In a county where dairy barns have mostly gone quiet, the Savage family still milks cows. Kevin and Laurie Savage own Brown Cow Creamery in Mount Airy, and they are the last remaining dairy cow farm in Montgomery County.
“We are a very small farm with mostly our family doing the labor, along with some great help in the store. We care for the cows, do the field work, bottle the milk and make the ice cream ourselves,” Laurie says. “We run other businesses and work off the farm as well because it’s impossible for us to make our entire living from the farm.”
Kevin, who also runs an equine service business, and Laurie, who also works for Future Harvest, both grew up on multi-generational dairy farms. When they married, Laurie moved her cows, including her Jerseys or “brown cows,” to Kevin’s place. “His family farm always had Holsteins, so that was when the hooves of the first brown cows of our own operation hit the ground,” Laurie says.
Those brown cows stuck around and gave the creamery its name. Today, the Savages milk around 30 cows on pasture, with help from a robotic milker that lets the cows decide when they leave the field to be milked. The herd is grassfed on 60 acres, and the family is breeding for A2A2 genetics, which some folks find easier to digest. “We recently started planting sorghum sudangrass to feed cattle, as this is a drought- and heat-resistant crop that allows us to get several cuttings in a season.”
There’s a logic to grazing that Laurie sums up well. “Our cows are all on pasture, eating the grasses that grow on the farm, which are not digestible by humans, and turning them into dairy products and beef, which are digestible by humans. It’s basically their superpower,” she says.
The bottled milk is the headline. The Savages don’t skim the fat, and they don’t homogenize. That means cream rises to the top of the bottle, the way your grandparents probably remember it. This is single-source, hyperlocal milk. The cows live on the farm, the milk goes into the bottles, and the bottles go onto the market shelf. This same milk primes the ice cream mix and heads to the cheesemaker. Every batch gets tested for antibiotics before it enters the pasteurizer, and the Maryland Department of Health stops by monthly, a regular procedure for on-farm creameries, to sample both raw and pasteurized products.
The ice cream starts from the same milk, pasteurized with eggs and sugar into a house mix, then frozen one container at a time. “When it’s time to make ice cream, we add one container of our own homemade mix to the ice cream freezer, along with the ingredients for whatever flavor we are making, then spin and freeze in the machine for about seven minutes,” Laurie says. “Then the ice cream goes into containers for serving at the store or into pint containers.”
Flavors run from the familiar to the unexpected: toasted coconut chip — the runaway favorite among staff and customers; peach, pumpkin and apple, depending on the season; ginger and Cuppa Joe for the more adventurous; followed by chocolate and vanilla for the purists. The whole operation is nut-free, and the Savages lean on natural flavors wherever they can.
For cheese, the milk is taken to a cheesemaker, who turns it into Cheddar and Colby varieties. “They are raw milk cheeses and amongst the only cheeses we can make in Maryland that are not pasteurized,” Laurie says. “We are hoping to look into making some soft, fresh pasteurized cheese ourselves soon.”
You’ll find the farm’s dairy products, as well as its eggs and meat, at the on-farm market in Mount Airy. The Savages regularly set up at the Urbana Farmers Market. For Laurie, the direct connection is the point. “Being able to meet and greet customers one on one as they come into the store and make them feel welcome and part of our herd is so meaningful,” she says.
So become part of the herd. Stop by, grab a bottle of cream-topped milk, a pint of toasted coconut chip or a wedge of Cheddar that tells the story of one family, 30 cows and 60 acres of pasture. Come taste what farm fresh really means.
Hungry for more? Learn about the Maryland ice cream trail. Read more about farmers markets.