New England Green Pastures Awards Winners

Steve Taylor
New England Correspondent

WEST SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — Six outstanding family run operations have been named Dairy Farms of the Year for 2009 by the New England Green Pastures program.

One farm in each of the six New England states is recognized each year for superior achievement in dairy herd management, land stewardship and contributions to agriculture and the broader community.

This year’s winners are:
Connecticut - Shawn McGillicuddy, Square A Farm, Lebanon.
Maine - Triple D Farm, John & Marcia Donald, New Sharon.
Massachusetts - Allard’s Farm, Wayne Goulet, Hadley.
New hampshire - Ath-Mor Farm, Tom and Carol Morrell and Russ, and Kristi Atherton, Lee.
Rhode Island - Breene Hollow Farm, Kevin Breene, West Greenwich.
Vermont - Richardson Family Farm, Hartland.

The farms will be honored Sept. 18 at the annual New England Green Pastures banquet at the Eastern States Exposition (The Big E) and at additional agricultural functions over the coming year.

Square A Farm, the Connecticut winner, has a milking herd of 235 Holsteins with a 21,000-pound rolling herd average. A crew of four fulltime and three part-time employees handles the work of cow management and crop production.

Owner Shawn McGillicuddy took over the farm from his grandfather in 1993 when the herd numbered about 100 head. He has built the cow population steadily using top bulls from Genex AI, with heavy emphasis on udders and body type.

Facilities have been steadily upgraded, too, and flower gardens and farmstead landscaping have earned the farm recognition as a Connecticut Dairy of Distinction.

Maine’s Green Pastures winner was the first farm in Maine to begin organic milk production back in 2002, and its consistent herd average of over 20,000 pounds on a feeding program built on round bale silage has attracted attention of organic producers far and wide.

John Donald is a lifelong farmer who started out with a small part-time dairy enterprise while working in a large Maine paper mill. Eventually he and wife Marcia acquired their present farm consisting of 550 acres. They and a crew of three others crop about 200 acres, mostly seeded to clover and timothy, and they’ve been named Maine’s top forage producers in 2007 and 2009.

The Triple D herd has 75 milkers, mostly Holsteins with a few Jersey crosses mixed in.

The Massachusetts Green Pastures winner has undergone some dramatic changes in recent years under the ownership of Wayne Goulet, who took control after the death of his grandfather, Joe Allard. Goulet expanded the farm’s land base and herd size steadily until 2003 when some 340 Holsteins were being milked and over 600 animals were kept on the farm.

Goulet decided that year to go in a different direction, dispersing the Holsteins and building a new foundation on high-quality purebred Brown Swiss cattle.

With herdsman Robert Gould he assembled an entirely new herd drawn from several of the top Swiss breeders in the country. The new herd has recently been setting production records for the breed and turning out winners in the show ring including grand champion cow at the 2008 Big E dairy show.

Goulet has also won numerous awards for his work in resource conservation and agricultural land preservation in the Connecticut River Valley region.

Ath-Mor Farm, this year’s New Hampshire winner, is widely recognized for its high herd production, consistently in the top one percent of farms on DHIA test with the most recent monthly rolling herd average coming in at 29,830 pounds with 1,056 of milkfat and 912 of protein from 200 cows.

The Morrells and the Athertons place heavy emphasis on cow comfort and producing top quality feed. They use their entire land base for production of haylage and buy in their corn silage needs. In 2008 they produced 1.1 million pounds of milk per employee.

Ath-Mor Farm is involved in many research and teaching activities with the dairy science program at the nearby University of New Hampshire campus.

Kevin Breene, the Rhode Island winner, established Breene Hollow Farm at his parents’ home in 1977 when his finished studies at the University of Connecticut, then in 1980 acquired the farm’s present location where he built a freestall barn and milking center. Today the farm includes 350 acres and a herd of 50 registered cows representing the Holstein, Jersey, Ayrshire, Guernsey and Milking Shorthorn breeds.

Crops include silage corn and hay plus firewood and sawlogs from the large forested acreage on the farm. Breene Hollow Farm is a producer in the successful Rhody Fresh Milk initiative, which seeks to build fluid milk sales through localized branding.

The farm is operated by Kevin Breene, his son Steve and daughters Melissa and Hillary. Breene is a 14-year member of the West Greenwich Town Council and previously served 12 years in the Rhode Island state senate. He is also involved in several other community and agricultural activities.

Richardson Farm, the Green Pastures winner for Vermont, is a picturesque hill farm that’s been in the same family for five generations. Currently it is operated by Gordon Richardson and his sons Scott and Reid. Gordon’s siblings James and Anita are retired from day-to-day operations but help out when needed, and his wife Pat and Scott’s wife Amy are also involved, along with several young grandchildren.

The farm consists of 450 owned acres, with another 100 of cropland and forest rented. The milking herd numbers 60 registered Jerseys housed in a freestall and milked in a flat parlor. The core of the feeding program is round bale silage plus, in warm weather, rotational grazing.

Richardson Farm is recognized as one of the most efficient and productive maple operations in Vermont and this year achieved a remarkable seven-tenths of a gallon per tap yield of syrup. The farm markets most of its maple production to wholesalers.

Richardson family members are active in various agricultural and community organizations, and Gordon is a veteran member of the Board of Selectmen for the Town of Hartland.

Representatives of the six state university Cooperative Extension units, state departments of agriculture, agricultural organizations and agribusinesses in the region conduct the New England Green Pastures program.