Abby Rockefeller

Abby Rockefeller is the host for the Real Organic Churchtown Conference. Abby acquired the land that would eventually become Churchtown Dairy in 2008. She and her trusted architect Rick Anderson set to work building a raw milk dairy in the tradition of her family. Abby had been drinking raw milk from a Rockefeller farm since she was a child. Since then, Abby has been an activist in pushing for the legalization of raw milk in the food system. She helped organize a rally on the Boston Common in May 2010. The demonstration, which featured a farmer milking a dairy cow named Suzanne, was held to protest the state of Massachusetts restrictions and cease-and-desist letters against the delivery of raw milk.

Today Churchtown Dairy features a farm store that sells raw milk, yogurt, cheeses, and meat to the local community. The milk is supplied by their beautiful Jersey herd.

Prior to launching Churchtown beginning in the early 1970’s, Abby was a pioneer in the fight against the spreading of sewage sludge on agricultural lands. This fight was an extension of her earlier work advocating for and eventually launching a company to manufacture composting toilets. That work was inspired by composting technology first developed in Sweden. Recognizing that conventional sewer systems and "sludge recycling" were poisoning our water and actually dispersing toxic, industrial, and pharmaceutical contaminants into the environment and agricultural soil, she became an outspoken critic of land-applied sewage sludge. Abby has forcefully advocated for sewage sludge to be legally classified as toxic waste.

The company Abby founded in 1973 is named Clivus Multrum. It operates today out of Lawrence, Massachusetts and sells compostable toilets to a national market. In 1990, she expanded the environmental policy dimension of these efforts by co-founding the ReSource Institute for Low Entropy Systems (RILES). RILES today works in partnership with a new national environmental entity called Just Zero advocating for sustainable sanitation the ongoing, bipartisan fight against the agricultural spreading of sludge.

Churchtown Dairy is proud to be certified as a Real Organic farm.