WESTBROOK – Some – if not all – of the cows at Smiling Hill Farm in Westbrook were transported to new homes this week.

The departure of the cows has apparently created dissension among members of the Knight family that owns the farm, and unsettled some customers and others with connections to Smiling Hill.

Warren Knight, president of the farm’s board of directors, said last week that cows at the farm would be leaving while the farm temporarily stopped milking on site. The farm plans to milk cows there again after it transitions to a less labor-intensive type of milking system, Knight said.

He said the farm at 781 County Road, known for its popular dairy store and petting zoo, would continue having local milk products and ice cream. It will obtain milk from other farms – a practice that to some extent the farm already employs – until a new milking system is in place, Knight said.

Knight said the temporary change in milk production involves a personnel matter that he can’t discuss for privacy reasons.

But according to Susan Mazzone, a Scarborough resident whose daughter worked in the farm’s dairy, the changes will eliminate the role that David Knight has played at the farm for decades. David Knight, who is Warren Knight’s brother, has been in charge of milking at the farm, but Mazzone said Warren Knight told her that David “would no longer be involved” with the cows.

David Knight did not return calls for comment for this story.

But Hillary Knight, a college student who is David Knight’s daughter and Warren Knight’s niece, has contacted the media to express her unhappiness with the changes at the farm.

Hillary Knight sent an e-mail message late last week to news media around the state that began: “The Smiles are no more.”

She wrote: “Smiling Hill Farm has been a working dairy farm since the early 1700’s, and the Knight family has raised the land and animals on it for eight generations. As you may or may not know, the cows whose ancestry dates back to the early days of the farm are being sold this Sunday, the 25th of July. The loss of these cows would not only be a loss of a trademark of the farm, but without them the future of the farm itself becomes dubious indeed…If the cows leave, how can there be a farm?”

Warren Knight called his niece’s message “disappointing” and inaccurate. He said that while Hillary Knight grew up on the farm, she doesn’t work there.

“Smiling Hill will have cows and will be a dairy,” he said.

Hillary Knight did not respond to requests for further comment. She later e-mailed that the message, which was sent to two local newspapers and a local television station with a note to “spread this around as much as possible,” was “an opinion piece, not a news story.”

Warren Knight said last week that the farm would still graze trademark black-and-white Holstein cows on its pastures, but they would be dry cows not currently being milked or heifers too young to give milk.

Although some of the farm’s herd of about 60 cows would be sold, Knight said, others would simply go to other farms to graze and be milked while Smiling Hill will continue to get their milk.

It’s not clear, however, how many of the herd actually left the farm on Sunday and where they went.

“Some went last night,” Warren Knight said on Monday. On Tuesday, he refused to comment further regarding the cows at Smiling Hill Farm.

However, Mazzone, who said she has visited the farm since she was a high school student three decades ago, said she was there on Sunday and saw every cow being taken away, including dry cows and heifers.

“I know they loaded every single cow on the truck. I have video to show the barn empty except for five cows being picked the next day,” Mazzone said Tuesday.

She said that only a handful of cows were sold locally and the rest went to Philadelphia for sale.

“I just think that people should be aware that this is actually happening,” she said.

On the Smiling Hill Farm Facebook page, while some customers wished the farm good luck, some customers said they were upset with the changes.

They called the farm’s plans “vague,” “very disappointing” and “concerning to hear about.”

Anne Thibault of Mechanic Falls wrote: “So many farms have been lost over the many years and yours has been a staple and a landmark.” She said that letting the cows go “is a bad decision!”

But Knight said that the 500-acre farm will remain true to its heritage. While the way it gets its milk is undergoing a temporary change, he said, “the overall mission and direction of the company is not.”

The Knight family, local farmers for three centuries, produces milk at the farm without chemical fertilizers, pesticides or artificial hormones.

Knight said the farms that Smiling Hill bottles milk for – Harris Farm in Dayton and Sherman Farm in Conway, N.H. – produce the same type of natural milk from their cows.

Smiling Hill already has the practice of accepting excess milk from those farms and will do that more during the transition period, Knight said.

Smiling Hill also recently started processing and packaging milk from Maine’s Own Organic Milk, or MOOMilk, a company formed by 10 organic dairy farms in the state. Knight said the farm also takes excess milk from that company, too.

When it has come to milking at Smiling Hill Farm, Mazzone said that only a handful of people have milked all the cows – David Knight and some helpers.

Now, however, Smiling Hill is exploring installing a different milking system that involves less human labor, Warren Knight said.

The farm currently uses a dumping station method that involves workers picking up and carrying lots of heavy containers full of milk, he said.

Other methods, such as a pipeline system in which milk flows through pipes, or a milking parlor in which cows come to the person doing the milking, involve less labor, Knight said. He’s also looking into the possibility of getting a robotic milking stall that involves even less human effort.

The stall, which would stand outside and which cows would come to because it would also feed them some grain, would be able to do an electronic read of a metal tag each cow would wear and know when it was last milked and whether it was time to let it enter the stall for another milking, Knight said. The stall would have the ability to automatically attach a milking machine to a cow and also cleanse the machine afterward so it would be ready for another use.

Knight said that what the robotic stall is able to do is so fascinating, “I bet I could charge people to watch it work.”

The robotic milking stall is used in Europe and there are a few in the United States, he said.

However, the stalls are expensive and the other milking systems are costly, too, so the farm is investigating all the options, he said.

Knight said he hopes that the farm – where the petting zoo recently re-opened after a nine-year hiatus – will be able to get a new system quickly installed. However, he said, he could not give a date when that might happen.

“The long and the short of it is that we’re going through a transition period with our cows,” Knight said.

Smiling Hill Farm has recently started processing and packaging milk from Maine’s Own Organic Milk, or MOOMilk, a company formed by 10 organic dairy farms in the state.
File photo