Acorn Hill Farmstead Cheeses is a small scale family run micro-creamery in the Catskill/mid-Hudson Valley region of New York. We firmly believe in the value of local food sources and sustainable agriculture and although we are too small to be certified organic we do follow organic practice and have taken the NOFA-NY farmer's pledge. The goats are free to browse the weeds and trees and are given organic soy and corn free grain at milking time. Each goat is an individual who is named and loved. We believe that happy goats are healthy goats that give milk that makes delicious cheese.
The birth of Acorn Hill was the result of a series of wonderful accidents. The purchase of a property with a barn followed by the discovery that a goat farm was only a few minutes drive away started it all. I had fallen in love with goats years before buying this place and always dreamed of having goats of my own. The purchase of our first two goats was an exciting time and was not intended to begin a business. I had wanted goat milk, yogurt, and cheeses for my family and the joy of the animals and nothing more. Fate had other plans though. A friend had been an organizer of a new local farmer's market and convinced me that making cheese for the market was a good idea. That set things in motion and sent me down a long and complicated path to creating a cheeseroom that would meet the requirements of New York state. When I set out on this journey very small scale facilities were a relatively new idea. New York has always had large dairy farms of hundreds of acres producing cow milk to be trucked off to be processed for sale in supermarkets. The concept that a small farm could safely store milk and produce cheese required open minded innovation on both my part and that of the state. Finally after what seemed like forever the cheeseroom was completed and the new milking parlor built and we happily went into production.
