight Parade, Excellent-92%, with nine lactations and a top 365-day record of 25,180 lbs. milk, 1,117 lbs. fat and 919 lbs. protein completed in 1982.
George was a director at large for the American Jersey Cattle Club from 1948 to 1951 and received the Master Breeder award in 1960. He and Marjorie were the first Jersey breeders to receive the Distinguished Cattle Breeder award given by National Dairy Shrine in 1978. Among the most beloved Jersey Journal covers of all is November 1990, which featured Mrs. Wilde and one of her favorite cows, Peter Fast Time.
In 2023, the farm the Wildes brought to world prominence – High Lawn Farm – was named Massachusetts Outstanding Dairy Farm and honored with the New England Green Pastures Award.
