Farming

~"We probably had thousands of hours of work to do."~

Well yeah we were living on the farm.  I loved it…it has always been fun.  I imagined when I was at Hollins or I don’t know when I always just imagined it would be wonderful to live to have enough land to have a big garden and my imagination was thoroughly vague when we went out...I loved the farm it’s a beautiful piece of property  I loved that and I loved living off of it.  I mean I am kinda one of those perverse people who likes doing oddball things.  I like that I like that image of myself you know oh yeah the farmer sort of like the young lady trained in all to do everything, for you know being a farmer so yeah I have always been like that.

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We don’t have any past relationship with farming , John and I did it because we were products of the 70’s and we wanted to be farmers and I thought that was cool.  Well you know it really did jump out right at us.  He and I have been partners in the business always it was a very wonderful thing for us.  One of the real reasons we became farmers is because we thought it was a good place to raise children.  And we really, we have always been partners and we were partners in the five years before we had children and we did everything together and worked together.  I mean that was really good for us because we both enjoyed it and we both liked being outside and we liked doing that kinda stuff. 

We liked gardening we weren’t brought up to do it but we just liked it you know.  We are ecologically oriented you know we like taking care of the land we believe in that.  We have milked cows organically, not all the time but some of the time we had a community garden just like Seven Springs.  We made cheese, we went through the process of learning how to make cheese for all our meals.  We made our own butter, we raised the children on I mean we always had all sorts of animals like pigs, chickens and rabbits etc around.  The kids grew up on the barn.

Yeah no I think that’s right…No, I am not the average farmer.  An average farmer... Well, there may have been times in the history of the country that I would have been an average farmer.  But it would have been a time when most people were on the land and therefore a certain percentage of them that were on the land were well-educated, philosophically in farming and interested in stewardship. So farming has necessarily become more an economic business and more institutionalized. 

You know business oriented, bigger, more commercial it…its run by fewer people who are businessmen and large equipment operators much more than what we historically had in farming.  For us, as you know highly educated intellectuals we chose farming consciously because we loved it…we loved the physical activity, we loved the wholeness of the occupation vocation.  And being able to raise our family in that way and sorta the realness of it.  We were willing to do at extreme financially costs… you know my husband could have been a lawyer in New York and clearly made plenty of money.  You don’t do that in farming [referring to making plenty of money] and we never thought we would.  But we thought we would live happier lives…and I think we probably have. 

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Oh well then I talked too much for you to transcribe all this.  I should be a good farmer and go “Ohhh yeah."  A good farmer…it goes way back to this notion of patronizing this gentlemen farmer who is interested in gardens and interested in landscaping interested in animals and interested in the land in a much more stewardship kind of way than an institutional farmer which is what’s mostly left today. Which is how big do I have to be to make this enterprise economically viable and economics really does drive the show when everybody lived on the land it didn’t…I mean there were other ways you could be as well as.

Well I don’t know that if my experience of farming has changed overtime, we have done different farming things.  For example one time we went into the dairy, we were in the dairy business and then we got out and we thought we had enough and that’s when we did the community garden.  Then we went back to the dairy business deciding that we could have help and I worked on and off and then we ultimately decided that we’d had enough.  In terms of the way I feel about farming we have always been very ecologically oriented you know we haven’t always been entirely organic on the farm and I don’t know that it has changed a lot.  The biggest  thing that has changed is the farming scene in this part of the world and I guess that’s really one of the reasons we are not doing it still or why you cant help. 

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But basically in the 30 years that we’ve been farming and have been watching farms, the size of the farms has grown tremendously and the difference between the value of land for other uses on the East coast and its traditional use of farming space has changed rather dramatically.  Umm… there were probably there were even at the end of World War II for example there were maybe there might have been as many as a hundred farms in Botetourt County an actual people living on doing farming and maybe 70 dairies and right now there are probably less than ten.  Uh and there are probably only three that are three or four that are really economically viable.  But they can keep going, I mean lots have gone out of business recently and the same reason its over and over again the value of the land as for development or for houses so the pressure from Roanoke to Botetourt County, which is where we live, is so gray that the relative value of the farming exercise is just ridiculous.  And as more families go out of farming then the infrastructures that you need  you know the places where you can buy the equipment the places where you can get support in any way whether its feed or you know there is one place that sells feed instead of three there is one tractor dealership all of the infrastructure is gone because they cant… its not you know…it’s a downward spiral and yeah so…

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When I was a child there were would have been 30 or 40 farmers now there are three or four farmers left so yeah there are very few farmers left on the market.  A lot of the stuff on the market is brought in shipped in.  It’s not produced locally for the same reason even the orchards around have had to you know…that land has been sold for development

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We own about 275 acres.  Well well we probably won’t move…as I said we have bought some additional land cuz we didn’t want it to built up in houses and if it were we wanted to be in charge of doing that and if we are successful we might do more of that.

What I can say is that there have been over the century, there was a great deal of time when most people were on the farm, most were functioning in subsistence situations as they continue to do in most places in the world.  It's fair to say that women weren't accorded as much status they had tremendous positions cuz' they functioned as partners on the farm, husbands and wives recognized that it would take both of them to run the farm and to feed the children and just to be farmers it would take both of them.  I think that particular partnership concept was pretty valid and it was very real and it worked pretty well.  And technologically, as we became urbanized and we became industrialized, umm men got to go on and women didn’t in fact.  The technology has made it possible to take the jobs that women were responsible for and reduce them to rather menial and/or insignificant items. 

The washing machine...washing your clothes in the brook or making your clothes or spinning the wool or milking the cow and making the cheese.  All of those things that were crucial...essential or real, whereas putting your clothes in the washing machine and going to the Wal-Mart to get your blue jeans...I mean these are...and I think this in big picture terms that’s one of the things that happened to women, it was very painful and denigrating....it reduced them to not much.

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So for me...John and I were able to reclaim being partner’s cuz’ we were both on the farm together and raise our children in that context and umm I had the luxurious position cuz’ it was... John's ego was perfectly capable of dealing with it...you know I was allowed to and taught...he taught me to drive the tractor to use the infamous and I liked doing that stuff, so you know, and doing physical labor.  There were lots of farmers that would great cackles out of things like...I preferred to pick the hay bells, to pick them off from the machine and stack them on the wagons rather that drive the big old tractor.  So John would let me...even though people could see he was the man driving the tractor, and a woman doing the heavy lifting.  It was a great joke in the community, cuz’ we were changing roles...  They thought we were very peculiar.  Yeah they thought we were crazy.  You know cuz’ they knew we didn't have to do this, they knew we were doing it cuz’ we wanted to, and they knew there was no money in it.  We did it cuz we thought it was fun. We obviously had to make enough money to buy the farm but…we…you know…We didn’t care whether they thought we were crazy or not. 

Oh, they used to…they stopped us and teased John or me.  I did all the sort of artificial insemination in the dairy.  I did all the…you know…and that was great fun for me cuz' I got…I would go into south Roanoke to visit my mother and there was this old world society there.   They’d ask what I was doing…and I would be like well I calved a couple of cows this morning.  I said yeah, you stick your hand up a cow’s ass… It was great, the shock value I could feel it…all these ladies at the bridge table…but they loved it.  So that was one side, on the other side the farming community recognized that I could and would do the same work as my husband you know.   And their wives didn’t do that, you know they either went off to teach school, or you know or…usually they had jobs in town so they could support their husband’s habit of farming.  That’s the way it worked. 

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Well, I mean obviously he did more of farming then I but then I was able to do it because there it was…I mean it fit with my role as a mother too.  I was working in the school my children were in.   And before I had children, I was working in the school I wanted to have for my children.

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Hmm…well I don’t know if my work experiences would differ if I were a man.  You know I hope I would have been as good about willing to teach my wife as my husband was.  But umm yeah…I mean I didn’t suffer I have been lucky in the fact that I have been accorded position in all my work, where people let me do what I wanted to do, which was…you know…whatever it took to get the job done.  Non-gendered.

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Well, I certainly know other farming wives.  But I didn’t know…Umm I know very few [referring to knowing other farming wives] that had the same position I did. Or none in this area.

Well you do need money to be in farming.  Its very interesting because you don’t have to have money, you have to have access to money…you know to be a farmer.  No matter what variety you might want to be because in fact the cost of the infrastructure, the land, the machinery, etc. are so high compared to the margin across the board.  But it’s not terribly different on a big scale, then being a big machinery operator but it has to be run according that kind of business model.

 I am you know we did come from a different position.  We in fact did by virtue of our farming activity, buy that land that John’s family owned and helped his mother in the process.  But umm we probably wouldn’t have been able to go out you know…if we just decided we wanted to go be farmers in Iowa.  I don’t know whether we could have gotten the land to do it.

We had a herdsman for awhile but we couldn’t justify that.  We didn’t have enough land to make dairy big enough nor did we think that was good for the land and in order to be able to afford to have hired help that was too much work for us.  We…John has two people that work with him now but its in development and construction.   In the dairy farm we never had more than one person at a time or mostly we didn’t have anyone.  Yeah we milked about 50 cows.  John, myself and the children as they got older.  Well, we have machines and all of that. John built the dairy barn himself…pretty modern its very nice?   Well its this sort of can-do attitude that I have.  I am this... is what we wanna do you know and  I am certainly smart enough to know how to do it.

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Oh absolutely my approach to farming is not by necessity but idealistic.  Some cross between idealism and romanticism, I think. We would have done something else before we starved.  And we both…you know the privilege…when you said “Do you consider yourself privileged?”  The privilege is that both of us were educated.  Both of us came from situations where we had lots of options and never did we think that we didn’t have those options. No by choice, by a conscious choice.  I think that’s it.

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 When we were first farming umm there were still some…I think I told you this some last time…there were still a fair number…((pauses)) of dairy and beef cattle farms in the immediate county area.  Uhh and that has faded systematically over the time, over the last 30 years because…for all sorts of reasons if you get over this sort of...once you got over this gas scare then the suburbs went back on the high...you know the hike...hot area place to go and Botetourt County was...[muffled tape] has grown ever since.  Farm land that could be farmed becomes much more valuable to be developed.  And the profit margins in farming are so bad that there was plenty of reason for people that weren’t people committed to the land or to farming but were really happy to...you know have money and go do something else, would sell their land.

We have more or less given up on farming at this point you know...we just haven't given up on the land.  And we have the luxury of not having it... No, he might quit and write or go sail or something...  But not back to law.

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We have supported a lot of alternative agricultural things like this great organization called Ecology Action out in California, that you know has their internships all over and is based on how you can produce more sustainable foods on less land.  How to grow more vegetables in a little teeny space?  I think there are lots of things that we could do or that the world could do but I see no evidence in 2004 that’s really how farming per say is going but it may happen though.

Umm…the most frustrating part of farming is that the market doesn’t reflect the activity.  For example, in beef cattle farming this is what certainly is my most frustrating thing, which is why we did go in to the dairy.  Beef cattle farming you can spend all year raising these calves that go to market, and they go to market one day, most usually…you know…two days.  And that one day absolutely determines your year’s profit.  Yeah, and so there are three or four buyers I mean it’s a small area, small market there might be three or four buyers and one of them is sick the price drops off.  You know and you have no control. 

Well its you know its like growing things is a very satisfying enterprise its one of those things that is very interesting about farmers.  Sometimes farmers, I mean on many levels think its true that farmers are much more invested or many farmers are much more invested in producing then they are in what it means to run a business and get it to market effectively.  Their aptitude is actually in growing it and oddly enough therefore this sort of real farmer is not usually the person running these fancy big enterprises.  They are really very corporate and they are not necessarily financiers…  you know that is one of the things that is happening in the first world that is yet to happen in developing countries, think of the percentages of people in developing countries that are living on the land.

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There are very few children today who don’t know much about where their food comes from.  And that’s just a huge loss…like milk comes from the carton.  We give tours to little kids and we actually had them say that they are overwhelmed with the notion that their milk didn’t come from the carton.

We had college kids one of the college kids when he first came he knew nothing about he didn’t know what corn looked like. He really had never seen it you know its unbelievable but…umm…we had these really cute interns for a couple of years but about the third or fourth year that we had this garden Lucas my son who is now 21 was about…I don’t know…8 [referring to Lucas’ age then] said “I don’t want to pick any more green beans” and John and I had always vowed that what was important for us is that the kids recognize that we did this cuz we wanted to and it was a conscious choice and we like it.  And we didn’t it to be so grinding for them that they would hate it and so we realized that we were verging off on to the child labor world. Laughs.

We had a community garden in other words we just like Seven Springs, we sold shares and people could work on the farm…  We haven’t done that in recent years basically what we learnt about that…umm…was we really wanted to do it because we wanted people to join us and come do the work.  since people really didn’t want to come work too we didn’t do it just for the money. And…umm…we found that people would really rather pay more and have us do all the work and we actually had summer interns for a couple of years. 

No we didn't take anything up to Farmer's Market to sell  when we did a lot of organic gardening I mean we just did vegetable production for a couple of years.  We did sell the lettuces to like the Wildflower and things like that but I don’t have the patience to sell stuff.

Our milk was  for a long time…absolutely of course…the one we sold to a co-op that actually …it that milk umm the dairy men incorporated milk was processed in plants that then filled the jugs for Kroger’s and Richfood and you know those stores.  Well you might have been drinking Thornton milk.   We always drank our own we drank it unpasteurized we knew how we made it my children grew up on it you know my children grew up on fresh raspberries and cream they liked that.

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