Mixing It Up with Miss Kitty
From tennis pro to dairy farmer, she created a place where women thrive in agriculture.
Kitty HockmanNicholas took over her family’s 50-acre dairy farm in Winchester, Virginia, in 1977. It was just after her brother, Robbie, died in a farm accident. She had never milked a cow before and says she knew nothing about farming at the time. Kitty was raised to be a southern lady—only boys and men went into the barn.
“But farming was always in my heart,” she says.
At that time, Miss Kitty, as they call her on the farm, was a professional tennis player with two young daughters, and she was going through a divorce. To be a woman and a farmer in the late 1970s was fairly unusual. At first she hired help for the dairy, but eventually she learned how to milk. She replaced her father’s Holsteins with Jerseys, which she jokes are “the only breed” of cow. And for the past 20 years, she’s been the only one she trusts to milk the herd, which consists of about 25 cows at any one time.
The family farm began as an apple orchard in 1906 and became a dairy in the 1940s.
It’s now a diverse and flourishing woman-owned and -operated business that produces raw milk, sells meat, provides educational programs and offers farm-stay accommodations at the Herds Inn, a two-bedroom log cabin
with breathtaking views of the surrounding mountains.
Guests can pet the calves, visit the dairy, talk with Miss Kitty and delight in watching the peacocks, llamas, pigs, ducks and chickens go about their days. Kitty has also added a tiny house log cabin, the Birds Nest, sized for one or two guests or overflow from a larger group at the inn.
The dairy is the heart of the farm, though, Kitty says. And a cow boarding program, in which customers purchase part of a Jersey cow, allows Hedgebrook to produce and share raw milk. (In Virginia, it’s illegal to sell raw milk.) Shares of the grass-fed, hormone- and pesticide-free milk can be picked up at the farm or delivered around the region.
This raw milk is also used to produce cheese in On the Farm classes offered in league with two local nonprofits, Sustainability Matters and the Lord Fairfax Soil and Water Conservation District. Engaging in such partnerships has helped diversify the farm business while honoring Kitty’s passion for animal welfare, conservation and the production
of high-quality food. Other partnerships at Hedgebrook include a bee pollination project, a hydroponic farming system and a community garden.
Kitty’s advice to her fellow farmers: “You have to be willing to change your mind away from the traditional way of farming.
“The future of farming will be corporate farms unless you, as a small farmer, are able to find more than one lucrative niche market, stay focused and build on markets with what you have.”
Hedgebrook is still a family business, and Kitty gets help from her daughters, Shannon Triplett and Jackie Hott; her granddaughter, Meghan Triplett; and her grandsons, Nickolas and Griffin Hott. Kitty’s mother (also named Kitty) lived on the farm until she passed away four years ago at age 98, and Kitty says she misses her every day.
Now age 77, Kitty sees the farm’s future in its hospitality business, which daughter Shannon helps manage.
Kitty’s advice to other women who want to farm? It’s simple: “Go for it.”