I could go to the spot where we were standing and I could take you there today. And I remember stopping outside the doors of Crowley cheese and looking at our bird saying, that's what we're going to do. We're going to start making cheese when we get home.

September Farm, our story.

I was building houses for several years and farming as a hobby on the side. I rented several acres in the community that we lived in. And again, this was just strictly a hobby. I had no experience with farming. I just, for whatever reason, I developed an interest in it. And so I learned as I went, and we just really enjoyed that. I enjoyed it as a hobby and I enjoyed it more and more to the point where I thought that it would be a neat way to raise our family.

Once we moved here, it wasn't long before we started the dairy, and although he put a lot more energy into it than I did, I was still out there every day helping feed the cows and milking and all the chores that go along with it and getting our children involved in it.

And that's really what drove us to go into the dairy business. I wanted to have a business like that, that we could work together closely as a family.

I was definitely the hardest worker we had. That's probably not true.

I helped a lot with feeding the calves and helping my parents milk.

I was too short to really help milk the cows. Some of my responsibility was to prep for them, things like that.

That was over the time that we had the bed breakfast, so it was really fun to take guests out and show them the calves and to share the farm with them.

So I was milking for maybe a year and a half, and it is, for a lack of better terms, it can be a grind. You do the same thing in the morning and you do the same thing in the evening for two hours every day, every day. And I just remember hanging the milkers up in the milk house to get washed at the end of the milking. And I remember hanging them up and I just felt very lonely. There was no one in there with me and my wife and my children were in the house. It was in the morning. And I just remember thinking as I hung the milkers up,

This is what I'm doing and this is what I'm going to do possibly for the rest of my life every single day. And I just remember almost having a panic attack and thinking, am I prepared for this? Is this really what I want? And after about a year and a half, I just went, I told Roberta, we need a break. We need to take our children and we need to get away and have a little vacation. So at the time, I had a neighbor helping me, and I said to Amos, would you be willing to watch the dairy for us for five or six days so we can take a family vacation? And he agreed to that. So I still remember pulling out of the driveway with Roberta and the children in our family van and thinking, I don't believe the freedom that we're experiencing right now.

I mean, we're going to get away for five days or whatever it was. So we decided we were going to go somewhere that wasn't too far away, and we always liked New England. Roberta had going to college in New Hampshire, and we love Vermont. And so we chose Vermont as our vacation destination, and we stayed at a small country inn in South central Vermont. And ironically enough, it had been an old cheese factory that had converted into a country inn. It was pretty cool. So we went into the main dining hall for breakfast in the morning with our children, and they served our food, and I just asked them what there was to do in the area. And they said there were several small cheese manufacturers in the area, and of course we had an interest in that because we had our dairy, and I didn't know much about cheese making. I said, that's perfect.

Cheese making wasn't really a dream. Cheese was probably nothing more than something we enjoyed eating. But then when we found out that there were all these little cheese factories we could go visit, we were all on board with that. We were excited to go look at them and to call our little children in and did some tasting, and I wasn't thinking anything about it when we were in there. I was just looking at them making cheese thinking, well, this is really neat.

I don't know why, but I just remember thinking, we could do this. This is something we could do.

And Dave said, that's what we're going to do.

My dad has a lot of ideas, so I was pretty sure we could probably talk him out of this one.

I know I was not excited about it.

It was just another one of my dad's crazy ideas. And we rolled our eyes.

Just sure we're going to make cheese.

I wanted to make a cheese that was fairly popular, not very complicated, and something that I could get pretty quick results with. So I started with mozzarella and I bought a little cheese making kit from a company in New England called New England Cheese. And it gave me the runt and the culture and the instructions, everything I needed cheesecloth. And so I followed that recipe as exact as I could, and I made it in a pot in the kitchen and then put the mozzarella cheese and the microwave, which is what they suggested. And I heated up and I stretched it. And oh, it was just so exciting for us. And then we put it in a little bowl with salt and put it in the fridge, and we got it out maybe an hour later and sliced it up, and we were eating fresh mozzarella and it was delicious. And then I graduated from that to making Kobe and Monterey jack and Cheddar.

Dave really did most of the cheese making himself. He kind of took it on as his own little project and had all his wheels here that he was keeping track of.

They were my babies. I mean, I could still remember going in there every day and checking my little wheels and flipping 'em over and looking at 'em and oh, it's just so exciting. I had been making cheese for about a year or so in the kitchen, and I did want to start our own business there on the farm. So we took the downstairs of one of our barns that we had some heifers in horses in there. We even had a chicken coop in the corner and we cleaned it all out. It took us about three or four months. My son and actually our daughters and my wife helped me to convert the downstairs of our barn into a little retail store and a processing room.

And my dad is really good at, I would say, design interior decorating. And he really had a vision for making it a really cool space.

We advertised it, we put some signs up and yeah, one day we just decided we're going to go for it. And we opened our doors on a Saturday, if I'm not mistaken, and opened it up to the public to come and sample our products and watch us make cheese. And even at that time, see the cows that we were milking as well. But after maybe six months or so, people started to find out about us and that word of mouth that there was this farm that made cheese that had the dairy right there. And I can still remember painting one of our daughter's bedrooms on a Saturday and my daughter Hope running into the house at like three o'clock in the afternoon saying, dad, we made a hundred dollars today. It was, I mean, hope was so excited about this. They made a hundred dollars.

In the first year that we were in business, and it got to be Christmas time and the little parking lot down there was filling up with people and we're keeping track of all of a sudden hundreds of customers coming through the door and buying gifts. And all of a sudden you started to realize that, yeah, this is a real business. This is really going to go somewhere.

So for us to be sustainable and to have a business that our children could one day call their own, we knew that we had to do something. We wanted to stay together as a family and continue to work together, but we really needed a larger facility to be able to do that.

I really wanted the business to look like an old country store. I love the country stores in New England, and I wanted Honey Brook to have a country store with a large porch and a fireplace. I even wanted to have a little gas stove in the corner if we could have with a checkerboard. I just thought it'd be so neat just to have a place that the community could come and sit and relax, have a cup of coffee or a sandwich and a cup of soup, and sit on the porch on a rocker and just catch up with the neighbors, that sort of thing, and have a destination that people could come to that they could feel like they're in a really neat family run country market. We wanted to get our children involved in the business as much as possible.

After I graduated from college, I moved into a role with human resources and also took over to the wholesale department. And that's probably the thing I enjoy the most, is helping to grow the wholesale and getting out on the road and meeting new people and visiting customers and getting them excited about our products.

I worked in the retail store and buying customers up and sampled cheese to customers.

I work in the sandwich shop and make the yogurt now and stuff too.

I've done a lot of designing ads and labels and signs for the shop, and probably the biggest part of my job description right now is sending out a weekly e-blast that goes out to our customers sharing specials and promotions for the week.

So initially, the online store was not really developed much at all, so I began to work at developing that. And so now essentially my role is online sales manager and trying to grow the online retail business.

My role is the bakery manager and coming up with new recipes and trying out new ideas and choosing seasonal items. And yeah, I really love what I do because baking is something I love, and getting to do that for a job is really great.

It is a really beautiful place, and they put a lot of effort into building the building there, and that adds the atmosphere for sure. And it just has a very, I would say, kind of a peaceful quality. The people are kind of, there's a fine line between shopping and dining at the place, and so that fine line, I think adds to the atmosphere a bit. There's a busyness, a peaceful busyness, even for those that come to Dine, I think, which is kind of a neat addition to the atmosphere.

We've been able to build relationships with a lot of our customers that come in a lot. We have some that come every morning for breakfast, and so we've become good friends with them, and it's more than just a customer now. It's good friends of ours that we know what's going on in their life and we can care about them and be a friend to them.

I think the thing I am most excited about with our potential is to continue to grow our wholesale and see our products get into stores all across Pennsylvania and into the Midwest and south of us, and just spread out into as many states as we can and see our yogurt and cheese on grocery store shelves all around the country.

Our Story - September Farm (Honey Brook, PA) Video