Tony Baughman 
Classic Values, Modern Technology Share The Field At Hickory Hill
A toddler planted himself in the middle of a round galvanized trough filled with corn, peeled off one sock and one boot and began scooping handfuls of bright orange kernels into his boot.
Across the yard, a family strolled together into the corn maze, and a young couple in matching Clemson Tigers sweatshirts held hands and waited in line for the next hay ride. As the sun dipped into the horizon behind the big red barn across the road, the season’s first Farm Night at Hickory Hill Milk settled into its comfortable, lazy rhythm.
Anything but lazy, Daniel Dorn, the 31-year-old fourth-generation dairyman running the show, navigated the grounds in constant and deliberate motion. His community had come to visit the family farm, and he wanted to make them feel welcomed.
“We’ve been hosting Farm Nights for the last 16 years, ever since we’ve been bottling milk,” Daniel said, taking a few minutes to step away from the commotion outside and settle behind his father’s desk in a quiet office. “It has grown since then. This year, we’ve kind of re-imagined Farm Night, if you will. We’re trying to go bigger. We’re trying to improve things. We’ve got new activities, new vendors, new food opportunities. We’d just love for people to come out and experience the new and improved Farm Nights.”
The drive to “go bigger” is seemingly a family trait for the Dorns, who have been farming this same land since 1764, for 11 generations overall. Watson Dorn, Daniel’s daddy, and Daniel’s 91-year-old granddaddy Jim cruised around Saturday’s festivities in a golf cart, surveying the crowd and waving to passersby who came to share in this relatively new family tradition.
Over the years, starting in the 1950s with Daniel’s great-granddaddy James Marvin Dorn, the family has reacquired tracts of land that had been sold off since the 1700s and refocused their daily labor on dairy. Now, with leasing additional property beyond what the family owns, the entire Hickory Hill operation spans about 700 acres.
‘Give All Glory To God’
As a younger man, Daniel followed in his father’s footsteps and went off to Clemson University, but his ambition was to discover another life and career away from this idyllic piece of land. That vision soon changed.
“I did not think that I wanted to come back to the farm originally,” he said. “I got up to Clemson. I was majoring in biology, went through one semester of that and decided, ‘You know what? The grass isn’t always greener on the other side. I think I want to come back and be a part of the family business.’”
Daniel changed his major to agricultural mechanics and technology, “and the rest is history,” he said with a smile. “I’ve been back here for nine years, and I want to be able to pass the legacy on to my son.”
Daniel and his wife Darcy have a toddler who obviously loves his Daddy and the farm. Wearing a Clemson-orange shirt and denim overalls, he rolled into his granddaddy’s office on his tiny bicycle as Daniel spoke. Meanwhile, Darcy stood under the Farm Nights banner at the dairy’s entrance, smiling and welcoming guests.
These seasonal Farm Nights and the entire Hickory Hill Dairy enterprise are clearly not just a source of income for this young family. They are matters of pride and a question of faith.
“We give all the glory to God,” Daniel said. “Everything we do is only through Him. Over the past 16 years of being able to process our own milk, we’ve been very blessed in the business to have great relationships with folks who have helped us along the way to build the business. We go by sort of a creed that Mr. Billy Amick from Amick Farms had told us: First of all, give God all the glory. Second, hire people that were smarter than you. Third, outwork the competition. And that’s what we strive to do each and every day.”
That philosophy clearly has paid off. In 2020, Hickory Hill installed a robotic milking system — the first such system in South Carolina — that now harvests upwards of 1,000 gallons of milk every workday.
As a cow steps into one of the dairy’s 200 free milking stalls to feed, the robot cleans the teats and affixes itself to the cow. The harvested 101-degree milk is then cooled to 37 degrees and transported across the road to the dairy’s processing facility for low-temperature pasteurization at 145 degrees. The milk is not homogenized, yielding what the dairy’s website describes as “the smooth, sweet taste of yesteryear” and a “return to nostalgia when a thick layer of cream rose to the top of each bottle.”
A giant tank outside the processing facility is emblazoned not just with the dairy’s logo but with a Clemson tiger paw. The family’s commitment to quality – and tradition – is clearly evident in every inch of this property and every sip of its milk.
“We always say, you get out what you put in,” Daniel said. “We feed these cows the best quality feed that we can feed them. We grow our own corn silage here on the farm and feed it to the cows. So, we control all the points of quality from the feed to the cow to the milking of the cow…We try to do as much as we can on the farm to control the points of quality from the cow to the jug.”
Growing A Market, Leaving A Legacy
The market for Hickory Hill’s delicious brand of “yesteryear” milk has grown exponentially from a few local retailers to supermarkets across South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia. Still, the family maintains an “honor cooler” just outside the windows to the milk processing facility. Local fans of the milk may drop by, select gallons or pints of white milk or chocolate milk from the cooler and deposit their cash into a lockbox affixed to one of the porch columns.
This nod to the sweet old-fashioned ways of rural dairy farming speaks volumes about the way tradition is treasured at Hickory Hill Milk, even by a young 21st-century dairyman like Daniel. The message to other aspiring young farmers is clear:
“Leaving a legacy on a farm is just something that I think a lot of people take for granted, but it’s worth it,” he said. “It teaches you a lot of good lessons. It teaches you the value of hard work, the value of a dollar, and it teaches you to be thankful and grateful for how things get on your plate. There’s a lot of lessons that farming teaches you as just a byproduct of the hard work.”
Daniel, his wife and son and the rest of the Dorn family and their friends again will welcome their neighbors and the community to the next Farm Night celebration on Saturday, October 25. Admission to Farm Nights is $15, and the festivities include live entertainment, a corn maze, a pumpkin patch, a petting zoo with baby farm animals and of course, the sunset hay rides across the road and up the hill for a closer look at the cows.
Two-hour “Calf-To-Cup” tours of the milking operation also are offered to school groups and church groups. For more information on Hickory Hill Dairy, including locations of retailers where the milk is sold, visit the family’s website at www.hickoryhillmilk.com.
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