Our History

Staff-Herd Farms has been a family run farming business since 1898. The original farm was located in New Castle County, Delaware, purchased by Thomas Stafford in 1898. The First work horses started plowing there in 1900. The two youngest sons, Ernest and Lewis, took over the family farm and became the Stafford Brothers Partnership. The farm was a dairy, hog, poultry, and produce operation. Cows were killed by hand and milk shipped in cans, which are only seen around in decorations these days. Lewis married Alice Williams and had two children, Carl and Louise.

In 1963, Interstate 95 was built through the farm in Delaware. Lewis and Ernest purchased a 130 acre farm in Cecil County, Maryland. Several years later, they purchased another 150 acres where Carl would carry on the farming tradition, with dairy as the main business. In the late 1980’s, Carl formed a partnership with his son, Wayne, and that’s when the operation became known as Staff-Herd Farms. Wayne took over the reigns of the operation in 1995 with his family, (wife, Sandy; son, Jeff) and continued being a dairy farm until 2004. When dairy was no longer profitable, the farm went to a full-time beef operation that was secondary to the dairy for all those years. They also farm 700 acres of crop land raising corn, soybeans, wheat & hay. They also enjoy custom harvest, planting, and bailing hay for other local farmers totaling a couple thousand acres each year.

Starting at a young age, Cole Stafford, the owner and full time operator of Stafford Pork, always loved raising pigs for his 4-H projects. In 2017, Cole decided to pursue his passion of raising pigs by purchasing his first large group of hogs, creating Stafford Pork. Starting out by selling bulk meat items ,such as half and whole hogs, 10 hogs were finished by the end of 2017. Now, with Cole expanding his market to whole-sale in multiple stores, as well as selling individual products in Stafford Farm Market, Cole has turned this operation to processing over 150 hogs a year.