From moo to you.
My husband likes to tease me about how I had to touch every farm animal the first time we visited his cousin’s farm in Iowa. I scratched rabbits between the ears and scooped up kittens for a squeeze. I even grabbed an inky piglet away from its mama to pose for a photo. But Kevin’s favorite memory is when I walked over to the fence to pat a cow, and she ran her big tongue up my leg just past my knee. Her sloppy kiss reminded me of visiting Cloverland Farms on Dulaney Valley Road in Phoenix, Md., in the early 1970s, back when I was a kid.
Cloverland began in 1919 as a horse-drawn milk delivery wagon owned by Irving B. Kemp, and quickly expanded into one of the area’s largest dairies. By 1943, Cloverland’s plant at Monroe Street and Windsor Avenue (easily identified by the giant two-thirds full Cloverland milk bottle bearing the legend “A Safe Milk for Baby” that towered above the entrance) was one of the most modern dairies in the city.
And the dairy was aces at advertising, calling attention to the source of the area’s milk long before eating and drinking local became a trend instead of a necessity. One jingle went, “If you don’t own a cow, call Cloverland now.” They also commissioned one José Giordano to compose a lullaby, “The Young Man’s off to Cloverland,” which told of a boy traveling the Milky Way with Cloverland’s cows, Clover Cream and Lotta Cream, the latter familiar to Baltimoreans after it was showcased in a glass barn with an electrical milking unit and pulled around town on the back of a flatbed truck.
In the late 1950s, Cloverland began inviting the public to view the daily milking of the purebred Guernseys at its Baltimore County farm, and from then on, Cloverland billed itself as “the dairy with the cows” and advertised the farm as “one link in the process of ‘From Moo to You.’”
Like many Baltimoreans, my family had a metal insulated box decorated with the green and blue Cloverland three-leaf clover logo on our front porch, into which the milkman deposited a glass gallon bottle of whole milk twice a week. And a trip to the dairy two or three times a summer to see the cows was always a treat. I remember the silos and the snowy white outbuildings emblazoned with “Cloverland Farms” in green cursive script, the white picket pasture fences, and the way everything seemed so clean, even though it was a farm.
And, if memory serves, I remember standing behind glass in the long white milking building watching rows of ruddy brown cows attached to the stainless steel apparatus that took their milk. Watching the milking was more clinical than warm and fuzzy, and I don’t recall ever getting to touch the cows, though an ad from 1976 describes “a petting area for baby animals.” Yet I recall always being excited about going to see “our” cows producing milk “for us.” Or perhaps it was just the paper cup of ice cream— chocolate on one side, vanilla on the other— eaten with the miniature wooden tongue depressor that doubled as a spoon that made the trip worthwhile.
The farm remained open to visitors until 1978, when Cloverland’s 300-head herd of cattle was destroyed after one cow was found to have tuberculosis. Today Cloverland remains a milk-producing dairy, having joined with Green Spring, another Baltimore-based dairy, some years ago.
I was reminded of Cloverland again on a recent visit to South Mountain Creamery in Middletown, just west of Frederick. Run by Randy and Karen Sowers and their children, Ben and Abby, and their spouses, the creamery sells its products at stands at the 32nd Street and downtown farmers’ markets— and they deliver milk to 4,000 homes within a 70-mile radius of the farm (including Roland Park and Mount Washington in Baltimore City, and Catonsville and Rodgers Forge in Baltimore County). When I learned that they, too, invite the public to view milking, I couldn’t resist a visit.
In South Mountain’s white-tiled milking parlor, dusty black and white Holsteins and a few Brown Swiss, their udders hanging from their lower bodies like heavy shopping bags, enter the milking line in groups of 20, some in the same order every day.
“They’re very scheduled, very routine animals,” Abby Brusco tells me, explaining that the person working the milking line sprays the cows’ udders with iodine then dries them, their touch triggering the release of the chemical oxytocin, which makes the cows’ milk flow. When the cows are finished being milked they slowly plod past us, out of the parlor and into the pasture, leaving an earthy tang in the air behind them. Some of their milk is immediately pumped across the walkway to the creamery store, where it’s turned into homemade ice cream. Some is used for yogurt, butter and cheese. The rest remains milk, from skim to cream-on-the-top whole milk to half-and-half. When you buy milk from South Mountain, Brusco tells me, it’s been out of the cow for only 24 hours.
It’s a much different atmosphere in the calf barn, where each afternoon the farm invites the public to bottle-feed the dairy’s 40 calves. The calves like to be touched, and they push their heads out of their pens, hoping for a chin scratch or, better yet, their supper. Brusco points out a particularly noisy calf, mostly black with patches of white, born only yesterday, and nearly hoarse from mooing. “He probably misses his mama,” I say sentimentally.
“Mama has to go back to work,” Brusco gently corrects. “If baby drank all of mama’s milk, there wouldn’t be any for ice cream.”
By 4 p.m., the barn is filled with mothers and children all waiting impatiently. Chickens hop from pen to pen and there is as much clucking as mooing. One husky boy in braids and a burgundy Arlington Gators football shirt can barely contain himself. “He’s so cute,” he repeats over and over of Calf B504, a white calf with a pale nose. “I can’t wait to do this.”
After a worker places a half-gallon bottle with a substantial nipple in front of each calf, each of us takes hold of one bottle with two hands while a hungry calf pulls and sucks. My black and white calf finishes her bottle in no time and begins nuzzling my elbow with her tongue as if there were more milk to be found there. Within 10 minutes, the feeding is over, but the children are still buzzing. The boy in braids is ecstatic that he got to feed two calves and can’t wait to come back. One mother tells me she finds any excuse she can to come to the creamery.
I pat my calf goodbye and walk over to the creamery store to wash my hands, treat myself to a scoop of homemade black raspberry ice cream, and grab a bottle of cream-on-the-top milk in a glass bottle, just like we used to get from Cloverland, from the store’s cold case. In the milking parlor, Abby Brusco tells me that her family opens the farm to the public because she wants people to see and understand where their food comes from. But she also tells me that she hopes she’s creating memories for future generations— “like Disney on the farm,” is how she puts it. South Mountain Creamery may be short on princesses or monsters, but I’d bet my ice cream that at least one little boy is going to be telling a story again and again this summer, the one about the calves that moo for their supper.
Devil’s Food Cake with Broiler Coconut Frosting
Cottage Raisin Pie
Free Daily Farm Experiences:
Watch cows being milked from 1:30 pm to 5:30 pm daily
Help bottle-feed baby calves at 4 pm daily
*please note: Limited number of calves & bottles
More details at their website.
