Our Mission

Our commitment as a farm is to be transparent, to educate and engage with our community, reconnecting our neighbors to the land and the source of their food.

As cheesemakers, we strive to produce high quality, handcrafted farmstead cheeses.

As people, we are steadfast in our charge to treat our animals ethically, and reconnect the public to their food and to the land. If we take care of the land, the land will sustain us.

Our History

In 1987, three brothers inherited 400+ acres of undeveloped farm land in the Lawrenceville/Princeton area. Their ancestors had farmed the area before the revolutionary war, and this particular parcel had been in the family since 1902.

Originally, the land at Cherry Grove was farmed for row crops and then, at some point, converted into a traditional dairy farm where black and white Holstein cows were fed on a mixture of grain and hay. Over the years, the dairy operation was leased to various farmers and the land suffered under more and more intensive conventional farming techniques.

Land preservation and locally grown food are family passions, so the Hamill brothers put their heads together and decided to create something special — something that would give back to their community while keeping the land healthy and undeveloped for generations to come. The Hamills, with their children, planned to regenerate the land by embracing sustainable farming, using old fashioned, pastoral techniques as a guide. The focus would be artisanal farmstead cheese and everything done on the farm would support the making of a quality, handcrafted product.

Today, at Cherry Grove Farm, our grass-based, sustainable style treads lightly on the land, prizing quality over quantity. The farm grazes roughly 120 cows (a mix of Jersey, Friesian, Milking Short Horn, Red Ayreshire, Dutch Belted, and Swedish Reds) on 240 acres of certified organic pasture. The cows are milked twice a day, and their milk flows into our creamery to produce award-winning farmstead cheeses.