It’s the “gotcha” question that politicians are often asked to see whether they’re in touch with the common man: What’s the price of milk? The answer, at most New York supermarkets, is roughly 95 cents a quart. So why are people lining up at Manhattan’s Union Square Greenmarket to buy milk that, including a $1 deposit for the glass bottle, costs nearly three times as much?
The food aficionados who are addicted to Ronnybrook Farm Dairy’s products run out of adjectives when they try to explain why they’re willing to pay extra for the Osofsky family’s high-quality, hormone- and preservative-free milk, cream, butter, yogurt, soft cheeses, and ice cream. Okay, the returnable bottles are quaint, and the story line is appealing—how nice to buy from a family farm versus an anonymous corporate conglomerate—but can a generic product like good old-fashioned milk really be that memorable? Take a few sips of this creamy cow’s brew, slather Ronnybrook butter on a hot slice of toast, or put a dollop of impossibly rich crème fraîche on a pile of berries, and it’s easy to become a true believer.
“The butter and the milk are as close as I can find to what I had in Europe growing up,” enthuses Austrian chef Kurt Gutenbrunner, of New York’s Wallsé restaurant. Robert Rising, a waiter at the Four Seasons hotel bar, comes into Manhattan from his home in suburban Mount Vernon on his day off every week just to get his Ronnybrook fix. “The milk is great to drink and wonderful to cook with,” Rising says as he trades in five empty bottles. “It really does taste different.”
Such praise is gratifying for the large Osofsky clan, who have triumphed against all odds at holding onto the farm in Ancramdale, New York, that has been in the family since 1941. The three Osofsky brothers and their children have always followed the kind of practices that make environmentalists happy: The cows aren’t given hormones, are pastured in season, and are wintered on hay and corn grown by the Osofskys. While most commercial dairies homogenize—processing the milk to break up and evenly distribute the fat globules—Ronnybrook skips that step to keep the fresh-from-the-farm taste (and also because unbroken fat globules are more easily digested). They call it Creamline with good reason; a layer of cream floats at the top of every bottle.
Yet even with a stellar reputation and premium-priced products, the Osofskys are struggling to turn a profit and keep the farm going for the next generation. “I love visiting Dean & DeLuca or The Vinegar Factory in New York because they treat me like a big deal,” says Ronny Osofsky, at 62 the oldest of the Osofsky brothers and a full-time farmer. But, Ronny adds ruefully, “The real joke is that I think the guys stocking the shelves make more than we do.”
The Ronnybrook story is quintessentially American: the tale of an immigrant Jewish family who settled in upstate New York at the turn of the last century, and of their well-ed ucated progeny, who were eager to get away from the demands of farm life only to discover that there really is no place like home. Add to that drama a dash of ingenuity. In trying a myriad of schemes to turn the farm’s fortunes around, the Osofsky family has shown a flair both for developing delicious new products and for marketing their folksy style in a manner that may yet save the day.
The cast of characters begins with the farm’s namesake, Ronny, and his brothers, Sid, 57, a worldly MBA with a knack for recipes, and Rick, 58, a small-town lawyer and tractor me chanic. Ronny’s wife, Cathy, handles the orders for this 25-person operation; his youngest son, Daniel, 22, milks the cows daily. Rick’s daughter Kate, 30, manages Ronnybrook’s accounts, and his son Peter, 27, trucks the dairy’s products from the tiny village of Ancramdale on the two-hour trip into Manhattan. It’s a close-knit clan that works and plays together.
The best vantage point to see the family’s 650-acre spread in the Hudson Valley is from a hilltop meadow: It’s gorgeous rolling countryside, dotted with silos and barns and 100-year-old farmhouses, where family members, farmhands, and dairy employees live. Kate Osofsky drove me to this spot so I could see the land and appreciate her recent decision to give up teaching in Boston to move back to Ancramdale with her husband and daughter.
“I grew up in 4-H, raising cows,” says this slender woman, who has an undergraduate degree from Wesleyan and a master’s degree from Lesley University. She’s now living in the handsome farmhouse that belonged to her grandparents David and Helen Osofsky. “You don’t know how much you miss it until you go away.”
Up close, Ronnybrook is a rambling, funky kind of place. The pristine dairy is a two-minute walk from the manure and mud of the barn. Ronny Osofsky sets the easygoing tone—he’s a man who loves his cows and has strong feelings about what it takes to produce good milk. Walking through the barn, he offers a running commentary on everything from the pedigrees of his Holsteins to what the cows are fed to the care and personalities of his whimsically named animals. The cows prick up their ears at the sound of his voice. “This is Satellite—whoops, sorry, she sneezed on you. Step over here and meet Bliss, she’s my son Daniel’s favorite. And this is Pinky, she’s blind,” he says. “There aren’t a lot of farmers who would keep a blind cow, but Pinky’s worth the trouble.”
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.
In trying to sketch out a future for the dairy, the family faces constant dilemmas. Although many competitors, such as Horizon, are successfully trumpeting their “organic” milk, the Osofskys have so far resisted the expensive paperwork and special feed required for federal organic certification. Carolyn Lasar, a Greenmarket inspector who made a surprise visit to Ronnybrook on a day I was there, said, “Ronny’s a great farmer, the cows are very healthy, and the quality of the milk is excellent. I don’t know that being certified as organic offers them anything other than a label.” Ronny says he thinks it might nonetheless be worth trying; Rick is markedly unenthused.
Ronnybrook is very much a work in progress: These dairy farmers are constantly improvising and searching for new products and new customers. Milk sales typically peak in November and December and slump in the winter, but try telling the cows to stop producing. What to do? On a recent Wednesday, Peter Osofsky, a University of Michigan grad, was presiding over his thrice-a-week stand at Union Square when a regular customer commented, “I’ve never seen this cheese with dill before.” Peter, a wiry man with a shy grin, explained, “We had extra milk this week. It’s an experiment.”
On a happy note, some recent experiments have been quite successful. Last spring, a new buttermilk drink was introduced and has been a huge hit. More importantly, Ronnybrook land ed a contract to produce yogurt and yogurt drinks for Pret A Manger, a British sandwich shop chain that has 14 locations in Manhattan (and is aiming for 40 by 2004). In June 2002, Ronnybrook began selling 1,000 pounds of yogurt and 315 gallons of milk a week to Pret A Manger. “Our mission is natural products, no preservatives; and Ronnybrook’s attitude is the same as ours,” enthuses Monica Gelinas of Pret A Manger. “And they’re a bunch of fun guys.” The guys (and gals) are hoping that if these products prove popular, the Pret A Manger orders—along with a new distribution agreement with Gourmet Guru, in the Bronx, and one with Northeast Cooperatives, to supply natural foods stores in New England—will se cure the farm’s future. Rick optimistically says, “We’re finally at the point where things are breaking our way.” The Osofskys even felt secure enough last summer to invest $29,000 in a freezer, to avoid a repeat of the meltdown catastrophe.
Family businesses often falter because the next generation loses interest, but the Osofsky brothers have very clearly passed on their passion for the farm to their children. “I love it here,” says Kate Osofsky. “None of us are doing this for the money. I’ll just be happy if we can pay our bills and retain a little bit.” Her brother Peter talks about feeling a loyal, family obligation to keep the place going: “This is hard work, and there’s never a break, but it’s also an opportunity for us.” Cousin Daniel, who often passes out from exhaustion by 9 p.m., is equally addicted to farm life. “I love the quiet mornings milking the cows, I like driving the John Deere. I think I’ll eventually leave to go to college, but I’ll come back. This is home.”