Welcome to the Farm!

Sweet Rowen Farmstead is a grass-based hill farm in Northern Vermont. Our small herd of pasture-raised Vermont Heritage Lineback cows produces delicious milk, which we bottle and craft into yogurt, cheese, and dip in our wood-fired creamery. Our cows are family, each with their own name and personality. They get fresh pasture daily, along with hay that we grow and cut ourselves, preserving that rich summer energy for the winter months.

THE COWS

Sweet Rowen Farmstead milks a heritage landrace breed called Vermont Heritage Linebacks. Many of our cows can be traced to Randall Linebacks; however, the majority of our herd is a regional ecotype from the Northeast Kingdom.

Linebacks were allowed to evolve naturally on Vermont pasture, making them uniquely suited to our native climate. Lineback cows tend to have a unique white splash running the length of their backs, as well as white splotching on the face.

Rotational GRAZING

We follow a holistic approach to grazing management: our milking herd is moved to a new piece of pasture every twelve hours during the grazing season (May–September).

BARN & MILKING Facility

During the snowy Vermont winters when our cows are unable to graze, they spend their days in the barn where a well lit sand-bedded free stall allows them to achieve full physiological expression.

Forage & Feed

In addition to rotational grazing, we manage soil fertility by:

Amending the soil with manure from our farm and wood ash from a local wood-fired power plant in Burlington, VT.
Frost-seeding legumes to increase nitrogen content and improve forage quality.
Avoiding tillage practices in our cropping to maximize carbon banking and avoid releasing carbon into the atmosphere.
Haying our fields so we can provide carefully managed feed to our cows during the grazing off-season.

For our cows to remain healthy and produce balanced, nutrient-dense milk, we supplement their forage with grain at milking time. Each cow gets 6–8 pounds of a non-GMO grain pellet blend, mixed locally by Morrison's Custom Feeds. This grain is singly sourced from farmers in Quebec within a 200-mile radius of the farm.

CERTIFICATION

While many of our farming practices meet organic standards—often going above and beyond to ensure the most responsible stewardship of our environment—Sweet Rowen Farmstead is not currently certified organic. While all of the hay we grow and cut ourselves is organic, as well as the pastures on which our cows graze, we feed our cows a small amount of non-GMO grain to ensure that their diet is as healthful as possible. That grain is not always certified organic. Organic grain is very expensive, and we prefer to keep our milk costs accessible while ensuring the best possible care for our cows.

In addition, we want to be able to treat our cows if they ever become critically ill. Certified organic dairy cows cannot be given antibiotics under any circumstances. If an organic milk cow develops a life-threatening infection and is treated with antibiotics, that cow’s milk cannot be labeled organic—ever. Such cows must be sold or moved to non-organic herds, which we can’t support on principle or scale. We prefer to treat our cows if they become sick and allow them to return to the milking herd once any antibiotics have passed through their system. We never give our cows rBST or any other hormones.