Pushlar Farms: Four Generations Choosing to Carry the Family Legacy
In Cazenovia, New York, Chloe Pushlar has watched farmland around her disappear into subdivisions, storage units, and solar arrays. It's changed the way she sees the fields her family still farms. They aren't making more of it, she says, and that scarcity has only deepened her appreciation for the 1,000-plus acres the Pushlars have carried forward since 1946.
That year, Chloe's great-grandfather left East Springfield and set out to find land of his own. People told him it couldn't be done. He searched the state anyway and settled on a farm in Cazenovia, where he and his wife raised Paul milking cows by candlelight, since the property had no electricity yet. The work was hard and the tools were basic, but the life suited them. As Paul remembers it, they were happy then, and the family is still happy now, four generations later.
That contentment never meant standing still. When Paul's son Adam finished college, the family's herd wasn't large enough to support a second household. Rather than walk away from the farm, Adam opened a repair shop on the property to make ends meet. When the neighboring farm came up for sale, he bought it, starting with a handful of cows that grew into a full barn. He and his father built a new parlor and moved the herd in together, expanding with a clear purpose, to eventually bring in enough income to support another generation after his own.
That generation is here. Chloe started working with calves around age 13, bottle-feeding them by hand. She admits she wasn't thrilled about farm chores as a kid, but the calves won her over, and from there her responsibilities grew alongside the herd, from heifers to the milking cows themselves. She talks about the cows the way you'd talk about people you know well, each one different, each one worth the effort of keeping happy and comfortable. That attention pays off in the milk itself. Comfortable cows produce better milk, and Chloe sees looking after them as central to the job.
College sent Chloe further into the science behind the work she grew up doing, from what happens in the soil to how a cow's body actually functions. An internship at MVP Dairy showed her what a larger-scale operation looks like day to day, experience she says would serve her well if the family ever decided to grow Pushlar Farms further. She feels the weight of that possibility. Carrying forward everything her grandfather and father built while preparing the farm for whoever comes next puts her in the middle of the family's timeline, passing along what she was given.
Adam is the first to point out that none of the Pushlar kids were pushed into farming. He'd rather they choose it, the way he and Chloe both did. Each generation that chooses to stay has brought the farm something new, from the candlelight his grandparents worked by to the technology running the barn today. Every cow at Pushlar Farms now wears a small ear sensor, tracking activity and rumination around the clock. If a cow stops eating, the system sends an alert, and someone goes to check on her. It's a level of daily monitoring most people never think about when they picture a dairy farm. The cows need to be healthy and content to produce good milk, and that's the standard the Pushlars hold themselves to.
Paul Pushlar, Adam Pushlar, and Chloe Pushlar each carry a different chapter of the same farm, from a stretch of land found on faith in 1946 to a repair shop that became a second herd to a next generation weighing how far the operation might still grow. Through all of it, the Pushlars have kept building on what came before, adding land and animals and technology, because each generation chose this life and chose to leave room for the next one. That choice is what Pushlar Farms represents, and why Paul, Adam, and Chloe can each proudly say that they are New York Dairy.
Watch our spotlight video on Pushlar Farms here: https://youtu.be/tJ7mN8DbApU
