Powder Hill Farm Tour Stop for 2024 AJCA-NAJ Annual Meetings
Powder Hill Farm LLC will be a tour stop during the annual meetings of the national Jersey organizations on Thursday, June 20, 2024.
Though Powder Hill Farm in Enfield, Conn., may be a newer face to the Jersey industry, the business owned by the Collins family is not new to agriculture. The 180-acre farm in the Connecticut River Valley is in its sixth generation. The family initially raised vegetables and then poultry. Today Collins Powder Hill Farm is primarily in the dairy and composting business. Collins Creamery makes ice cream that is sold through an ice cream parlor on the farm. The family operates with a focus on providing customers with quality in everything that leaves the farm.
The Collins family began the dairy with Holsteins and then added Jerseys several years ago. Today the milking string is about 55 Holsteins and 20 Jerseys. Milk is sold to Agri-Mark. The Jersey herd is enrolled on REAP and has a 2023 lactation average of 16,112 lbs. milk, 868 lbs. fat and 599 lbs. protein. The herd includes six Excellent and 14 Very Good cows (none lower) and has an average final score of 86.9%. The highest appraised cow is LFF Colton Jazzalina, who was just raised to Excellent-94%. Miss Gentry Jessie is Excellent-93% and Aerlei J Folly is Excellent-92%.
For the past 50 years, the family has been showing at local, state and regional levels, and occasionally at national shows. For the past four decades, the farm has hosted young people from all backgrounds to participate in the Merry Moo-ers, a Hartford County 4-H club.
They established Collins Compost in 1992 as a means of diversifying the business. Though not certified organic, Collins Compost is produced in a manner that meets the National Organic Program standard requirements for use in certified organic production and is approved by Baystate Organic Certifiers.
Collins Compost is a mix of manure and composted leaves. Every fall, thousands of cubic yards of leaves are brought to the farm and combined with manure from the farm and managed as piles. Compost is lab-tested for pH, organic matter and nutrients. The process is complete when compost is run through a screener to create a consistent product size of about ½ inch. Compost is then bagged or made available for bulk distribution.
In 2017, the farm became the first in the state to install a compost aeration and heat recovery system, financed in part with funds from the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and the U.S. Department of Energy. The closed-loop plumbing system aerates compost and recovers heat which is used to heat water in the milk house and then reused as cool water.
The family established Collins Creamery in 1997 to further diversify the operation. Collins Creamery has a large offering that includes ice cream in cups, cones, sundaes, shakes, cakes, pies and stampedes, which are soft-serve ice cream with mix-ins. They also offer frozen yogurt and low-fat and sugar-free ice cream along with sorbet and Italian ice. Collins Creamery was endorsed by Patch News as one of its “hidden gems” of Hartford and Tolland Counties in September 2023. It was voted the best ice cream spot in Connecticut by more than 44,000 viewers in the WFSB Channel 3 Ice Cream Social in 2022.
Farm tours to schools and other groups are made available through the creamery.
The Collins family enrolled the farm in Connecticut’s Farmland Preservation Program in 1992 to ensure the land will always be used for agriculture.
