Evening Milking: Visions of Life on the Family Farm

A farm kid comes of age by an alternate route than does the average kid. I remember classroom discussions about home chores, how urban kids described their chores: take out the garbage, mow the lawn, sweep the garage, vacuum the rug. Some even had a paper route, summer and winter. The average farm kid feels estranged at this discussion of all those chores.

Our farm, circa 1960, was 45 milking Holsteins, 20 young stock, typical for the time. We raised 70 acres of potatoes shipped out in 100-pound sacks; 600 bags a day was routine. The grading line was fashioned of wood, the washer fed by a garden hose, elements interstate commerce and Good Agricultural Practice would now frown on. As for the motive force, that was what farm kids were for, the motors of agriculture.

I was 10 when I took over evening milking, that was fifth grade with Mrs. Ross, her son John was my Boy Scout troop leader. I took over evening milking inadvertently when our dad arrived home late one night so I started the milking myself. Apparently I knew how. He was surprised to see the milking under way. “You OK?” he asked. I replied I was, which he acknowledged by doing my chores while I finished the milking. Soon evening milking became my chore, about 90 minutes for 45 cows using three Surge milkers. Start at 4:30 pm, toss the last filter to the cats by 6:30 pm, wink out the lights, remember the haymow light, walk the 50 yards to the house for supper.

Even as a kid I noticed the singular gratification of this moment; that walk to the farmhouse after evening milking. A specific pleasure was that hour, the sense of the day’s completion as the night sky rose. The farmstead was going dark, from behind the silo the doves were cooing, there was the hiss of the bulk tank compressor. From the barn, the low hush as is the singular contentment of cows. This moment, when any decent country kind of dirtball feels reverential. The house glowed like a paradise with the lights of the supper windows steamed over with preparation. In the spell of this moment was a sense of satisfaction, the day’s chores complete, around was the ampleness of that farm, the house was warm, the tractors away in their sheds, the doors closed against the dark; it seemed as if we lived in a tidy little kingdom.

Divinity, I believe, enters our lives from oblique directions, nothing orthodox but rather the mundane elements of life, that work and function, get their job done. Elements we only occasionally notice are temporal acts of holiness; that evening sky, a most casual divinity, unscripted, unpulpited, no brand-name. Between the house and the barn, the night sky closing, great Jupiter was balanced on the weathercock of the barn, Orion clambering over the fence at the moraine. The neighbor’s young stock bawling for their supper (seems he was late).

A thing exists as might be called the farmer’s hour, when chores are done; the milking, the field planted, the potatoes dug, the shed doors closed. A moment that has propelled and enlivened farmers to their moral core for thousands of years. The collective emotion of work well done, supper waiting, the participant a few yards short of the front porch.

CAFO is another kind of agriculture. Some say this is just the way it is and has to be, how food and fiber will be produced for a nation of 400 million where only 0.3 percent are farmers, in a world rapidly tilting from seven billion going on nine. A number I find daunting. When I came on scene, it was 1.5 billion. Maybe it’s just my farm kid roots, maybe just pickle patch morals, but there is such a thing as weedy growth.

A CAFO is far more efficient than a 45-cow herd, besides the chance to kick out kilowatts from that methane generator. Then I remember my hometown once had its own milk plant, made its own ice cream, butter, cottage cheese, food items that now must travel hundreds of miles to get back home. Efficiency can be spelled in different ways.

A recent editorial in Science magazine makes a claim for family farms, suggesting a clear distinction between the nutritional value of mass-produced, monoculture, big-farm grains than from food generated by family farms. I do not believe this assertion. Chemistry doesn’t play favorites. Food crops grown in soil under photosynthesis generate consistent values for vitamins that end up in the food, at least until they are processed. As a potato farmer, I am fully aware the standard practice of eating potatoes is the precise reverse of good nutrition. Potatoes are peeled to make French fries, hash browns, the peeling thrown away. Better for nutrition if we kept the peel and throw away the rest of the potato.

Still, that Science editorial is on track because processing is at the core of our food supply, including bigger, more distant farms. The most nutritional benefit of food is gained by its proximity to the source, as every gardener knows. That tomato from the vine is different from the one we pour out of the catsup bottle. There isn’t anything wrong with catsup, but it isn’t whole fruit and can’t be. Processing is not the bad word – processing was once what saved us; Ball, Kerr and Atlas singlehandedly improved off-season nutrition for millions, as did the tin can and jam jar.

What is at stake with the family farm and the CAFO is another kind of nutrition – a moral nutrition and a life dimension. One where food is proximate, uses less energy, has less waste, gains more trust, creates jobs, call it local if you want. Intrinsically all food is good. The Big Mac is perfectly healthy if you are a lumberjack and deserve to eat like that. Modern nutrition is complicated by the reality that most of us have to work out to work. We don’t even roll up the car windows any more, don’t split wood. Meal preparation used to be a physical task, now it’s heat and serve.

The issue of food, of CAFOs, is that constant pattern of removing energy from our lives and transferring it to the carbon atom. CAFOs are all about efficiency – efficiency that is relentlessly bleeding purposefulness out of our lives. CAFOs make it possible to do it with fewer farmers when what the world needs is more farmers, more real work.

Agriculture is in the midst of this cultural transition. In the end there will always be food and fiber. It won’t necessarily originate on a family farm. It bothers me that the significant demand for immigration reform comes from modern agriculture, an agriculture designed for “foreign workers.” A work force not of neighbors and not of local kids. I was 10 when I began to milk cows; evening milking was my chore, two hours every night after school. Despite I was a pretty good hay-wagon athlete, I didn’t go out for sports; instead I milked 45 cows every night. Dad did the morning milking. I wasn’t the only kid in the township to do this, most of my friends milked cows. When Stevens Point had its own dairy, a good share of that product was produced by grade school and high school kids. When media clamors about child labor, they don’t understand the truth of this circumstance. Kids can do real work, something besides watch television and twiddle with iPads.

The family farm is the subject of a worldwide debate. That identity has everything to do with nutrition, with the humane treatment of animals, with the carbon cycle, local food, the connected community. The family farm is not where agriculture is going. To gain a new perspective and direction will require the other end of agriculture – the consumer, the co-op, the processor, the regulator – to care about community.