Stay on the Farm: Reflections of Three Generations; Part 1

Stay on the farm, reflections of three generations, Woodsmoke Productions. Just as I've always said, I work like hang for my farm, and that farm to me has more value than than I could ever get for it and put it in the bank. And that's why I was pretty pleased when my son came back to the farm. Now, I slipped right on this farm to suspend my home. And my grandchildren are six generations here. My father farmed and then I was one.

It stayed on the farm and liked it and came back in place. My family had been farming. I was born in Mooresville, December 30th, 1951. I was born on a small dairy farm just outside of town. I guess I always assumed I'd be there farming forever. I think that's what I always plan on. Stand by. Stay on the farm profits from Eroticize. Day by day on the Vermont family farm, small ones on hillsides, larger ones and valleys, a barn, a silo, perhaps a Sugarhouse, maybe some hands, even pigs, but mostly cows passed along generation to generation once the war, 33000. Now there are 63, 300 once they raise their own grain

potatoes for starch, apples and corn for whiskey. Once they raised mostly sheep and before that, mostly beef. Today they raise mostly milk. And today, as always, the work begins early for those who, for better or worse, stay on the farm. One of the first jobs I remember doing is driving the horses. That's all we had for, you know, doing the work on the farm with the horses. I was about probably 12 years old before we got a track guy. It was funny. Those were great days. But I remember in high school being one of a few kids who had who had farm responsibilities at home, I milked every morning before I went to school and they couldn't understand that, you know, why do you do that?

I know one of my jobs. That's what I do. By the time my brother and I reached the age of six, we were expected to start learning to milk by hand. It wasn't a matter of of my father asking, can you help with the chores tonight or can you work in the hay field tomorrow? It was the other way around. It was expected. And to us this was nothing unusual. You know, growing up on the farm, you go to work every day, including weekends. I remember working, you know, and sometimes having to work pretty hard. But, you know, you got to you got a chance to take some time off, you know, if you want to go after the chores were done in the morning, if it was a rainy day, you know, and you go fishing. Yeah. To me on a farm, you are tied down really too much. You get a job in the morning and every time you get your job done, the month you get any amount of care at all. Its phone owners have two thirds

gone and it's near dinnertime. I mean, just get out in the field and do anything and you got to go back in Virginia the time you get out after dinner and you have to get doing things. And Miles claims that George again and you can't you really can't say your time is your own. Farming is romantic. It's work and it's a business because it's just like any other job. You have to plan it. You'll have to be a business person. And it's hard work and it's quite a few other dairy family. You're working seven days a week because those cows have to be about twice a day. I get up usually around half past four and fix the fire and then I get me a lunch. I go down to the barn and start to get it clean. Is that clean out the gutters early before there's any peak load on the line? And then I go

back to the house, make all the noise, I can wake everyone else up and get some more breakfast. And then I go back to the barn and I spread the manure because it's all loaded. Sometimes I help some of the corn down farm depending on how much help is around. But at one, I don't know. I just don't accomplish what I used to do. I get up early and I try to keep going, but I just don't get traction. I get back some days. It's kind of discouraging. We know what hardships are on the farm. I was like I say, I've been at it most of my life. I can I can truthfully say five fifty years. And there's many, many problems out there that people don't realize is

there's probably not a night in the in the winter that I'm not in the barn two or three o'clock in the morning, Jack, in girls that are going to freshen sometimes that they don't have, I might have trouble. But if a girl does have trouble, you what you do is you go out in the morning and you open the barn door and there you have a dead girl when you've lost. Six or seven hundred dollars and well, the other day we had a cow, we lost a cow there, she couldn't calf, so that was a thousand dollars went down the drain. You have problems with machinery. Heying goes to pot when it's raining. Whether you'll lose the value of your hay crop, you just never know what to expect when you're going to have something happen. You sort of have to make plans for that, whether it was horses replacing oxen or tractors replacing horses. Each generation has seen changes in the operation of the Vermont farm. I started knocking when I guess I was about 10 or 12 and cleaning the barn and feeding calves and

the usual thing, but not mechanized. The work was completely different because it was all done by hand. The barn work was all done by hand, milking the cleaning hay and everything you can think of was done by hand. I really hate to handle hay. I just don't think any human should have to do that. I'm glad they have machinery now to do those jobs. You know, the hard work that we just put it in loose when I was young and just have all over here from morning till night just couldn't handle it. And things like plowing, tilling the land were real slow, real slow and real deliberate. And you worked long days to get it done or just didn't get done. We were later getting, you know, mechanized. So I've seen a more drastic change than, you know, most people my age have. You expect to see a drastic change in someone my father's age because he's gone from, you know, seeing his first car to now?

1943, we were milking around 100 cows by hand, and in the spring of 1943, the area, which is was a government co-op set up to bring electricity to rural areas, came into my neighborhood. And that was the first that we experienced anything with electricity. And up until this point, we'd always had a nice house and we'd have to get out every night to put in the old ice cooler to keep our milk. And we burnt kerosene lanterns in the barn and kerosene lights in the house. And, you know, when these when the lights came in, it was, you know, it was a tremendous improvement to the farm situation. I know my father immediately bought a milking machine and he immediately bought a electric milk cooler, which

took a lot of drudgery out of farming. The way we knew it, we had a lot of problems with the milking machine because, you know, we didn't know how to run it. It was real hard for us. But, you know, we can't get it in a year or so. And it really, really made a tremendous difference. But if electricity is the work, it also brought changes that strained the budgets in the 1960s, farmers were required to install electrically cooled bulk tanks for holding the fresh milk. Now, big trucks, often from out-of-state dairies, came to the farms and Vermont farming changed again. They made and put in bulk tanks. No more cans. So a little Fallahi couldn't buy a he couldn't pay two or three thousand dollars for a bulk tank. He didn't make enough milk to say so. I just follow in one canaday 40 quarts

but didn't pay the bills, didn't pay for the truck to stop his house. We all want to be old fashioned. We didn't like the idea of a bulk tank coming in, but in fact I guess I was the last guy in the town of Troy to buy one. I was forced at the last minute to do it or get out of it and I was wrong. The bulk tank has been a great improvement to the farm. It's been a great improvement to the quality of the milk. It's taken the all the hard work out of handling the milk. We have a dumping station now behind the cows and as we get a milking machine full of milk, it's gone. It goes immediately into the tank. It's immediately called. I do feel that we were not properly compensated for the big expense that we put in our milk houses. Most guys have anywhere from 10 to 30 thousand dollars invested in the milk house. And, you know, I don't see that we get too much of compensation for it.

But this would be my only drawback on the bulk tank. It certainly was a great improvement. This bulk tank is really good because it calls them out fast. It's called and it's the product is just continuously better. I gave up the dairy on and six to seven. Because they came along and they pushed the small farmers out, you got to have a bulk tank and you got to have milk house built under their supervision. And there was five farms on the side of the pond that are sending milk right off the pharmacy that are all whittled down to that. It is only a half a dozen farmers left in the whole town. And every year there's fewer some areas in this town and there's not a production farm.

Once the trees, you look out the window out to Pasture Hill, not a county and not a one I remember is not shipping any milk. That was the time when we started raising veal calves rather than shipping milk. It was, you know, quite an expense for a small farmer put in a ballpark in those days. So we decided to we shipped in cans as long as we could find a place to take it in cans. And then we raised veal calves and finally we started building a new barn and put up a milk tank, went that route. There are a lot of farmers went out of business in those days. Yeah, I really think canned milk was always, you know, always was up to snuff. It was if it was clean milk when I went in, it was clean when I got to the creamery. I think the bulk tank came in right when there was a revolution in farming. The the creameries were more or less felt that they'd they'd like to deal with a big guy. And it seemed that at this particular time, everything was for the big guy.

And here again, I don't agree with their philosophy because I know I know northern Vermont like it was forty five years ago. And you talk about beauty, you know, there's nothing was any more beautiful than the little farms we had in GAO and in Troy and in Westfield in law, what we which we call mountain farms. And these people would have 15, 18 cows and they kept everything mold perfect. It was you know, it was a picture that, you know, there's no way it could be drawn. And when these people were going to have to go to the bulk tank with a few girls and the big expanse, they more or less, you know, what you say, went down the road. And I think that this was a very, very bad thing for the for the state of Vermont. I think there's nothing wrong with Vermont today. And it's beautiful, but it was a lot more beautiful.

Forty five years ago, as far as the farms are concerned, we're definitely losing our farms. Just above the mountain, grass still trampled. Livestock sat on the lawn while in their homes now have to by making faces all the new things to belong to. The auction man comes round to pass them on. They did. France, the country. But one song on the wall in the sun, like my only option, my surgeon one, and I'll tell him the. OK, flip to last fall where they work so hard to buy the things said. I've stayed small and tried to keep better care, and

I used to keep him, I kept anywhere from three to 500 hands and they were a pretty good prop.. But the price of grain went up a few years ago where I couldn't break even on them. So I sold them all one out of the chicken business. We raised a few meat birds and that saw Vermont because of its location and the fact that the cost so much to get the grain in there, they can ship grain or sand, grain by boat, the cheapest of everything, and they can send it to Europe for what it costs to get it into Vermont. And that's driving the dairies out here, driving everything else out. So I. I don't feel too encouraged about Vermont as a dairy farming state. I think it's too bad that farming couldn't be a more profitable way of life.

I mean, because it's definitely it's obviously necessary to have farms because that's where the food comes from. Somehow it has to become profitable. As farming changed and the number of small farms declined, so did Vermont's rural communities. A lot of these little towns are dying. At one time, we had around eight, eight stores here in North Dreux Village. They were all doing a fantastic business. We had a bakery, we had a gristmill, and Saturday night was was your night out. Everyone would work in the fields and work in the sugar places or whatever. And Saturday night everyone went down to do your grocery shopping. There was a band concert every week. It might sound exaggerated, but 700 people, as I've seen on these streets many nights, it was it would be like being in Hartford, Connecticut, two days before Christmas. You were bumper to bumper with people and it was right here in

the little village of North Troy. Now of Saturday night, you go down the street. If you see two people, you know, it's it's big. It's it's really gone the other way. The little farmers on the back hills used to come down to Troy with their with their milk or come down and get their grain and they would buy their groceries in in the village here. And it was, you know, a really a great boom economically to the little towns. And, you know, this is this has gone down the road with the farms. The people now that have bottom bought the farms are usually out of staters or tourists that come weekends. They bring a lot of their groceries with them. It's been a very, very he's had a very, very strong impact on all of these small Vermont rural towns. I think it's been a big, big detriment years ago when they sell a farm. You know, the farmer was coming another one and he devil, you know, more or less the same outlook on things that you did.

And now with the people coming in from the city and down country, you know, they don't look at things the same way anymore. It's just changed. Probably one of the biggest factors why a lot of small farmers went out of business was the tremendous price they got for their land and their farm from city people who when Vermont suddenly became the place to live and they bought all these marginal farms and really have taken them over. But I mean, a lot of people got very high prices for their farm. And that's where the city people want to live, was on a back road and have a small farm and an old house and repair it and make it to their liking. And the only bad factor of it is, is with taxes, that the listing has kind of gotten out of hand because they think that all farmland should be listed at those prices that people were willing to give that wanted to live in Vermont.

But still, land prices are very high. And with the price of milk and expenses today, it is difficult. Go farming. I don't see how how people today, young people today can go out and buy farms. You can't. You absolutely can't. And for that matter, the thing that's really getting scary is that dairymen can't afford to sell their farms to their children anymore. That's the really scary part. How can I possibly make this this place available to my son when I can't afford to pay the taxes? You know, and that's that's going to be a real decision. A lot of our farmers are over 50 years old and they are going to have to be making some decisions soon about what they're going to do with their farm. And it's not going to be an easy decision for anybody anywhere. On how they're going to do it, I don't want to have to go back and I'm having a man having a night, everybody addressing this would go good with your horse drawn. I got nine out of you and I decided to get out of farming for a while.

And Dad was at the age of retirement anyway. So we decided to get rid of the herd and I went to doing other things while I still had some cattle, some young stock. I stopped shipping milk, but I still have some stuff I was raising. I got the hay and sell it and raise heifers and sell those. And I'll actually about it about a year and a half. Two years ago, I started farming again, running some cows and just couldn't just couldn't seem to make it. Just after about a year of it, I found a way to get out of it without wanting anybody any money. So I figured that was a good chance to get out of it again. And still, you know, hanging onto the place, it wasn't as bad as as it would have been if I'd had to sell the real estate, though, if I had to lose the place that would have I would have been the clincher. That would have been the end for me, I think, because the land is mainly what I'm concerned with hanging on, because it's been in my mother's family since 1919. You can't legislate people on the farm.

You can't legislate them to be there. And if it's not income enough for them to stay there, they can't. I mean, for instance, you can't you can't own a piece of property agriculture and say it's got to stay that way if nobody owns the farm. The Vermont family farm, a life of work and a life of change and a life that's clearly endangered. Yet despite it all, despite both tanks, rising costs, real estate development and higher taxes, despite the weather, long days and an uncertain future, both the image and the reality of the Vermont farm somehow endure. I guess I've always found that the good farmers made it and not so the farmers didn't make it and the

farmers made it to prove that you can make it. The good farmers will find a way to work around a situation no matter how bad it is, because I don't I don't think you'll see it died. Not in our lifetime, not here. I'm convinced that Vermont will remain an agricultural state. There's no question about that in my mind. A new farmer, a young farmer who's gone out and had to buy everything he's got is in debt so heavily that you just wonder, you know, where they can go from here. And I think that's that's going to be a real problem. But farms that have been in families, and that's traditionally the Vermont farm, there's going to be problems. Of course there's going to be problems. But I think they're going they're going to make it. I'm really convinced of them. And of course, as I keep preaching to everybody, my favorite line these days is, is it's not going to be so much the quantity of what you're doing is in agriculture, but it's going to be your efficiency, how well you can do it with what you've got. New England farmers have been efficient for a long time, but I think they're going to get

more efficient. They're going to have to. This farming business up in here is at a very low point right now, but it'll get better after no one else has gone out and they haven't any milk to go around and talk about bringing these people up in here from down New York, Connecticut and those places in case of an atomic attack. Well, if they have time to get here, what are you going to feed them with? The farmers are all. Stay on the farm Reflections of three Generations has featured

Jack Star, Troy, Vermont fireman, you got to like it. You've got to be fun or, you know, it's something you don't want go into because there's work there. Kate Bayti, Danville, Vermont. I spot trouble with animals real quick because I can walk in another famous barn and I can look at it and I can tell if he's got a cow. I don't have to watch that cow all the time. I can walk in and tell one. I guess you just get that cow sense and really know. Barney Crosier, Springfield, Vermont. I drove the horses a lot, would stay on the wagon and drive the horses. There's a lot of driving horses for me. When I was growing up, Wallace, Alan Hardwick, Vermont to me ran a five year tied down really too much. So that's why I never, never really liked farming that much. Walter Smith, Plainfield, Vermont. I always like to farm it died down, but if you're not going anywhere, you don't mind being tied

down. Bob Bragg, East Montpelier, Vermont. My father sold the cows and went to Hartford to work in a plant, and I lived in Hartford for one winter and that was worse than farming. Doug Bragg, East Montpelier, Vermont. I think it's too bad that farming couldn't be more profitable way of life. I mean, because it's definitely it's obviously necessary to have farms because that's where the food comes from. Claire Parker, Springfield, Vermont. Vermont is stabbed to death in two weeks. We didn't want to bring in food that had a pig left in town. This chicken extinct. Larry Miller, Hyde Park, Vermont. We never really had everything we wanted, but we had everything we needed. That's what makes the good old days. Good old days. You forget the bad times and remember the good times. Linda Stanley Swanton, Vermont. It's the only way for for a kid to grow up is is being

part of a farm family. There's just a whole different way of it's a way of life. That's what it is. That's in the blood, I'm convinced. Winston Churchill, Burlington, Vermont, the fall of 1928. I moved in here. I've lived here long enough now. So it begins to feel at home. [Woman's voice singing folk song ] Stay on the Farm was written, produced, edited and recorded by Mary Kasamatsu

and Mark Greenberg for the Center for the Arts and Public Issues. The studio engineer was Steve Zinn. The song Stay on the Farm is from the album of the same name by The Arm and Hammer String Band. Faded Prince of Country Living was written by Mark Greenberg and performed by Coco and the Lonesome Road Band. Consultants to this program were Richard Hathaway, Christina Johnston and Karen Lane, I'm Weston Cade. Stay on the farm is a WoodSmoke production, funded in part by a grant from the Vermont Council on the Humanities and Public Issues.