Bos-Haven Farm

Verbank, New York

"There is a demand for milk, local milk -- our milk. The market is here, the cows are here. So why truck from elsewhere? We all make a quality product no matter what, but to be compensated for that with the premium that Hudson Valley Fresh provides, well, it’s nice to be appreciated.”
                                                                  ~ Brian Donovan

            
 

Bos-Haven Farm gets its name from the Latin word for cow, or bos, and haven is a place of safety, which suits Tim Marshall, whose ancestors have been taking care of cows in this region since the early 1800s, starting with his mother’s descendants, the Benhams.

Located in Dutchess County in the rolling hills of Verbank, New York, the Marshalls today farm over 500 acres of land, 400 of which are used to grow corn, alfalfa and grass hay for the cattle.

Tim learned about the dairy business from his grandfather Stanley Benham who farmed the land since 1946. This land has been farmed by Tim’s mother family, the Benhams, since the 1800s who back then did more subsistence farming until the railroads came up from New York City and brought with them the opportunity to sell milk to city folk. That’s when the dairy business began to thrive in the Hudson Valley.

“And that is what we are still trying to do today,” says Tim. “That’s why we need Hudson Valley Fresh, to get a fair price for our milk so we can keep farming. Farming is much more costly in the Northeast than it is out west. The taxes are higher, the land costs more. Local does not always mean less expensive.”

Environmental conservation has always been important to the Marshall family. They use a liquid manure system which allows them to manage the delivery of nutrients to the fields and they do rotational cropping and strip cropping, which prevents soil erosion.

Tim retired from the dairy business and handed over the reins to Brian Donovan in 2004, who rents the facility and buys the feed that Tim grows on his property. Brian keeps almost 300 Holstein cows in the freestall barn and uses the 14 machines in the milk parlor daily, milking 14 cows at a time, twice a day, every day, rain or shine.

“Holsteins produce milk with a lower protein and fat profile, but they make up for it in volume,” says Brian, who the hails from Waterbury, Connecticut and began his career on a dairy farm as a teenager, preferring the work with actual cows to his former job of painting barns.
 

Brian says that when growing up in the suburbs, he had no exposure to agriculture and had no idea how complicated the farming life really was. “You took it for granted that the milk just appears in a carton at your store. When you find out what goes into that one glass of milk, from producing the milk to marketing it to distributing it -- it’s a multi billion dollar industry -- you really begin to appreciate it.” Tim and his family still live on the farm. His wife, Carolyn, is now retired. Their son Robert has a house painting business and their daughter Kathryn graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in Museum Studies.

Awards and Notable Mentions:
 

• New York State Dairy of Distinction – A state program that identifies farms that are well kept and well managed
   

• Conservation Farm of the Year presented by the Dutchess County Soil and Water Conservation District.
   

• Conservation Farm – Take Pride in America, USDA, National Association of Conservation Districts
   

• Hosted a Conservation Field Day for 5th and 6th graders from 1967 – 2005, sponsored by the Dutchess County Soil and Water Conservation District