By Jane Kaufman
Photographs by Stephanie Zollshan
On a hot summer day inside the cow barn at Ronnybrook Farm, Rick Osofsky spoke softly in a low, affectionate voice to a Holstein named Jennifer. He reached down and gently touched her nose.
Jenn, Osofsky said, is one of the sweetest of the 95 Holsteins, Jerseys, and Brown Swiss at the dairy, which straddles the towns of Pine Plains and Ancramdale in the Hudson Valley.
He then pointed to another Holstein named Julie, whom he termed “a pain in the ass.” It’s not coincidental that both cows have names starting with J. In an endeavor that relies heavily on genetics, that letter denotes the mother-daughter relationship, or lineage.
Lineage also plays a role in the success at Ronnybrook Farm. Since 1991, it’s been selling unhomogenized milk in glass bottles to a customer base in the region as well as in Manhattan. Innovation, diversification, quality, an abiding passion for cows, and grit also contribute to that success.
Today, Osofsky runs the dairy and creamery with his daughter, Kate; son, Peter; and nephew, Daniel. Started by Rick’s father, David Osofsky, in the 1930s, Ronnybrook Farm was in its second generation of ownership and on the verge of collapse around 1990. This was after the window had closed on the USDA’s offer to buy out dairy farms in the late 1980s. By that time, though, the Hudson Valley had been discovered, so there was an easy exit plan: sell the land at profit. That wasn’t their intention.
Above, The Osofsky family: (left to right, back row) Kate, Jean, Rick, Peter, Daniel, Tatum; (middle row) Jack and Sadie; (front row) Miles and Ronan; Cousins Miles and Ronan, both 6, take a turn on the tractor.
“We wanted to go back to the way milk used to be—fresh off the family farm and in glass bottles, the way it tastes best,” Ronny Osofsky, Rick’s brother, was quoted as saying in a press packet dating to 1991. He was the Ronny of the Ronnybrook name. “Some things just can’t be improved on. For those of us who grew up with the cream rising to the top of the glass bottle, it’s the way we think of milk, the way we remember it.“
We wanted to go back to the way milk used to be—fresh off the family farm and in glass bottles, the way it tastes best.
Bottling in glass meant the business would have to deliver all of its own milk and build a delivery network from the ground up. With Manhattan’s greenmarkets just 90 miles away, the New York City sector opened up. It took 10 years to catch on, with the business taking losses for that full decade, Rick said.
Since switching to glass, Ronnybrook has been continuously developing and rolling out new products—always under kosher supervision—crème fraîche, compound butters, sour cream, yogurt, kefir, and ice cream.
“I think the thing that made it successful was the unwillingness to give up,” Rick said. “Since 1980, we’ve lost 630,000 family dairy farms. The government really wants to get rid of us all. We wanted to be farmers. This land was terribly important to us. We really believed in cows.”
After Ronny was hospitalized for a year while awaiting a heart transplant about 20 years ago, Rick, who previously moonlighted at the farm, gave up his Pine Plains law practice. Ron lived with that new heart for two decades, until he died in 2022, leaving Rick in the most senior position at the farm.
The COVID-19 pandemic turned out to be a boon for Ronnybrook, partly because of the Paycheck Protection Program. The USDA also paid for drinkable yogurt to be shipped to food distribution centers from Chicago to California.
“We were managing before that,” Rick said. “But that infused enough money that we hired a salesman—we never had a salesman.”
On that same summer day, two men—wearing turquoise-colored gloves and dressed in white—were slapping garlic butter into four-ounce tubs in a dairy barn converted into a creamery. They were working in a small refrigerated room where a 1930s-era electric butter churn was noisily cranking away. In a much larger room, other men were making drinkable yogurt. In the warehouse, crates of yogurt, milk, and five-pound blocks of butter bound for restaurants were ready to load into trucks parked at the dock.
When David Osofsky started Ronnybrook Farm in the 1930s, it was actually his second. His mother, Rebecca Osofsky, gave him his first.
Born in the city of Slutsk, in what’s now Belarus but was then Russia, Rebecca and her husband, Nathan Osofsky, came to New York City by boat right after the turn of the century. At first, Nathan worked in the garment district. There he contracted tuberculosis, known as “the tailor’s disease.” Later one of their daughters, Ida, also developed respiratory trouble. A doctor recommended relocating to the country.
At that time, “Jews couldn’t get mortgages,” said Carol Ascher, author of “A Chance for Land and Fresh Air,” which traces the stories of Russian Jews who bought farms in the Ellsworth hills of Sharon, Connecticut, with help from the Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society, which also helped Jews buy farms in New York, Massachusetts, and beyond.
With the society holding the mortgage, Nathan and his brother, Max Osofsky, bought a farm in Ellsworth in 1907, where the family relocated and Rebecca took in boarders. In 1915, when Nathan and Rebecca’s oldest daughter, Freda, reached high school age, she was barred from entering Sharon’s public high school because she was Jewish. Nathan took her to Amenia, New York, and in 1918, the entire family relocated to Amenia.
There, Rebecca, described by Rick as a “powerhouse,” transformed their large home into the Hotel Grand House, taking in Jewish boarders from New York City, feeding them kosher meals, and offering them amenities on the property, including a swimming pool, tennis courts, and a casino in the pre-Catskills era. It was one of four such hotels in Amenia.
The hotel initially doubled as the town’s first synagogue, where Nathan read Torah in Hebrew and led services. He also milked cows on the family’s land and worked as a cattle trader. After he died at the age of 53, in 1935, Rebecca continued as the family’s breadwinner, sending her daughters to college to learn to teach and buying each of her four sons a farm.
The one she bought for David in the late 1930s was a flat slice of land on Route 22 just north of Millerton. To this day, Rick doesn’t know why David, his father, sold it and in 1948 bought a 205-acre hillside farm in Pine Plains that was much trickier to work. That’s where David and his wife, Helen, raised their three sons and their daughter. In 1941, they named their farm Ronnybrook, after their firstborn son.
The Osofskys expanded their land holdings over time, first with additional land in Pine Plains, later with land on Route 82 in Columbia County and, finally, by buying the old DeLaval Research Farm on Prospect Hill Road in Ancramdale, where the buildings now stand. The herd grew to its largest in the 1980s, with 350–400 milking cows.
From the top of Globe Hill, about two miles from the dairy, the barn, creamery, and siloes look diminutive. Most of the land between here and there—about 800 acres—is owned by Ronnybrook, with five houses among the holdings, where family members and employees live. There’s a commanding view of the hills of the Hudson Valley. It’s easy to understand why Rick often receives offers for the land Ronnybrook owns. He always says no.
On top of Globe Hill, Daniel Osofsky, Ronny’s son, was mowing hay, picking up what was left after the first cutting of the season. His 6-year-old son, Ronan, named for Ronny, was riding along with him. A second tractor was raking nearby.
“We’ve only been able to breathe for the last four or five years,” said Rick’s daughter, Kate Osofsky, who handles the books for the business. “We were lucky that our farm was located so close to New York City.”
Today, the farm has 35 to 40 employees. The creamery processes 180,000 pounds of milk each week from its own cows and from milk sourced from other local farms, most of them multi-generational small dairies.
At 14, Tatum Osofsky, Daniel’s daughter, keeps cows in her yard to show at the Dutchess County Fair. Her first memories of the farm were with her father, who brought her along on the tractor before she was school age. “I just enjoy being with cows,” she said. “They all have different personalities.”
This summer, she is shadowing a large-animal veterinarian, because she’s interested in pursuing that as a career— with a caveat: “I want to stay and help work on the farm.”
RONNYBROOK FARM’S STORE
is located at 310 Prospect Hill Road in Pine Plains, New York.
To arrange a farm tour, call 518-398-6455.
