You are here:

Farm

Millborne Farm is located in Shoreham, Vermont, a small town on Lake Champlain, in what we believe to be one of the most scenic areas in the Northeast: Vermont’s Champlain Valley. With breathtaking views of both the Green Mountains and New York’s Adirondacks, we deeply appreciate our surroundings. Come visit our farm and you will see what we mean!


Our farm covers 400 acres and is protected from development through Vermont’s Land Trust, assuring the farm will remain just that! The land provides us with enough feeds— grass, alfalfa and corn silage—for our herd. Cows have an amazing digestive system, 4 stomachs, that can digest all kinds of feedstuffs humans could not begin to utilize. They convert these products into a very nutritious wholesome food humans can digest. Co-habitation at it’s best.

From spring to fall, animals can graze and harvest their own meal. We do harvest enough feed to cover our winter months, which in Vermont means about 5 months.

We try to treat our land with the same approach as our animals: Take good care of it, and it will return the favor. Dirt is the foundation of it all, and here in Addison County the dirt is heavy clay soils. Not ideal for many crops, but great for gras and alfalfa. Manure, although it does smell when disturbed, does our fields a world of good. If applied at the right time, it does not only replenish a portion of the nutrients taken when the feed for the cows was harvested, it also improves the structure of the soil and greatly reduces the need for fertilizers. Ultimate recycling.
 

The Herd

Our fascinating bovines! Tilley, Karmen, and Cassie, the first letter of their names indicating the family. The “T” and “K” families are especially well represented. These cow families go back to the original cows that our friend and partner Morey Miller started Millborne Farm with in the early 1970’s, in Granby, Connecticut. Obviously high milk production is a desirable trait in our animals, but health and longevity traits, like strong feet and legs, udders and good immune systems trump production ability any time. The fact that some families are represented by 4 or 5 generations at once, attests to the longevity built into our herd. Over the years these same cow families have produced many show quality animals that have been shown from New England to Wisconsin.
 
The Herd
Millborne Farm’s herd is basically a “closed” herd, which means that we rarely buy cows; the herd is built and maintained from our own cow families. The most significant reason for being a closed herd is to avoid the health-risks for our animals that can be introduced when buying animals from other farms.

Drinkable Yogurt

Drinkable Yogurt