Our Story

This farm’s story begins in Hardwick, Massachusetts, where Gina Robinson became the sixth generation of the Robinson family to milk cows on the family dairy farm. In 1979, the farm had modernized by building a new “freestall” dairy barn, in which the 100 or so milking cows were free to walk around a concrete pen, but not to walk on the earth or graze on pasture for many months at a time. The cows, black and white Holsteins, were fed a “TMR” or total mixed ration, consisting mostly of fermented corn and grass silage plus imported grains and minerals. Gina’s grandfather and father took pride in the high milk production of their cows, but struggled to make ends meet when milk prices were low, which seemed to be the case more often than not. During Gina’s youth, farmer friends and classmates were going out of business in droves. The pressure to “sell out” farms for house lots was too great to resist for nearly everyone, and of course sometimes banks did the deciding. Through unbelievable hard work and sheer stubbornness, Gina’s father Ray and stepmother Pamela held the farm together long enough to put their five children through college.

As a child, Gina loved spending time on the farm, and beginning with hauling 5 gallon buckets of warm milk to feed calves in a faraway barn at age 8, Gina became a handy worker, especially around the cows. She really loved the cows. Like many farm kids, Gina was involved in 4-H, and had special pet cows within the family herd. She took them to fairs, gave them baths, took them for walks and planned breeding schemes to create grand dynasties of special pet cows. But there was a problem: Once the young cows reached milking age, they fell apart. They would develop deadly infections of the uterus or udder, festering sores on their feet and legs, or they would lose weight and refuse to eat. Calving time was particularly dangerous, when some cows would have difficult births of oversized calves, resulting in paralysis of the cow’s legs, nearly impossible to resolve in such a large animal. Cows on the Robinson Farm were only living to an average age of 4, which was considered normal for the dairy industry, but is anything but normal since dairy cows in grazing situations typically live to be 7 or 8 and plenty make it into their teens. The high-grain diet fed to confined dairy cows is a disaster for their immune systems, and the Robinsons were suffering both economically and spiritually, along with their cows.

At Oberlin College, Gina mainly studied music and sociology, and took the college’s single agriculture seminar during her final semester. It was in that class that she began to imagine a way to be her own farmer, not locked into the impossible situation of industrial agriculture, but working with natural systems and dealing directly with customers. The threads of a calling were beginning to come together. Gina continued to make connections with the natural farming community through the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) and the Vermont Grass Farmers Association. Shortly after graduating from Oberlin in 2000, Gina discovered the Weston A. Price Foundation, a nonprofit that continues to provide the only comprehensive dietary advice that Gina has ever found convincing. Here, finally, was a satisfactory explanation for why so many supposedly well-fed kids grow up with learning disorders, crooked and decaying teeth, and poor general health. Here, finally, was a set of guidelines for eating that were based not upon the latest UDSA surpluses, nor the whims of charlatans, but upon thousands of years’ history of healthy human beings eating their traditionally prepared foods. It was also in 2000 that Gina met Cinnamon.

Now 21 years old, Gina had returned home to help her dad on the farm. Despite her misgivings about confinement farming, she wanted to help the family, and she was becoming quite skilled at keeping sick cows alive. And she wanted something a little bit different – a Brown Swiss. When Gina met Cinnamon, it was love at first sight. And mischief. A 5 month old calf led on a halter by her teenage owner, Cinnamon balked and flopped on her side in the dust. She has not become much more cooperative in the intervening years, but somehow that is part of her charm. Young Cinnamon went home with Gina and became the first brown cow on the Robinson Farm in over 20 years. She took the gate off its hinges and ran away during deer season. She galloped up and down the freestall alleys. She learned how to sneak into the woodshed and steal chicken feed. She led her tribe of grazing cows astray more than once, taking a mile detour up Jackson Road to visit a neighbor’s lawn, going for a half-mile lap around an empty cornfield in March and belly-flopping (really!) back onto the paved road. She was….spirited.

Gina could not bear the idea of her beautiful Cinnamon going the same way as all of the other cows. But what was the alternative? Farm animals need to earn their keep. Then, it happened. In August of 2001, Gina was preparing to leave for a few months’ study in Central America, and attended the NOFA summer conference, hoping to learn more about sustainable farming. After one of the major addresses, two women from Boston came to the microphone and pleaded with farmers in the audience to produce and sell high quality raw milk. There were only three licensed raw milk dairies in the state, they said, and all were quite small. As awareness about the health benefits of raw milk spread, more and more people were finding themselves driving long distances to get it, and there simply wasn’t enough good milk available in the winter, for example. For Gina, it was as if the skies had parted and angels sang - this was the answer she had been looking for! To produce top quality raw milk, the cows should be genetically disposed to produce a high percentage of butterfat in their milk. (Jersey and Brown Swiss are the most common of the “high component” breeds, but individual cows vary within breeds and there are many other “good” breeds, including Guernsey, Ayrshire, Devon, Normande and even the black and white New Zealand Friesian.) Good quality raw milk should come from cows that graze during most of the year and receive little, if any, grain supplementation. That was exactly the life Gina wanted for Cinnamon, so she began plans to start a small, raw milk dairy as a side operation on Robinson Farm.

After returning from Costa Rica, Gina took a two month apprenticeship in cheese and yogurt making at Hawthorne Valley Farm, followed by another two months working with the cows and other animals at the same farm. Then she returned home to Hardwick and began the grazing revolution. 2002 was a year of planning and preparing, working on a business plan at the New England Small Farm Institute, learning to work with moveable electric fence. She reworked her father’s calf-raising system, allowing calves to grow up on pasture or in winter pens with nipple buckets for their milk, rather than raising them chained in tie stalls, as 1970’s agricultural colleges had advised. Spring of 2003 brought Gina’s first independent farming venture, a system using nurse cows to raise male calves (normally sent to auction at a few days old) for grass and milk fed veal. While some may disagree, Gina believes that an animal that lives well, in clover and sunshine and fresh air, has had a worthwhile life, even if that life ends with the butcher. She strives to ensure that all meat animals are treated humanely, living as full a life as possible, however short.

Finally in the fall of 2003, Gina was ready to sell milk. She borrowed a friend’s old Jersey cow and combined her with Cinnamon to form a two-cow grazing “herd” separate from the other milk cows. Ray and Pam very generously allowed their daughter to plant a 2 acre cornfield with beautiful, well-manured soil from corn to high quality pasture grasses. That pasture was a dream, providing 8-9 grazes in a season, compared with a more typical 4-5. On the other end of the quality spectrum, Gina was given permission to farm the “Rose Hill”, a roughly 8 acre sliver of pasture between stone walls and forest, which was overrun with 8 foot high multiflora rose bushes. During Gina’s childhood, the cow paths of the Rose Hill had been a fun alternate route to Grandma’s house, with a chance of wild berries on the way. By the late 90’s, the roses had made the pasture nearly worthless to cows, and the only way through some areas was backwards on a tractor with a powerful brush cutter. Gina began the work of reclaiming these wild pastures, but it would be years before they would yield a decent meal. The Rose Hill may not have offered much in the way of cow nutrition, but it did offer inspiration. Always inclined to see the potential for beauty in a broken thing, Gina named her fledgling farm Rose Hill Dairy.

Gina met with the state milk inspector to get approval for her milk handling methods, which included the use of her father’s milking machines before the other cows came in to be milked, and a very low tech method of cooling individual bottles of milk in ice water baths. It was inefficient, requiring no less than eight trips across the street with cow, ice, milk, or bottles. But it made use of the existing equipment, and most importantly, the milk proved to be clean enough in laboratory testing to meet Massachusetts’ stringent raw milk standards. By the following spring, Gina bought two more Jersey cows, Spinach and Phoenix from Butterworks Farm in Vermont, and added her own Holstein, Dancer, to the group. Heifers Liza (a gift from Drumlin Farm) and Titania (purchased as a baby calf from Chase Hill Farm) were also reaching milking age. Fancy cars were rolling in the driveway from Boston, and Ray and Pamela were taking notice. Having at first been skeptical of Gina’s raw milk plan, they began to see that the demand for this special food was real and that there was a lot to be said in favor of farmers selling directly to customers. Although Gina’s methods were laughably inefficient, she was getting $6 or more per gallon of milk while they were receiving only about a dollar. Robinson Farm had followed all of the “best” advice of the dairy industry, yet they were drowning in debt and exhausted from trying. Something had to change.

For Gina, a big change occurred in the fall of 2004. She met Garnet Ungar, a music professor in a city she’d never heard of, Evansville, Indiana. They had an instant friendly chemistry that progressed rapidly from email to phone to airplane tickets, and by February of 2005, Gina and Garnet were engaged to be married. Gina agreed to move to Indiana, with one caveat – the cows were coming too. The couple shopped around the Evansville area for a home and found one on Franz Road in Boonville, a rather run down old farmhouse on an open hilltop with 16 acres. In July of 2005, Gina and her creatures made their way to Indiana, with the five adult cows initially boarding for several months at the Swiss Connection, a grass-based cheese production farm near Terre Haute. Three calves, eight chickens, and two very grumpy cats made the 20 hour trip in Gina’s little blue trailer, arriving on Franz Road just in time for the not-so-charming part of Southern Indiana summer.

Gina and Garnet dove into fixing up their house and constructing a farm to go with it. Grasses and clover were planted on the 12 acres of cropland. Fantastic high-tensile woven wire fences were built strong enough to keep cows from corn and coyotes from sheep. A well was drilled and water piped to hydrants on the new pasture. There were inevitable mistakes and many false starts, but Gina and Garnet persevered, finally completing a small dairy barn in 2007, about a month before the couple’s first baby was due. The first cow shares were sold in late summer, and baby Samuel arrived the first week of September. Gina was determined to keep her baby close, and managed to combine baby wearing with some naps in the infant seat or swing to get the milking and other chores done. This worked again when the Ungars’ second son Peter was born in October of 2009. It has been Gina’s experience that babies especially enjoy farm chores at ages 3-9 months or thereabouts, but then they get very heavy (23 pounds at 9 months in Peter’s case!) and, once crawling, prefer to be more active. As of this writing, both boys enjoy attending a nearby daycare in the mornings while Mom gets the chores done.

Other recent developments at Rose Hill Dairy include the addition of a small flock of Katahdin hair sheep, a woolless breed known for its lean, mild-flavored meat and its suitability for organic production. The sheep fit well into the grazing season, with their highest grass consumption occurring in springtime, just when the pasture grows most quickly. The cow boarding operation, Rose Hill Dairy Service, LLC, continues to be the most important part of the farm, currently milking 6 cows for over 50 families. The farm operates on a shoestring, still without a tractor or a “proper” barn, but the number of Southern Indiana (and Northern Kentucky!) families who have made their health a high priority continues to grow. In 2010, Gina worked hard to connect with potential Shareholders, improving the Rose Hill Dairy website and adding a Facebook page for the farm. The farm’s budget finally allowed her to do more frequent milk quality testing, which serves to confirm again and again in the lab that this is extraordinarily clean, safe, raw milk. Test results are posted most quickly on Facebook, and eventually on this website. As Gina continues to work on closing the biological feedback loops on the farm, other species under consideration for the future are pigs (they grow well on skim milk), and poultry (great for insect control). Meat goats are another possibility, if there is enough local demand. Gina is considering forming a “butter co-op” in2011 with existing cow share owners to make butter efficiently in season. Grass fed beef and veal are both “harvested” occasionally and are available as frozen retail cuts at the farm, along with lamb.

So what happened to Gina’s parents? They started by getting a special raw milk license for the healthiest group of their Holstein cows, beginning the day after Gina’s Massachusetts dairy closed. Within a few months, they had sold all but 30 milk cows and begun the process of converting their cornfields to pasture and their whole farm to organic. They bought a Jersey bull and some Normande heifers. They took a series of classes on cheese production and converted their old barn into a cheesemaking facility. Today, they sell four delicious organic cheese varieties along with raw milk, range fed eggs, beef, vegetables and perennials. They are in the news regularly as awareness of local foods and artisanal cheeses in particular, grows. They still work hard, but with a new kind of energy. Ray and Pamela, like their daughter, have found that connecting with real people gives farming meaning and working in partnership with nature makes farming beautiful.