Brothers, Beef, and Brews

POMPEY — Dan Palladino remembers exactly where he was when he decided to finally walk away from a very successful and lucrative career with Thermo Fisher Scientific and concentrate on his family’s farm in Pompey full-time. It was 2011, and Palladino was attending a leadership conference in Boston. One of the speakers that day referred to his childhood on a small dairy farm in New England. This piqued Palladino’s interest, as he too had grown up on a family farm, eschewed the family business, and gone into the corporate world. 

The speaker, a senior-level executive, told a story of the day he turned 18 and was approached by his father to discuss transitioning the farm for his eventual takeover, to which the son replied, “No thanks. I’d like to get a real job.” According to Palladino, the room erupted with laughter. He, on the other hand, was shocked by this supposed punchline. A real job? What could be more real than a family working the land together over multiple generations, he thought. Hard work. Tradition. Family. Heritage, these formed the foundation of his success and he learned them on the farm.

  As he sat in Boston that fateful day, Palladino had his feet in both worlds; one in the barn and one in the boardroom. Having left the farm to go to college, eventually attaining his MBA from the University of Rochester, Palladino settled in Rochester. After his father, Nick, Sr., passed away in 2009, his uncles were set to sell the farm, which was limping along. Dan, overcome with a feeling that his children needed to grow up on the farm, as he and his older brother, Nick, had done, offered to buy it and keep it in the Palladino family — as it has been since 1951.

A short while after the Boston conference, Palladino left Thermo Fisher and turned his attention to the daily operations of Palladino Farms. A decade later, the farm (now in its 177th year of cultivation) and its Heritage Hill Brewhouse are thriving, bringing a renewed vitality to the pastoral landscape in Pompey.

The story of Palladino Farms and Heritage Hill Brewhouse goes all the way back to 1845, when the land was first cleared and cultivated. German immigrant, Morris Beard, settled the property and cleared acres of hemlock. Beard also built the beautiful Greek Revival farmhouse that still functions as the family homestead. Beard eventually sold the property to the Hamilton Family and moved to Fayetteville, where he developed much of that township. After the purchase, the Hamiltons owned nearly 1,000 acres and continued to farm much of the land until the 1940s, when they put it up for sale.

In 1941, Nunzio Palladino, the family patriarch and Dan’s grandfather, investigated purchasing the property from the Hamilton family, but held off. Like Morris Beard before him, Nunzio Palladino was an immigrant to the United States, after he and his parents left their hometown of Guardiaregia in Fascist-controlled Italy, in 1928 as a 16-year-old. 

Settling in East Syracuse, where his family had been sponsored by a local family, the Albaneses, he worked for the New York Central Railroad. In 1933, Nunzio married Christine Albanese, herself an Italian immigrant. The couple would go on to have seven children, including Michael, Nicholas, and Anthony, each of whom would follow in their father’s footsteps. 

In 1951, a roughly 300-acre portion of the old Hamilton tract that Nunzio passed on buying a decade earlier went back on the market and he purchased it. He moved his family from Jamesville to Sweet Road and into the farmhouse built by Beard in the 1840s.

In the beginning, the Palladinos focused on dairy farming, and they ran a moderately sized and successful operation. Near the end of the 1950s, Nunzio, frustrated with several of his farm-equipment suppliers, approached the Indiana–based Oliver Corporation, looking to become a dealer. In 1961, Nunzio Palladino founded, N. Palladino & Sons Farm Equipment, a licensed Oliver Corp., dealer. The business built a massive equipment showroom. In 1965, N. Palladino & Sons were named the Oliver Corp. Dealership of the Year for the U.S. 

 In 1978, Palladino Farms was selected as the host for the Empire Farm Days, the largest agricultural show in the Northeast. The farm hosted the event for the next three years, with an average annual attendance of 100,000 people. In 1979, a massive fire destroyed the farm-equipment showroom. The Palladinos rebuilt it across from the farmhouse on Sweet Road (it now houses Holbrook Heating & Air Conditioning). The early 1980s were difficult for many family farms in the area, as consolidation forced many into foreclosure. Palladino Farms was able to weather the storm through these challenging times. Empire Farm Days returned to the farm in 1986 and 1987. In 1986, Gov. Mario Cuomo landed at the Empire Farm Days in a helicopter to sign legislation designed to help New York state agriculture and the state’s farmers. That next year, both Nunzio and his wife, Christine, passed away, having built a very successful farm and farm-equipment business. Nick, Sr., and his brothers, Michael and Anthony, continued to operate the farm. 

As the market shifted towards more demand for organic products, the farm started the process of becoming a registered organic farm, transitioning its pastureland first. The farm-equipment business, which had morphed into a parts-service business in its later years, closed for good in 2005, but the Palladinos continued to operate the beef and crop farm. 

In April 2009, Nick, Sr. passed away at the age of 70, setting in motion the course of events that brought Dan Palladino back to Pompey. Since returning to Palladino Farms full-time in 2011, Dan has kept the 300-acre farm focused on beef and crops, including corn, oats, soybeans, and wheat. The popularity of the beef cattle and the farm’s meat products led Dan to the idea of opening a restaurant, a long-time dream of his (Palladino started his college career in hotel and restaurant management). 

In 2016, he opened the Farm Store to sell a variety of products from his family’s farm and other local farms. The success of the that business, in conjunction with the new spate of New York State farm brewery legislation, made a brewery a logical next step. Finally, in 2019, Palladino Farms formally opened Heritage Hill Brewhouse, a farm-to-table style restaurant, with Colorado brewer, and high school classmate, John Farzee. Fitting the name, they built the new building on the site of the former showroom that burned down in 1979.

Heritage Hill Brewhouse prides itself on being a vertically integrated New York farm brewery. To meet that stringent requirement, at least 60 percent of the hops and 60 percent of all other ingredients in Heritage Hill’s beers and seltzers must be sourced from within New York state. In fact, a good amount of grain and hops are estate grown, and until 2020, the farm was one of the largest producers of malt barley in the state. Leaving as little to waste as possible, all the grain waste from the brewing process is recycled on the farm as feed for the cattle. 

 In 2019, its first year in existence, Heritage Hill won a bronze medal at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, Colorado. In 2021, Heritage Hill Brewhouse and head brewer, Billie Smith, won two medals (gold and silver) in the New York State Brewers’ Association Craft Beer Competition. The brewery is currently undergoing a major expansion to double its fermenting capacity, a sign of Heritage Hill’s growing success in the ultra-competitive craft beer market. In June 2021, Palladino announced that Empire State Farm Days was returning to Palladino Farms for the first time since 1987. The event, which was held Aug. 3-5, 2021, was an incredible success and drew tens of thousands of visitors the area. In November 2021, Heritage Hill and the Onondaga Historical Association partnered to build The Brewseum at Heritage Hill, a new facility dedicated to showcasing the incredible brewing history of Onondaga County. 

As the Palladino family enters its 70th year working the historic farm, the future for this diversifying and growing third-generation family business is as bright as it has ever been.       

Robert J. Searing is curator of history at the Onondaga Historical Association (OHA) (www.cnyhistory.org), located at 321 Montgomery St. in Syracuse.