Meet your Local Cheese Farmer Date: Friday, September 11, 2020 ONLY
Time: 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Cost: No Charge for Meet the Farmer event. Pizza and Beer for sale.
Event Details
Come to Hawkins Farm from 5-7pm on Friday, September 11 to chat with Craig and Laban Hufford, father and son from Hufford Family Dairy, neighbors to Hawkins Farm and local cheese makers for our Friday night pizzas.
Ask them how they care for their cows, how they turn milk into cheese, and how they use they by-product whey to feed Hawkins Farm pigs.
While here, you may order locally-sourced brick oven pizza and Junk Ditch Brewery beer and dine in your own safe, socially-distant 25x32 picnic spot.
Fridays on the Farm Pizza Nights
Hawkins Family Farm Pizza Nights on the farm are very popular, and were even recently featured in the New York Times. Plan to arrive early to choose your tailgating site. After you order your locally sourced pizza and local beer, enjoy the farm and talk with the Hufford’s while you wait for your pizza. Read all about “How it Works” and bring everything else you’ll need to enjoy a relaxing and delicious evening at the farm.
Email Jeff@hawkinsfamilyfarm.com with questions or visit hawkinsfamilyfarm.com
Hufford Family Dairy - The Cheese Farmers
Hufford Family Dairy is where forages are harvested, calves are born and raised, cows are cared for and milked, and cheese is cultured and aged. This is our vision of maintaining our legacy of stewardship of the land, husbandry of livestock, and production of “Farm to Table” dairy products.
Our History. Laban’s great-grandfather, Delbert Coning, then a local school teacher, purchased this Northern Indiana farm in 1935 at the close of the Great Depression. He operated it as they typical grain, forage and livestock farm of that era until his passing in 1972. The farm has been passed down to now the 3rd generation with Laban’s parent specializing in home-grown, non-GMO forages and Grade A milk production from 25-30 cows since 1995.
Our Production Methods. On “Cheese Day”, hormone free whole milk is diverted via stainless steel pipeline directly from the cows through our filtration system and into the cheese vat in the adjoining USDA approved cheese room. Culture is added to the milk and the process begins; 2 hours later the whey is drained off and saved to be used for pork production. The cheese curds are salted with Celtic sea salt, placed in the press overnight and vacuum packed to begin the 60 day aging process at carefully controlled temperatures. The aging process makes unpasteurized whole milk cheese legal for sale in Indiana.
Careful consideration to pasture management, forage quality, cow comfort and nutrition, genetic improvement (especially A2A2 beta casin) and facility cleanliness help insure a consistent product.
Our Vision for the Future. While we applaud American agriculture for producing some of the safest, most affordable food in the world, it does favor economies of scale. However, it is our vision that smaller specialized farms will continue to fill the needs of a small, but growing segment of the population that value knowing exactly where and how their food is grown and preserved.
Hawkins Family Farm - The Host Farm
We are a fourth-generation family farm outside of North Manchester, Indiana. We rotate cattle, hogs, poultry, field crops, and produce around our 99-acres using a whole-systems approach, and market our products through Community Supported Agriculture, an online store, and to restaurants. The farm also hosts weekly Fridays on the Farm pizza nights during the summer, which feature artisan pizzas made with locally-sourced ingredients and baked in an outdoor, wood-fired brick oven.
We use the health and wholeness of soils, waters, plants, animals, and people as the standard by which we farm. In practice, this means we grow our crops without the use of chemical pesticides and herbicides. Our animals are raised outdoors on pasture without subtherapeutic doses of pharmaceuticals, and our hogs and chickens are given a non-GMO feed ration that we mix on the farm.
While our farming could be called natural, biological, agroecological, or regenerative, due to the fact that we have chosen not to pursue USDA certification, we cannot legally call it “organic.” Instead, we opt to be "customer certified" (to borrow a phrase from Virginia farmer Joel Salatin). This means that our CSA members are always able to contact us with questions or visit the farm to see for themselves how their food is raised. In fact, we encourage it by hosting weekly pizza nights in the summer and occasional work parties. One of the reasons we love CSA is that it gives us the opportunity to see members face-to-face, during which we’re more than happy to talk your ear off about soil health, cover cropping, minimum tillage techniques, crop rotations, raising animals on pasture, and other practices we use.