The family’s ties to this region date back to 1899. Polish immigrants Nathan and Rebecca Osofsky decamped from the Lower East Side to the rural life of Amenia, a small town near Ancramdale, when one of their children became ill. They built a small Catskills-style hotel (now extinct) for vacationing fellow immigrants and grew their own food to feed the guests. The neighbors didn’t exactly put out the welcome mat.
Undeterred, Dave Osofsky, Ronny’s dad, decided to stay in the area and, after marrying Helen, a Brooklyn butcher’s daughter, bought the Ancramdale farm and became a dairy farmer. Helen died in 1993 (Dave passed away in 1997), but their children and grandchildren affectionately recall her efforts to woo the community with chopped liver and other Jewish delicacies. As Daniel says, “My grandmother used to bring potato pancakes to school for my birthday, instead of cupcakes.”
Although Ronny Osofsky has never wanted to do anything but farm for a living—he attended the University of Rhode Island to take ag classes and immediately returned to Ancramdale—both of his brothers had bigger plans. Sid Osofsky, who attended Tufts University and got an MBA at New York University, logged more than a decade working in corporate finance for large companies in New Jersey before renouncing suits and ties in 1983 for the jeans and boots of the barn. “I wasn’t happy,” says Sid. “I wanted to live in a place I liked and work with my family.”
Rick tells me over lunch at the Peddlar’s Café, a block from his tiny law office, that he had the same revelation. After receiving his law degree from NYU, he worked in Washington as a congressional speechwriter and practiced law in Poughkeepsie before returning to the family farm. “My mother used to milk eighty cows by herself,” says Rick, a portly, avuncular man. “This is a way of life that’s important to me.” He admits he’s delighted that his two children have joined the family business, but feels guilty that they’re working so hard. “My son Peter puts in seventy to ninety hours a week. It’s foolishness.” Cathy Osofsky, Ronny’s wife, worries that her son Daniel ought to be going to college or seeing the world rather than getting up at 4:30 a.m. to milk cows. “All the Osofsky kids have extraordinary ties to their fathers and the farm,” she says. “They could all go out and do better financially working at something else.”
Farming, alas, has never been a path to riches. For nearly four decades, Dave and Helen Osofsky and their sons (a daughter married and moved away) eked out a living by selling raw milk to an ag co-op. But by the early 1980s, milk prices had dropped so much and Ronnybrook’s profits were so minimal that to keep cash flowing in, Rick, like many other farmers, marketed the cows to investors as tax shelters. After the federal government tightened up on the tax laws in 1987, that plan went belly-up.
The family’s decision to sell milk directly to consumers came out of a mixture of desperation and serendipity. In 1991, as Ronny and his brothers discussed their mounting losses with fellow farmers and with Stephen James, an actor with a country home nearby, an idea took shape. Why not take on food-mad Manhattan? “We were ninety miles from the capital of discretionary spending,” says James, who helped market the Ronnybrook name and is now the general manager of Swiss Dairy, in Riverside, California. “I thought that if you bring in fresh milk and give consumers the connection to the country, they’ll go for it.” Perhaps the smartest decision was to sell the milk in old-fashioned returnable glass bottles, a stroke of marketing genius.
But the Ronnybrook saga has a Perils of Pauline quality: Just when things are going well, some new disaster occurs. In recent years, these pioneers in marketing fresh, hormone-free milk have faced increasing competition. “We introduced glass-bottled milk into the market,” says Rick, “but now we’re up against the big guys.”
So several years ago the brothers decided to bet the farm by expanding. With a respected brand name, leftover milk, and a weekly Greenmarket stand visited by hundreds of curious New Yorkers, the Osofskys began to develop milk products with a longer shelf life, such as yogurt, ice cream, and cheese. “I have no background in food science,” says Sid, who relied on his own taste buds to devise such flavors as Lola’s Mint Lace ice cream (named after his dog) and Pauline’s Pistachio (for a favorite cow). “Sid came up with these recipes,” says Ronny. “And if we all liked one, we’d take it to the Greenmarket and get people’s input.” Ronnybrook now makes private-label ice cream (green tea, ginger) for Reed’s, a California company.
Even though Ronnybrook charges premium prices ($3.50 per pint of ice cream, $2.50 for eight ounces of addictive butter), the Osofsky family does not end up with any bread to spread that butter on. The sad truth is that Ronnybrook hasn’t made a profit since 1996. Somehow, things just have a way of going wrong in this penny-wise operation. “We can’t afford to put in a freezer,” says Ronny, “so we store our ice cream on a refrigerated truck.” On a hot day in October 2001, the truck broke down and $20,000 worth of ice cream melted.
Keeping the farm and dairy going in recent years has been an act of faith, rather than a rational economic decision. Ronny reluctantly sold a piece of his land to a horse farm to pay his own bills; Rick has kicked in money from his law practice to cover some of the losses; and the year before last, Sid bowed out of a full-time salaried job running the dairy to manage his wife’s successful furniture and antiques shops, Hammertown Barn, although he still consults on new dairy products.
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