Greetings Friends and Neighbors, What makes a farm a Farm? How does it differ from a place where farming once took place? A place whose stone walls and barns remember a former time? Or a place where the iconic stone walls and barns give us a warm feeling when we drive by and maybe even increase our property values? Or is a Farm just any place with a few chickens and a garden? A few years back, I had the pleasure of getting to know Florence Miles, the oldest resident of the town in Vermont where I lived. Florence, nearing a century old, had milked cows for the duration of her working life. So Florence’s stories about the old days weren’t exclusively about farming, but they did all involve farming because that’s what people knew and that’s what people did. They scalded hogs in the fall, salted and smoked bacons and hams, ran the heifers out to pasture each May, mowed the roadside ditches by hand with scythes, and drilled out saplings to pipe water down to the barn from the spring up on the hill. It was actually Bill Little, the third-oldest resident of that town, who told me about the wooden water pipes. Bill lived just across the Valley from Florence. He also told me that there used to be fifteen dairies along the Main Road between his house and the lower village, just four miles down River. At the barn just before the village they used to keep a pair of Goats in the barnyard and, each milking time, they sent the Goats up the hill on the opposite side of the road. The Goats brought the Cowherd down from pasture. When the traffic flow along the Main Road is regularly impeded by crossing livestock—that is surely a time and place where farming is being undertaken. Just a few doors down from Goose Landing my friends at the North Country Creamery scrape fresh manure from the road each day after milking. And this time of year that runny manure stains the pavement a gorgeous shade of dark green. Or at least you might find it gorgeous if you spent a lot of time looking at Cow manure and gleaning from its texture, color and odor troves of information about how the Cows and the pastures are doing.
Lovely! On my dad’s farm where I grew up there was a rusted carcass of an old square hay baler.