PAST

Fact: this part of Massachusetts has lost more land to development in the last 30 years than it did in the previous 300. Westport is one of the last bastions. But Westport saw two-thirds of its dairy farms collapse in the space of five short years. Men and women who love the land and were its dedicated stewards had to go into other jobs in other towns to live. Some of the land was then developed for the identical housing that you would see in suburban Omaha, or Birmingham, or Newark, erasing any indication that this was our town of Westport, Massachusetts. Both our rural character and our cherished rural characters are in jeopardy.

PRESENT

So we all stepped up and started Shy Brothers Farm to help turn that ship around. It seems about that hard sometimes. And it’s worth it. The effort we’ve made together to change the future of a farm has changed us.

We started Shy Brothers Farm in 2006 with these beliefs:

  1. Together, we could keep a third-generation dairy family from losing their farm.
  2. Together, we could turn that farm into a thriving economic engine for the community.
  3. Together, we could make this new enterprise a model to help empower other farmers to convert their operations to ones that are profitable and sustainable for them, our community, and our environment.

So far, so good! We’re working toward fully compostable packaging, our whey feeds other farmers’ chickens and pigs, and the company is healthy and growing slowly. We have to grow significantly before we’re able to meet our goal of using all the milk from the 120 cows on the farm. We must find a way to minimize Styrofoam shipping materials until feasible alternative and sustainable materials are available.

FUTURE

Cheese making requires several different temperature and humidity environments to convert our milk to Hannahbells. Inherently, it is grossly inefficient in terms of energy waste. We are now in the planning stages for schematics on a zero-net-energy facility at the Santos brothers’ home farm. The project includes a new barn, a new cheese house, and a retrofitted existing barn. While the three buildings will have synergies that capitalize on each other, rather than waste energy, they will also produce enough energy to support themselves.

A key component of the project will be a way to show other farms, engineers and architects, public officials, and the public at large how this very complicated challenge was met. As we learn from this project, we’ll be reporting some of the issues we’re facing in our blog. We hope to make the way easier for the next artisan cheese maker. After all, we are all in this together.