Response to the comments about the article in Sunday's paper.

This post was submitted to the article in Sunday's paper about our farm shutting down.  It was a nice article, I didn't cringe when I read it, and I will admit to being up early waiting for the paper to be delivered.  So maybe read the article and comments first and then read this.  Or skip the whole mess.  It's up to you!

I agree completely with several of the sentiments expressed here.  I also disagree heartily with some of the others.

First, families who have farmed for generations, especially dairy farmers, ARE the real story.  They are being wrung out by the system that has been developed in the last 50 years to provide cheap and profitable food to us.  There is an important difference between efficiency and effectiveness.  If you care enough, Google it and take some time to think about how it applies to our communities and our food supply.  Our story caught an eye because of the relationship that we had with our customers, primarily through my wife’s writing about it.  Commercial dairy farmers, with rare exception, don’t have the same relationship to their customers, hence they don’t create news other than complaints about the smell when they spread manure or when their barn burns down.  On several occasions during our interview I expressed my belief that we were not the real story, I would have preferred to retreat quietly and plan for my next move.  The real story is the few commercially viable, generational farming operations in the state and how little they are valued for their role in our culture. 

Second, our situation here is not life and death.  I made the decision to stop farming for now because I want to continue farming in the future.  Is it sad? Yes, to me and my family it is.  If I continue now I will bankrupt myself and my family and I will have to return to being a full time consumer and an educated patron of farms for the rest of my life. 

Third, I am by definition not a YUPPIE, I am neither young, urban or professional, if you want to call me names get it right.  But you’ll have to come up with a new moniker.  Maybe middle aged, rural and former professional, MARFPIE.   That trips right off the pen and tongue, doesn’t it?  But I really question professional as a descriptor of anything that I have done.  I fed people for a couple of years, food that was appreciated for its quality and freshness and, yes, it was expensive.  But, given the way our food system is right now, the laws are written to preclude many of the ways that value can be exchanged between people.  Not all of the laws are bad, they were written to prevent people from being harmed by unscrupulous individuals and bad practice.  Learn a little about the dairies that sprung up near cities and breweries in the early 1900’s and you understand why we pasteurize milk.  The challenge when I ran a non-farm business was creating rules and policies that didn’t manage to the lowest common denominator, hamstringing good workers in an effort to mitigate the impact of the less-than-good workers.  I’m afraid that’s what we have now in our food system.

Fourth, while I care deeply about the health, well being and care my animals get, and while I am by turns, annoyed and entertained by their personalities and quirks, they aren’t, nor have they ever been, my pets.  A sheep in a diaper is amusing, but given our lives with young kids, it was the best way to insure that the little guy made it.  He also taught a lot of kids and adults about sheepishness and elicited lots of fond memories from people with farming in their background.  But sentimentality is a luxury born out of abundance.  You won’t find a lot of that here. 

Fifth, our farming effort was ultimately more directed at our role in developing a vibrant, healthy community around the place that we live.  It would have been far easier to simply tend my house and enjoy my views, but we sought to share what we have.  I happen to believe that farming fills more basic roles and needs than feeding people.  Accordingly our goals were to find ways to let people participate in the farm.  Converting an old house with a couple of barns into a farm that enriches and educates people takes infrastructure and real thought and care to insure that those people are safe while they learn.  This costs money and takes time, both of which I ran out of, for now.

Fifth, $ 9.00 a gallon might seem like an outrage, but because of the way our laws are written to regulate the product, it is the going rate.  Fresh milk, from cows fed primarily grass or hay in season and supplemented with organic feed stocks is not a common product.  I happen to feel that fresh milk (aka raw milk) is a superior product and our customers agreed.  Ask farm families what they drink.  Do they go to Cumberland farms to pay $ 4.00 a gallon for something that they get paid a buck.  No, they drink it out of the bulk tank.  And they are some of the healthiest people on our planet.

Sixth, if our article stimulates people to get up at arms and support “real” farmers then it is a success. The Bachelders, the farmers with a commercial dairy on my road are “real” farmers.   They are people who glue our community together.  They work hard, are some of the nicest people I have had the opportunity to get to know, and they generously give of their time and considerable skills and talents.  It has been one of my greatest joys to walk into their barn and be able to have a conversation about farming and to watch the amusement they got from my questions.  I will never be the farmers that they are, but doing the work, in my way for my farm, gave me a perspective that I would never trade.  They are the real story and they are the people that you will miss if they give up so that you can buy inexpensive milk trucked in from some far away place.

Despite what our mass media driven culture might want us to believe, we are more than consumers to be “milked”, more than people who are counseled in crisis to go shopping.  In a crisis you take care of yourselves and you take care of your neighbors. Farming has provided me with a clear understanding of our dependence on community and each other.  As one very eloquent friend said, “we need a declaration of interdependence”.  So right, so right.    

I will mourn the loss of spending my time and life in the role of farmer.  I will find meaningful work off the farm, but mark my words, society is poorer place because this little farm stopped trying… for now.

I will be back.

P.S. If you are interested and if you want to understand a little better what we were about, read my wife’s column and her blog, Farmwifery, at www.blogsnh.com or read mine, Animal, Vegetable, “It will take a” Miracle at the same place.  I’m going to post this there as well, so just read around it.