WELCOME TO CALKINS CREAMERY AT HIGHLAND FARM
Calkins Creamery at Highland Farm is a 6th generation family farm bringing you the highest quality cheeses featuring the delicious milk from our herd of happy Holstein cows.
We take pride in being your local artisan cheesemakers. So, whether you shop online or visit our creamery in person, we can’t wait to offer you a truly memorable experience.
And the heart of that experience finds its roots in Highland Farm’s history…
The History of Highland Farm
Sausage crackles on the stove, pancake batter bubbles in the skillet, and the Bryant family sits around a kitchen table spotted with syrup and strawberry jam. Their breakfast conversation depends on the weather and the seasons, the price of feed, and the cost of milk.
The Bryants are farmers rooted in Wayne County, Pennsylvania, for more than 125 years. Highland Farm was established in 1841 by Asil Dann, whose family traveled from Connecticut, passing through Sullivan County, New York, on their way to what is now Honesdale.
Mr. Dann’s daughter Elizabeth (Libby) married Burton Bryant. And since Burton and Elizabeth Bryant first cultivated the glacial till of Highland Farm in the 1880s, more than five generations have been sustained by this land.
Essayist and farmer Wendell Berry believes that family farmers establish a connection to their land, a connection charged with the “profound and mysterious knowledge that is inherited, handed down in memories and names and gestures and feelings.”
Like Berry, the Bryants share an intimate understanding of their farm. They have a place rich in history and full of promise to call home.
— Written by Amanda Neely Lightner (a 6th generation member of the Bryant family)
Calkins Creamery & Highland Farm Today
It’s this sense of place that drew Emily Bryant Montgomery and her husband, Jay Montgomery, back to Wayne County, with an idea to help the family farm prosper.
While living in Bakersfield, California, the couple developed an interest in using farm-fresh milk to produce artisan cheeses.
In California, Jay gained experience at an ice cream manufacturing company, and Emily, who had worked at the Penn State University Creamery as a food science undergraduate, took a cheese-making course at California Polytechnic University. They began to research cheese consumption in the United States, market opportunities near Wayne County, and the costs of production.
Ultimately, Jay and Emily decided they could successfully fuse their creativity, their business savvy, and their desire to help the family farm, and Calkins Creamery was established.
Calkins Creamery specializes in fine, artisan cheeses, using only the freshest milk possible from our very own herd of registered Holstein cattle.
Emily’s father, Bill, and her brother, Zack, care for the herd. “Our cows are well-cared for and comfortable,” Emily says. “Cow comfort reduces stress and increases milk production and butterfat.”
In addition to producing quality cheeses, Emily and Jay hope their customers will come to know where food is raised and manufactured. “Today, many people take food sources for granted, and we want to show them where it all begins,” Emily explains.
Highland Farm and Conservation
Highland Farm participates in the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program by providing buffers along streams. We plant trees to “fence out” the streams from our cows.
We engage in the Environmental Quality Incentive Program by providing walkways for dairy cattle as they go out to our pastures. We follow a pasture management plan, offering a watering system for cows in the pasture and planting wildflowers for pollinator habitats.
We complete five conversation projects annually as part of the Conservation Security Program. And, as part of the Wayne County Cover Crop Program, our farm plants winter rye on corn fields to prevent wind and rain erosion during the winter months.
We also installed a storage tank to catch our creamery whey and milkhouse wastewater (including soaps, acids, and milky water), so it can be spread by a manure spreader rather than discharged in a single area as part of South Calkins Creek Growing Greener.
Highland Farm also values energy efficiency when it comes to our conservation efforts. We’ve installed LED lighting in our main dairy barn and use an energy-efficient scroll compressor to cool our milk. Our variable-speed milker pump speeds up only when a vacuum is needed. We use a system that takes heat from the compressors that cool our milk to pre-heat the water we use to wash our milkhouse equipment, bringing our milking, cleaning, and conservation efforts full circle.
