Page Viii Excerpt
Featuring "Cows & Farm"
This powerful image, linking heroic virtue with the renunciation of tyranny, is one of the central icons of our nation’s founding. I think there is a basic modesty that comes naturally to the farmer, a recognition of the essential order of things. You can’t make a plant grow any faster by issuing a court order or passing a legal statute. Cows behave like cows, and pigs behave like pigs. Abstract theories don’t last long unless they accord with practical realities. Farmers have enough to keep them busy without minding other people’s affairs, and have too much sense in any case to want to order other people around. It is no wonder that Thomas Jefferson considered an agrarian economy to be the font of liberty and the reservoir of public virtue.
As the heirs of this noble tradition face the
uncertainties of the twenty-first century, new challenges
bring new opportunities. In Washington County and
the nearby parts of upstate New York, much of the
agricultural activity used to focus on dairy farming. But
with competition from industrial agricultural methods
and supply outpacing demand, milk prices have
dropped, and formerly prosperous farms have fallen on
hard times. Elizabeth remembers that in 1956, when she
was little, she went with her grandfather, Guy Barber, to
a milk-processing plant, where he gave a speech to the
other dairymen assembled there and persuaded them to
dump their milk rather than accept the prevailing price.
Guy emptied his milk cans, and the other farmers did
the same. After that, her grandfather told her, “It’s all
over for the small dairy farmer.” He sold his herd, and
today what was once the calf pasture is a forest. Yet others have stayed on. Our friend Glen Townsend
and his wife, Jessica, own and operate a small dairy
farm with a herd of forty cows. Jessica, whose family
has milked cows since the eighteenth century, says this
kind of farming is in her blood and that she feels an
attachment to the life of the dairy farmer. “We have a
small herd, and I know every cow by name,” she said. “They are like members of the family.”
Glen loves the cows too, but he is more practical in
his approach. “At this point, every day I’m doing this,
I’m losing money,” he said. “It costs at least eighteen
dollars per hundred weight to produce the milk, and it’s
selling at twelve dollars. Dairy farmers are borrowing
money to stay in business. In this economy, you can’t
make it up on volume. The big operations are borrowing
more, but they have the greater potential for profit when
things turn around.”
This arrangement sounds suspiciously like that of a
highly-leveraged commodities speculator, but with the
added benefits of fifteen-hour workdays and manure on
your boots.
Teri Ptacek, the executive director of the Agricultural
Stewardship Association, is quoted in the Glens Falls
Post-Star as saying, “If prices remain like this, we’re
not going to have dairy farms.” The association helps
farmers sell the development rights on their property to
the state of New York, so that the land remains dedicated
to agriculture. But even if a dairyman receives a cash
payment, he is still in the position of the farmer in the
old joke, who, when asked by a reporter what he’s going
to do with the million dollars he won in the lottery,
replies, “I guess I’ll just go on farming ’til the money
runs out.”
Yet even in this atmosphere of anguish and
uncertainty, there are many rays of hope. And one thing
is certain: the indomitable spirit of the Yankee farmer
will prevail.
"Cows & Barn"
Cows seem to huddle in groups, probably as protection from predatory animals. These animals are owned by my good friends Glen and Jessica Townsend in Argyle, New York. They are surrounded by rolling pastures and beautiful vistas that look out toward the Adirondack mountains.