A Dairy of Distinction—North Fork of Long Island
I have summered on the North Fork for twenty-eight years and thought I knew most of the farms, but it took my son moving to Norway, and coming home a raw milk drinker, for me to find Ty Llwyd.
Tee-clewed. Welsh for “brown house.” A name easy to mispronounce and, I’m told, nearly impossible to Google correctly if you don’t already know how it’s spelled—which means, in practice, that a farm has been sitting on Sound Avenue for over a century and a half, hiding in plain sight from anyone who didn’t already belong to the small, word-of-mouth circle of people who knew to look for it.
The farm is sixth-generation, thirty-three acres, founded in 1870 as a potato operation and one of the countless small farms that once defined this part of Long Island, before so many of them became vineyards, or wineries’ event lawns, or simply stopped. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places now. But what pulled me in wasn’t the history plaque. It was the milk, and the family behind it, and the particular, stubborn Welsh inheritance that decided, after 140 years of potatoes, to become something else entirely.
Chris Wines added dairy to the family farm in 2009, certifying it for raw milk sales two years later—the only farm on all of Long Island licensed to do it. It wasn’t an experiment or a trend chase. It was, by his own account, in his blood: a long line of raw milk dairy farmers on his mother’s side back in Wales, going back to a grandfather who delivered small-batch milk to people’s homes and left it on their windowsills, the way milk delivery used to work everywhere.
You can still buy that milk today, in glass bottles, with a deposit, from cows raised on pasture. Restrictions require it to be consumed within twenty-four hours of bottling, tested monthly by the state for the pathogens people worry about. It is, in other words, milk that refuses to travel—that has to stay close to where it was made, or it isn’t allowed to exist at all.
I’d been reading Manchán Magan’s Thirty-Two Words for Field around the same time I found Ty Llwyd, and the two things started talking to each other.
Magan’s book, published in 2020, and by now something of a quiet phenomenon among people who care about language and land—traces the old Irish words for a field. Not one word, the way English flattens the concept into a single, serviceable noun, but dozens: words for a field that’s been recently plowed, a field where hay is drying, a field a particular animal is known to graze, a field with a certain kind of boundary or history or feeling attached to it. The Irish language, in Magan’s telling, didn’t just describe land. It paid such close attention to land that it needed thirty-two different words to hold what it saw.
I don’t have Irish blood. I have Welsh blood—my own inheritance running parallel, geographically and culturally, to Chris Wines’s grandfather and his windowsill deliveries. But reading about a language so attentive to land that a single field could carry thirty-two different names, I understood something about Ty Llwyd that I hadn’t let myself articulate yet: the reason it took me this long to find the farm wasn’t bad luck, or a poorly marked sign on Sound Avenue. It’s that most of us have lost the vocabulary—literal and otherwise—for noticing what’s actually around us. We drive past thirty-two different kinds of field and see only one word: field. We drive past a hand-lettered sign for six miles’ worth of years and see only farm stand.
The real story is what it took to find the farm. A son’s move to Norway and a book my dear friend gave me about a language that hasn’t forgotten how to look closely at land. And another friend, just days after starting the book, saying the words Ty Llwyd out loud. These things, arriving in the same season, finally pointing at the same brown house on Sound Avenue, with a simple sign out front declaring Dairy of Distinction.
The people who hold the knowledge are never hiding it, exactly—they’re just going about their work, the way the Wines family has been going about theirs on Sound Avenue since before automobiles existed. The failure, when there is one, is never on the side of the land.
Support This Work
Ty Llwyd Farm sells raw milk, fresh eggs, and seasonal produce from its Riverhead property on Sound Avenue, the only licensed raw milk dairy on Long Island. → Visit the farm
Manchán Magan’s Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape is available wherever books are sold.
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Author’s Note
This story is part of an ongoing series exploring regenerative systems in food, craft, and hospitality: how ancient wisdom and contemporary practice coexist to restore the relationship between people and place. Every act of care—a bottle left on a windowsill, a word invented for a single kind of field, twenty-eight years finally catching up to what was there all along— isa thread in something larger.
