As you drive along bucolic Green Hill Road in Telford, Pennsylvania, you could easily miss the unassuming sign on a mailbox notifying you of the location of Hendricks Farms & Dairy. When you pull into the parking lot, you may well be greeted by strutting roosters and waddling geese.
Hendricks Farms is a small, family-owned farm that produces raw milk dairy and beef from grass-fed animals who are certified as humanely raised and handled. The farm is powered by draft horses and also produces free-range poultry and eggs.
Raw milk is neither pasteurized nor homogenized and is the subject of heated debate regarding its safety and benefits. However, there is a growing number of advocates who travel many miles to obtain what they refer to as “real milk.”
According to Rachel Hendricks, co-owner with her husband, Trent, the farm was born out of her husband’s desire to make the switch to raw milk 7 years ago. She had two children at the time and was at first skeptical about unpasteurized milk. She wouldn’t do it unless she knew where the milk came from and that it had been tested weekly for pathogens. They weren’t in the dairy business at the time (her family was in trucking and his in building). She insisted they produce their own raw milk and thus was born the farming business.
Now pregnant with her sixth child, Rachel Hendricks is enthusiastic about the benefits of raw milk coupled with a good diet. She says that since converting, she has had three children who have never been to a doctor, never have “green goo” coming out of their noses and seem to be naturally immune to chicken pox.
At first Rachel was making cheese but with her responsibilities as a mother home schooling 4 of her 5 children, it became too much and her husband took over the cheese-making. He ramped up production and installed commercial equipment. In 2006, he submitted his first cheese to the American Cheese Society and won a gold medal. Trent is self-taught and believes the success of his cheese is attributable to the high quality of the milk he uses. The taste of the cheese varies with each production and he doesn’t strive for standardization, allowing the cheese to change with the milk, the season and what the cows are eating.
The Hendricks don’t actively market their products to wholesale customers. Like many other raw milk producers, the farm has a license to sell raw milk through other stores but they choose not to because their production isn’t high enough to supply both their own outlet at the farm and other stores.
Hendricks Farms and Dairy is typical of other small raw dairy farms, and raw milk products are becoming more and more available to consumers who are already advocates or just curious about this growing movement.