Farming

"I want the boys to know they don’t have to go to the store if they want green beans.  You know, they can raise them right here on this property. And they can raise their own beef here.  I want them to know how to do it, because I think eventually that’s going to be lost." 

Starting the Dairy

Hilary: So you didn’t have the dairy before, but you were always raising goats?  What were you raising them for?

Anita: [story told in quiet voice] Because, well, the year my parents passed away, my dad was in the hospital and we knew he wasn’t going to last much longer.  And I wanted him home for Christmas; that was all I wanted for Christmas: my dad to get home and to enjoy Christmas and to have his family with him ‘cause I knew it was going to be the last one we had with him.  And we got to bring him home just a little bit, about the day before Christmas, and I had decorated the house up for him and everything and my husband asked me, he said what do you want for Christmas.  You know when you’re at that point in your life, that’s a stupid question, you know, but you don’t want to say that to someone.  So my dad had had goats before and when his health went to failing I was working.  And I wasn’t married to my husband that I am now.  It was just me and my son, and I was working and trying to make ends meet, so I couldn’t help dad with the cattle so he had to let the cattle go, had to let the goats go.  And I knew my dad always loved having that stuff around and so I said, [in a frustrated tone]“Give me a goat.  Just get me a goat.”  He said, “Well what kind of goat do you want?”  And I said, “They make different kinds of goats?  A goat’s a goat!”  “No, they make dairy goats, they have meat goats” you know, all these different… I said, “Get me a dairy goat.”  A miniature milker appealed to me at that point in time.  So he got me a bred Nubian Doe and by the time she had her baby, my father and my mother had passed away.  My father died January 28; my mother died February 28.  And I was pregnant with our first child.  And it was like I threw myself into those goats.  And I got into research on genetics with them and how to breed them up and got registered and I just… instead of dealing with that grief…you know, ‘cause my dad always said, you got a problem, you work through it.  Hard work, that’ll get you through it.  So I did that.  I worked hard as I could with these goats.  And then by the time I got through the grieving process, I realized I really loved them; I liked them.  And so I just kept (them) and then after I had them about three years, I started dreaming about maybe opening a dairy farm someday, ‘cause I wanted to be a stay-home mom ‘cause I had missed so much time with my oldest son ‘cause I had to work and then with Brian, my husband now, I wanted to be a stay-home mom; he wanted me to be a stay-home mom.  And so I figured, well if I can raise enough baby goats, which you’d make sacrifices, when you only have one income, you make sacrifices.  But I did it. And I stayed at home with the kids and I had supper ready for him, although he does know what H and C means on the bathroom faucets, believe me! 

H: (laughs) good!

A:  I don’t go that far (laughs)!  But I do try to take care of him and the boys.  Well he said, you know, if we get a dairy going, he said even if…because we had tried so many times, we’d looked at me going to work.  Without a college degree, all I could get was, what do they call it?  Minimum wage –

H:  yeah.

A: You know, that was it.  And, I mean, you’ve got two children and you have to pay a babysitter for two little kids and then before and after school care for a six or eight year old, by the time you take out for your gas and your lunch, you don’t have enough left each week to buy a tire if you have a flat.  We figured it up.  So he said, you know, it’s not worth it, just stay at home.  We figured if I could take the goats and turn the dairy around and make as much, at least as much as what I would make working at a department store or a grocery store, I’d be better off to stay at home and deal with the goats.  And, which right now it’s hard because we have to juggle the marketing with the t-ball practice and the wrestling and… ‘cause I will not deny my children that chance to explore theirselves.  You know, to try to do something other than their academics because if they don’t have something they enjoy in school, they’re not going to do well academically.  So that’s just something that me and the goats has worked out, we can go around the kids sports schedules.

Pressures of Small-Scale Farming

Hilary: Getting a rough frame of reference, how long have you been dairy farming? 

Anita: Brian and I’ve been married 15 years and he was a dairy farmer when I met him.  So I’ve been into it 15 years.

H: Since you grew up on a farm and now you’re farming – has your experience of farming changed at all over your lifetime? 

A: [answer immediate and emphatic] Yes, yes. When you’ve just got a family farm, it’s a lot of difference between that and a commercial farm.  You don’t have the stress of getting the production.  And you can go more at your own pace, you’re not working with deadlines and stuff like you do with, say, a dairy.  And you definitely don’t have to worry about pushing the animals for the production as you would in a dairy.  It’s a lot more relaxing; it’s a lot more enjoyable to do it.

H: And did you ever work on a commercial farm?
A: No

H: Or do you know that from seeing other people…

A:  No, It was just from seeing it and visiting and watching other people, ‘cause I knew commercial farmers, you know, that had a grain crop that had to get that out there.  You know, each year… 

H: I think that would be so hard

A:  Yeah, it would be.  And so I learned a lot from watching him on the production end of it – you know, how to go, how to do the nutrient balance so that you get the optimum production from the animal.  And it’s a lot different when you’re depending on that for you income as opposed to that to supplement your income.  To keep from having to use your income.  Say, ok, like my dad: he worked in the coal.  But he always had the cattle.  And in the fall, he would sell the calves off.  Well that money he’d just put in the bank.  You know, ‘cause he didn’t need it for anything, so it would go in the bank. Well, you know, he paid cash for his houseboat when he went to buy it.  We didn’t have to buy chickens to eat.  Because we had them in the freezer or we could go down to the hen house and kill one and cook it and eat it.  But we didn’t have to buy it.  So when you furnished yourself your own meat and then we would fish around in the lakes and freeze the fish that we caught… so there you’ve got poultry, fish, beef, pork.  What’s left to buy?  Not a whole lot but your veg – and in the summer time we grew a garden, so we canned and froze most of our vegetables.  So basically our grocery list was household needs, personal needs, and coffee, sugar.

H: So do you still provide most of your own food?

A: Yeah, yeah.  I can beans, peas, carrots.  I can meat.  My husband hunts during deer season – I can the deer meet.  So we have that.  And when my hens get too old to be productive laying, I can them.  So we have canned chicken for chicken and dumplings.  We have fully stocked ponds on our farm, so we have our own fish any time we want it.  I can my vegetables, and I freeze what I can.  And we pick berries in the summer, the blackberries and we have the, what’s called the fox grapes, the wild grapes and they’re really good and we make juice, and we make jelly and jam from that.  And we have that, and then like if we hear of a place that has pick your own strawberries, one day we’ll go pick strawberries and I’ll make strawberry jam and frozen strawberries.  So we have that, and…just… you just go do it and I guess you really don’t think of it as something extra you’re doing, it’s, well, you’re supposed to do this because you’ve always done it all your life. I mean, that’s just the way it’s done.  If you do this, you don’t have to buy it … and it’s better for you.

H: Right, exactly.  Without all the chemicals…

A: Yes.  Right now I’m out of hamburger meat, ground beef.  I will not buy it from the store.  I won’t.  I will not.  I’ll get it from the Hubbards (the family that sells meat at the Roanoke farmer’s market)  You know, people will say well that’s too expensive, it’s the same stuff.  No, it is not the same stuff.  There’s no growth hormones in her meat ‘cause she’s not giving it any.  There are no antibiotics and extra things that are… ‘cause I mean once you work on a meat farm… I mean now since the mad cow, I’m sure they’re tightening it up on regulations.  But my niece managed a meat, beef-packing farm.  And she said that they would bring them through with their feet rotted off to their knees.  Their whole leg would be plumb rotted off; they’d just be walking on stubs.  And they’d kill them, slaughter them and McDonalds and Hardy’s would buy them.  And she said if you’d ever go to the auctions and see what those buyers in those places buy, you’d never eat out again.

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H:  It seems to me that there are so many commercial farms taking over now.  Is it hard, are there pressures being on a, living on a small farm?

A: [Immediate and emphatic answer]  Yes.  Yeah.  Right now I’m not making my feed bill.  My feed bill and all my expenses that the dairy has, my husband’s paying out of his income.  ‘Cause there’s just not…you know, we can’t compete with Kraft.  You know, I can’t mass-produce cheddar cheese like they can and Colby and all this stuff.  People don’t understand, it’s really an artisan trade.  And it’s almost a lost art, cheese making.  I mean, people used to make cheese in their kitchen all the time.  And now they say well how do you make cheese?  You know, hardly anyone knows.  I don’t know all the technical stuff about it, the pH and the acid content and all this other stuff, I don’t know that.  But I know by the look, I know by the smell when it’s right.  And I think that’s a lot of what the older people did. You know, well it smells right, it’s ready.  It looks right, it’s ready.  And that’s what I want to teach my boys.

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H: Do they spend their summers just helping you out on the farm?

A: Yeah.  Yeah, they do.  Like now where they just do chores in the evening, they’ll do some mornings you know, they’ll have to help me with the morning milking and cleaning.  But in between milkings, we will do trips to the pool, we’ll go to different places and see things.  So it’s not like they’re getting out of school just to work here on the farm.  But we want them – I want the boys to know they don’t have to go to the store if they want green beans.  You know, they can raise them right here on this property. And they can raise their own beef here.  I want them to know how to do it, because I think eventually that’s going to be lost.  You know, even if people have the place and the time and the want to to do it, the skill is going to be gone.  They won’t know.  And if there’s not someone still around to tell them, they’re going to be at a loss for a long time till they figure it out.  My mother in law, she came from New York and she didn’t know beans from squash about farming.  She went to the farmer’s market with Granddaddy Hall to sell cabbages one time.  This guy walked up and asked them if they guaranteed the cabbages, which what he meant was guarantee them not to be full of worms in the center and squishy and all, you know, be solid, sound cabbages.  Well she popped up there and said, “I guarantee these to be genuine cabbages!”

H: (laughs)

A: But, you know, she had no idea what he was talking about.  He could see they were genuine cabbages!  [she points to some pigs within viewing distance] And then it’s just like those pigs over there.  You know, the boys will learn – they’re not just learning how to feed them and how to take care of them and what they need to grow on and how they need to be taken care of, but they’re learning how to shoot them, how to cut their throat, you know, how to dress them out. So even if they never use it, they’ll know it.  You know, it’ll always be there, even if they never use it.  They can be like my dad and my brother. 

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