FEATURED FARM: Find the scale that works for you: Kiss the Cow Farm, Barnard, Vermont, owned and operated by Randy and Lisa Robar

Kiss the Cow farm balances an impressive line of products and services with a very small herd! By Amy Anselm, NODPA Contributing Writer

Kiss the Cow Farm in Barnard, Vermont is owned and operated by Randy and Lisa Robar, educators by background and now twenty-year veteran farmers of an organic, grass-fed dairy. While the scale of their herd is comparatively small—averaging 12 milking cows at a time—they have a robust and diverse line of products and services including A2A2 milk, ice cream, and organic eggs—plus a farm store and a whole-diet CSA. “This farm certainly isn’t what it was 20 years ago,” Randy says, “it evolves!”

The farm business is an LLC jointly owned by the Robars, and like an increasing number of smaller farming operations, they rent the entirety of their farming land through a trust. “We own zero acres!” Randy says. “We steward about 80 acres now, part of a larger property that is a total of 500.”

This larger property, which has historically been a dairy farm, is privately owned by another farmer but the Vermont Land Trust owns the development rights so that it can only ever be used for farming. Since beginning their venture, the Robars have used renewable five-year land leases built on solid relationships with their neighbors—though they are now pursuing a 99-year lease as a good business practice.

Kiss the Cow Farm is 100% grass-fed, and so the Robars don’t till any of their leased acreage for corn or grain. Of their 80 total acres they raise and bale hay on about 35 acres and also bring hay in from some remote fields to supplement. They keep about 35 more acres as permanent pasture, which for their small herd is enough for the first two cycles of rotational grazing. “Come late May we usually take a first cut off the front hay fields,” Randy says, “and by that time the cows have completed their second circuit through back pastures. If that back pasture isn’t ready for another cycle yet, then we’ll turn them in to graze the front hay fields.”

“We have some ‘less than ideal’ back pastures here, and we have a lot of rock ledge,” Randy says of the grass-growing capacity of the land. “Some pastures didn’t grow a lot when we first came here. The farm was managed traditionally. The previous farmers, like most folks back then, milked their 40 cows and then pushed them out back door—so they would all just disappear into 140 acres. When you do that, they eat all the good stuff and leave everything else. So each year there would be more goldenrod and less grass. When we first showed up, we bush-hogged everything. We were whacking down goldenrod taller than me at 6 feet! And now, while I wouldn’t say it’s lush—there’s still too much rock—it does grow decent grass.”

Dividing the pasture into paddocks for intensive rotational grazing is key to maintaining and improving this pasture quality, Randy says. “Getting them on fresh pasture is important for the cows,” he says, “Getting them off each section is just as important.” The Robars use 3-strand high-tensile electric fencing for the farm’s perimeter, and they also have some single-strand interior permanent fencing along the old stones walls and keeping with the farm’s hilly topography. “We have nothing flat,” Randy says, “So we can’t do any squares or rectangles.” They subdivide pastures with braided wire, including when they seasonally turn the herd into the hay fields. “Most of our paddocks are sized for 24 hours—we move the herd to fresh grass every day, after milking,” Randy says. “Conditions are dynamic—grass grows quicker in certain paddocks, at different times of year, so our paddock system has to be adaptive.”

The Robars have a total of 24 cows in their herd at any given time, and milk about a dozen on average. When asked how they manage the milking herd, such as sorting and separating the dries, heifers and calves, Randy laughs. “We started with one cow in the garage!” he says. “And we’ve grown slowly since then. There was no value in trying separate the herd back then, and even now we generally keep them together.”

“We have a traditional old New England tie-stall dairy barn,” Randy says, though the herd is only in the barn for milking. The calves are kept in pens in the barn until they’re about 3 months old, then they are weaned. Those pens include a run-out space so that after about a month they can go outside. “We sell a lot of our bulls as calves through Facebook Marketplace,” Randy says. “We raise one or two a year for veal, but it’s kind a pain… these little calves suck a lot of milk that might be more profitable as ice cream.”

The heifers run with the herd, staying outside year-round—something made possible by the farm’s layout. “The farm buildings block the west wind,” Randy shares, “so the herd is fine outside all winter unless there’s a major snowstorm coming, or if the wind is coming from the wrong direction. Then we bring them in until the weather clears.” The Robars find that not only does this setup require significantly less labor, the cows tend to be much healthier.

When asked about their milking system, again Randy just laughs. “Neither of us have a farming background, but the deal right from the beginning was, ‘yes we can get a cow… but I’m not milking it by hand!’ So we started with a little portable milker.” The barn had surge milkers when the Robars took it over, but Randy says that system didn’t work for them. “We worked with a DeLaval bucket for about 12 years or so, which you can do when you only have a handful of cows. But you can’t do it with more than a handful, which we have now, and you can’t keep it up when you start getting older!” Three years ago the Robars knew they needed to upgrade from the manual buckets and launched a successful GoFundMe campaign to install a modern pipeline system.

This experience was a great example of how their scale and their farming values fit their community. “When we got to a point with our back and knee problems that we knew we needed to change, that GoFundMe campaign raised $17,000 dollars all from local folks who knew us and wanted to keep us going,” Randy shares. “That’s a lot of money for a community-sourced fundraiser. We want to take care of our community, and if we do that well, our community will take care of us.”

Scale is a factor in most of their decisions, even playing a role in their herd genetics. The majority of their herd are Jerseys, which Randy credits to three important reasons. Like most farmers with jersey herds, he cites the heavy cream content of the milk as the most important reason—after all, the farm’s most successful product is ice cream. There is also a logistical consideration. “Jerseys are small, they fit in this old barn.” Randy says. “If we tried to put a modern Holstein in here to milk, she would hang out into the alley!” Finally—but just as importantly—Randy says, “Jerseys are cute! Life is too short to have ugly cows.” After all, if you’re going to be called Kiss the Cow Farm, you had better have kissable cows.

The Robars also include Normande cows in their herd, a decision they credit to a pasture walk some years ago at Franklin Farm, another small organic farm with a mixed herd. “They’re gorgeous,” Randy says of the breed, “They come from northern France, very close to the Isles of Jersey and Guernsey, so they’re all basically first cousins. They give a lot of cream, like the Jerseys, but they’re sturdier, hardier than Jerseys. Our Normandies never get sick.” About two thirds of their herd is Jersey and the remaining third are Normande.

The Robars first built up their herd by buying in cows as their sales demands dictated, but the herd is now closed. “We use Genex,” Randy says, “Because their success rate is a whole lot higher than mine! It’s worth the cost—it’s honestly still cheaper than if I managed it. Plus they get the cows bred back sooner.”

While fresh cows are milked twice a day, the Robars soon settle them into once-a-day milking. “We could get more milk if we did it twice a day,” Randy admits, “but it’s not worth it to us, both from labor and from quality of life perspectives. And because we’re on grass only, once-a-day milking also keeps more condition on the cows through the winter.”

The Robars are also happy with the quantity and quality of milk produced in this system. “We think in terms of gallons because that’s what our customers are used to,” Randy says, “And so we average about 2.5 gallons per cow, per day.” Somatic cell count averages 200, and the fat ratio varies between 5% and 6%. “We don’t use DHIA,” Randy shares, “We just use a spreadsheet because that works better for our scale.”

The herd does have A2A2 genetics, and Randy says that trait pairs well with being both organic and grass-fed. “The milk is overall much easier to digest,” Randy says, “Plus all three components have significant value. Only one other farm in Vermont does all three!”

The Robars do sell wholesale to a handful of local retailers—mostly their milk and ice cream, and occasionally eggs. But a significant part of running the farm includes managing the more complicated sales channels, including their farm store. “Of course we sell our products there,” Randy shares, “but we also offer over 350 other products from other small Vermont farms and small food producers. They get more sales and more marketing, our customers have greater choice, and we even make a few pennies on the sales—it’s a win-win!”

In addition to the farm store, they also manage a year-round CSA with products available every week of the year. Learn more about this “whole diet” CSA on the farm’s website: https://www.kissthecowfarm.com/about-our-csa.html

Herd health and nutrition

A key component of the Robars’ herd health management comes down to trusting their cows to manage their own health. “For example, we do have kelp and loose salt with selenium available—all free choice,” Randy says. “I’ve tried feeding mineral supplements before, but they just turn to cement because the cows give them a lick or two but don’t want it.”

The Robars don’t have a detailed preventative health regime for their animals. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t,” Randy says, “we just don’t—we haven’t needed to have one. We don’t have any hoof issues because they’re out grazing. We have very rare incidences of mastitis—only one case I’d call ‘clinical’ in the last two years. Occasionally we’ll see milk fever, but we don’t have any other health issues.” For those rare health issues, the Robars are the first line of defense but rely on a local vet for anything that calcium, Dynamint or herbal supplements can’t fix.

Cow health starts with calf health, and the Robars trust to the proven natural order when it comes to starting them off strong. “Calves are given hay within the first week,” Randy says. “They may not eat it, but they watch mama across the aisle eat it, and they learn. After a couple of weeks they start to nibble. We feed milk for 12 weeks, then wean them off—and once they’re weaned, they go outside and join the main herd.”

Randy says that this weaning system is a great example of how they learned from others when they first started. “We had no background in farming—zero. We went to all sorts of workshops, we read everything we could find. And when we started to get the NODPA newsletter, we wrote down everything that everyone else was doing! We’d see that one farm did 10 weeks of milk before weaning and another did 14 weeks—so we averaged those examples and that’s how we came up with our baseline.”

Their herd health philosophy remains simple. Randy shares, “If you take care of animals and give them what they need, which is simple—decent food, sunshine, exercise, clean water—then they’ll generally take care of themselves. By default, they will be well. So we let them do their cow thing, and then we don’t have to worry.”

Organic certification and sourcing “extra” milk

The Robars certify through Vermont Organic Farmers, the USDA-accredited organic certification program owned by NOFA-VT. “Our experience with the certification process has been pretty good,” Randy shares. “It’s all online, and most of the entry fields are pre-filled with information from the previous year, so that helps. Some of it is certainly annoying—and I do think it’s way too expensive. But the process itself has gone pretty well.”

Committing to a manageable scale of farming comes with plenty of challenges, and one unexpected one can be what happens when you are too successful. Demand for Kiss the Cow ice cream has risen so drastically that the Robars couldn’t keep up by processing just the milk they produce themselves. “To meet that demand ourselves we would have to double the herd,” Randy says, “and still people would want more.” But the Robars don’t have the land to scale up like that, plus they would need to double every other aspect of their operations—something they simply don’t want to do. So this year they started purchasing milk from local small, organic farms in order to supplement their own supply.

“This is very difficult to do,” Randy shares, “because whether you’re organic or conventional, if you’re attached to a processor then somewhere in your contracts it will say that you cannot sub-sell your milk. And if you get caught selling to someone else, you get kicked off the milk truck and there are no other trucks!” Fortunately the Robars were able to find other local farms with complimentary needs. For example, one local farm had previously shipped milk to Organic Valley but had downsized and so needed someone willing to purchase much smaller quantities. “They’re the perfect size for us to partner with,” Randy says, “so we just go fetch their milk with canisters.”

Small herd, tons of products and services

While the scale of their dairy herd may be small, their product line is not. Kiss the Cow regularly produces and distributes raw milk, pasteurized milk, ice cream, and organic eggs—with a broad range of other seasonal, trial, and community-sourced products. Their model continues to evolve as they identify opportunities and weigh them against their capacity and customer demand. Randy shares, “We have managed a small vegetable garden to supply farm store and CSA, but we realized last year it was too small to be successful, and so this year we switched to flowers instead. We’ll do U-pick flowers, bouquets for sale in the store and through the CSA. We also plan to wholesale a lot—we have accounts lined up with wedding planners and similar buyers.” And these plans continue to evolve—they are in the process of expanding the farm store to offer more products, including putting in a seasonal scoop shop for their ice cream.

Their offerings also extend beyond products and into experiences. “Folks coming to the farm store are looking for more than food, they’re looking for connection with the farm and with the animals. We’re educators by backgrounds, and we love engaging. If an adult brings their child to the farm store and they’re interested in the farm, of course we offer to see the cows—to meet them. Let me tell you, all visitors get excited to meet a baby cow! It’s an experience you can share with them, and it’s such a heartfelt experience. People will share some version of, ‘I remember when I was a kid, I would go to my grandparents’ farm,’ and now they can give that experience to their kids.”

“We also plan to have a weekly series in summer for kids,” Randy says, “focused on educational events about things like bees and pollinators, and of course at the end we all come and get an ice cream. We hope to offer a similar space and time for dementia patients, so that they can come and wander the garden, sit on benches, take in all the colors and the flowers. To just be peaceful.”

Imagination and ambition can’t get far without education, and Randy credits a diverse range of resources for their growth and success. “NOFA Vermont has been huge,” he says, “That has been a huge help in getting us going. We immediately took to organic, and they were helpful through their educational programs, helping us to visit other farms, attending workshops, attending winter conferences, and the networking was huge.”

That networking and continued opportunities to visit other farmers are the types of support that he’d like to see more of to help more new and aspiring farmers. “We reference a lot of books and online stuff,” he shares, “but there’s just no substitute for seeing someone else do this – especially at your level or a bit above. Those are the ‘ah ha’ moments, where you can see something in action and realize, ‘that’s so simple, that’s brilliant, that could fix our problem.’”

And scale remains an important part of finding those networking, shadowing, and mentoring opportunities. “When we started out, so much of the available information was by homesteaders,” he shares, “and we started at that scale—but homesteading is all about the one cow and getting every single drop out.” Providing for just one family’s needs was the wrong scale for the Robars as much as the big dairy operations were wrong for them. What is most needed, he shares, is “some sort of loose mentorship, somebody like you, who is at the scale of where you want to go. Someone who you can call with questions and share advice.”

Creative solutions for on-farm labor

Given the quantity and diversity of products and services coming from this small farm, it may surprise some that the Robars have no employees. “We do have help, obviously,” Randy says, “it’s impossible for two people to do all this. So we use interns and WWOOFers!” Referring to the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, an organization that matches organic farm hosts with individuals who want to learn about organic farming through hands-on experience. “It works for us,” Randy says, “We’re both educators by background and it’s great to have these young people come in who are interested in farming, food, and sustainability. We get to teach them our version of that. It’s meaningful to them, and that’s how we get our teaching fix.”

The program is set up so that no money is exchanged between hosts and participants; instead host farms offer accommodation and meals in exchange for the voluntary labor of visiting learners. “WWOOF works for us,” Randy says, “But it’s not going to work for everyone. Our visiting WWOOFers live with us, upstairs in our house where they have their own rooms. Everyone forages on their own for breakfast, lunch is typically leftovers, and then for supper we all take turns making a big meal and we all sit in the kitchen family-style and share it.”

WWOOFing is not just temporary farm labor, nor is it expected that participants are necessarily training to become full-time farmers. Randy shares that they build real and meaningful long-term relationships with most of the participants, many of whom will drop by to visit even years after their original stay. “We do have a couple stories where these folks have gone into some kind of farming,” Randy shares, “like one woman who stayed with us is now making butter and yogurt, that was her dream—and another one lives in suburbia but raises chickens. But generally most don’t go into full-time farming, and that’s okay too. They get an appreciation that most people don’t have—about how hard this is, and where food comes from. And there’s real value in that.”

Guiding the next generation of new farmers

“We’re not doing this for the money,” Randy says, “that’s clear to anyone doing this scale of farming. But we’re doing it to feed our community, and they appreciate it, we hear that appreciation all the time. ‘We’re so glad you’re here,’ folks tell us, ‘Your milk is the best, that’s all my kid will drink,’ and that keeps us going.” The Robars also find reward in stewarding the land and using it to engage the next generation of farmers. “We don’t have kids of our own, we have these WWOOFer farm kids and local kids that visit—and that’s pretty cool. Our goal is, when we’re done and someone else takes over, for this land to be in better shape than how we found it.”

While it’s hard to boil all of their experiences and learnings down to one piece of advice for beginning farmers, Randy wants to be sure that anyone getting into farming for the first time goes into it aware of the challenges and with a clear idea of what their goals are. “Some days I think somebody should have talked us out of this!” he says. “I enjoy what we’re doing, but there are many days where this is the dumbest thing you could do—it’s an uphill battle everywhere, and there’s no profit in farming.” Certainly no financial profit, he clarifies, and not like other career paths open to most people. The physical, mental and emotional investment can sometimes be overwhelming. “We’re doing the full circle thing,” he says, “We are the processor, there’s no truck that can take this milk away so that I can focus on the cows and the land. Because we process it, we have to process it! My wife is in charge of the creamery and that’s way more than a fulltime job for us, even with only 12 milking cows. Then there’s the marketing, sales, delivery, the CSA and delivery accounts… We deal with people—at the store, in the scoop shop, at a service counter—and then there’s all the farming!”

He doesn’t mean to scare anyone away from farming or any of its components, just to be sure that new or growing farmers approach these decisions with eyes wide open. “We’ve read a ton of articles that say, ‘process your own milk and you can keep that money! You don’t have to give it to a middleman!’ And that sounds great, but the reality is that it’s not that great because it is so much work. And they’re entirely different skills.” These decisions require an objective assessment of scale – both at your current capacity and at your aspirational capacity.

“So much of the available information just doesn’t apply at our level,” Randy shares. “It’s for those bigger farms where every penny is counted and they’re trying to be as efficient as possible. And that’s important for them, but I’m not interested in this farm feeling like factory work.” He remembers a speaker at a workshop from years past with a line that really stuck with him: “’I’m not milking or farming for maximum milk; I’m farming for optimal milk,’” Randy recalls. “And that optimal approach means not trying to squeeze every drop from the cow. Instead it’s asking, ‘what’s the best I can do for this cow that also meets my needs?’ I’m not interested in getting rid of any cow just because I could get another that can make more milk. I just want to make good milk, with cows that have a good quality of life, while I can also have a somewhat good quality of life.

This is what Kiss the Cow hopes for beginner and small farmers: May you find and live your optimal scale of farming. Value community, natural health and beauty… and take the time to kiss your cows.

Learn more about the Robars and their farm on the Kiss the Cow website: https://www.kissthecowfarm.com/about-the-farm.html And enjoy some of the most wholesome content on social media on their Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/kissthecowfarmandcreamery/

Posted: to Featured Farms on Sat, May 9, 2026
Updated: Sat, May 9, 2026