At Millbrook Beef & Dairy, it’s all about the field to food link—and some really delicious steak and cheese.
In the fertile hills of Dutchess County, first-generation farmers Keegan and Brian Donovan share a passion for connecting people to the land. In addition to the unrelenting toil a working farm requires, the Donovans operate a farm store, where they sell what they raise and—critical to their ethos—meet those they feed.
“A family was in buying groceries the other day and Brian was able to take the kids out to the farm and show them where it all came from,” says Keegan, who runs Millbrook Beef & Dairy with her husband. “It’s why we do what we do; to give people a connection to the food on their plate.”
The Donovan’s evolving farm operation includes 66 acres for raising, milking, and tending to their 70 beef cattle (primarily Black Angus); about 60 dairy cows (butterfat-rich Jerseys and iconic Holsteins that produce 3,000 pounds of milk a day); 20 milk-fed Berkshire pigs; and thousands of meat-producing chickens, turkeys for Thanksgiving, and egg-laying hens. They grow hay and corn for the cows and reserve an acre for pick-your-own strawberries, plus space for sowing veggies.
As a teenager, Keegan fell for farm life working at a since-closed dairy (serendipitously, the same land they operate today), before going on to a career in nursing. It was Brian who stumbled into dairy farming during a temporary barn-painting job. Feeling the itch to start his own dairy business, he took out a USDA Young Farmer loan and purchased a herd of cows.
The two met when Keegan brought her broken lawn mower over to the farm next door to see if someone there could lend a hand in fixing it. Brian came to the rescue, one thing led to another, and they eventually married. But their journey took a dramatic turn in 2020 when schools and restaurants shuttered, and the dairy industry cratered. Farmers were told to dump milk while still paying staff. “Thousands of dairy farms went out of business during [the pandemic],” Keegan says.
At the time, she was pregnant, hesitant to leave her nursing job but watching their dairy farm bleed money. It didn’t make sense to her that supermarket shelves were empty, yet they struggled to sell their abundance of milk. “The farmers are here, the cows are here, our question was: why aren’t people sourcing food more locally?”
The Donovans’ evolving farm operation includes 66 acres for raising, milking, and tending to their 70 beef cattle; about 60 dairy cows; 20 milk-fed Berkshire pigs; and thousands of meat-producing chickens, turkeys for Thanksgiving, and egg-laying hens.
She traded in her scrubs for boots and joined forces with her husband to upend their business model. Instead of dumping milk, the couple began raising milk-fed pigs. They purchased a herd of beef cows and pivoted from the commodity dairy business Brian had been running since 2004 to providing premium beef and cheese in a direct-to-consumer model. In 2022, Millbrook Beef & Dairy was born. “You have to evolve to stay solvent,” Keegan notes.
Now, up to 100 pounds of milk a day is used to feed the pigs while roughly 1,700 pounds (several times a week) goes to McGrath Cheese Company in Hudson, where their award-winning MBD line is crafted in-house, by hand.
What the Donovans don’t grow, they source from fellow producers within a 15-mile radius of their farm store. “There’s a real camaraderie,” says Keegan. “We sell each other’s wares, and I get to tell customers why I chose a particular canary melon. We’ll discuss the black dirt in Ulster or why I got something specific on the other side of the river.”
But milking cows with her husband remains the best part of the job, reminding her of when they were dating and Brian would need to milk the cows before taking her out. It makes her think: “It’s still you and me. Here. In this barn.”
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