Monday, September 20, 2010

Farmers Stories-Our Story?

Farmers:
            The stories we hear, and those we should…but don’t.

            In farming you live many stories, some short, and some unfolding over an entire lifetime and weaving their threads into future generations. What follows is the beginning of the stories that touched the life of one farmer and his family in one rural Wisconsin county not so long ago…

Bessy at Morning Milking    photo by LJ Pfeiffer 2010


William, and the stories we hear…

The sun was barely up when William glided through the morning chores, he walked with each step measured, not slow, but not quickly either. His pace reflected a time weathered routine designed to conserving energy for the prolonged series of tasks he had mastered in his sixty-some years of practice. Glancing out of their windows in the early morning fog, the neighbors always knew when William was in the barn because they could watch the sun reflecting off the red-brown coats of his Jersey’s as they paraded in long lines across the misty fields, moving steadily towards their morning ration of grain.
Animal and man had worked easily together. William knew each of his cows by name. Habit told him which one needed a little extra prodding, and who was moving just a little different than usual. So many hours spent together each and every day, for both the morning and the evening milking, allowed for an uncommon familiarity between them.  They had forged a routine together which was comforting to both the cows and the man. This is the story we know of farming and of farmers. It is a simple story of an old fashioned farmer who took care of the animals and the crops. Everyone had his or her role on the family farm.
            William’s role was to tend to the animals and the crops. His wife’s role was to fix the meals and tend to the household chores. And, as a result, he rarely set foot inside the local Piggly Wiggly.  But, if one could imagine William  wandering the grocery store in his same even pace, one wonders what he would think as he strolled through the aisles? Would he stop by the dairy aisle to admire the quintessential black and white Holstein dairy cow recently popular on cartons of milk? The picture is of an ice blue sky punctuated with billowy cumulus clouds providing a perfect contrast for emerald green pastures where a large red barn fades off into the horizon. This is the image that the marketers like for us to call to mind each time we approach the dairy section of our local grocery. Even better, we can take a gallon of this wholesome goodness home with us and absorb its milky white, emerald- blueness right on top of our whole-wheat corn flakes each morning.  One can imagine that this picturesque story is the one that William lived, and the one we can absorb into our busy modern lives and take with us, even if only one sip at a time.

             But when the ‘typical’ farmer milks old Bessie she may not exactly look like the Holstein on the carton (she may be a Jersey or a Brown Swiss), or have a red barn behind her, or even graze in the grassy green pasture pictured under her feet. More likely than not, if Bessy is from Wisconsin she comes from a heard of 80-100 cows, (in California she has an average of 300 herd mates). Pasture is a luxury for Bessy. She may graze there for a few months to rest between calves, but mostly she lives in a free-stall barn so she doesn’t burn up energy on walking around. Less energy means less milk, not really a desirable trait for a milk cow. So she spends most of her life on a cement slab. Cement is easy to clean with a skid loader, and free-stalls allow enough room to move from stall to parlor without wasting too much energy on walking.
            Still, Bessy has a nutritionist arranging her daily menu of starches and proteins, a veterinarian checking her ovulation cycles and reproductive health, the farmer monitoring daily pounds of milk production, and the milk hauler checking the somatic cell count of the bulk tank. Prior to milking she has each teat washed, rinsed and sterilized. After milking she can return to a bed of sand, have breakfast served in her stall bed, and lounge away the morning chewing her cud and producing more milk. Her neighbors in stalls to her left and right will usually be the same because cows form social groups and like consistency in their buddies.  Relaxed cows let down milk easier than stressed cows so it is wise to keep Bessy relaxed.

            William didn’t relax much, not many farmers do. But when he did rest he liked to read. In the winter he enjoyed going to the library to find a good book to settle in with on a snowy night while he warmed himself by the woodstove.  If William could have gone to the library recently, he would find dozens, if not hundreds of titles about farming. These stories lay out, in page after page, the tale of how farming has changed since the fifties and how ‘industrial farming’ was now crowded out the family farmer. “Big is bad, small is good.” Small often means closer to the land, friendlier farmers, and happier Bessy. Big, on the other hand, is everything you never wanted your food product affiliated with. Big is ‘factory farms’ where the cows are nothing more than replaceable cogs in the milk production machine, and the farm managers are only profit driven. (Do they even have families in our image of corporate farming?).
For William, having started feeding calves as a young boy, farming was his way of life, as natural as breathing. He farmed the way his father and grandfather had farmed, with the few exceptions that progress had allowed.  Technology had made farming easier. Machinery had grown larger, seeds were engineered, and his crops had seen ‘better living through chemistry’ allowing for less pests and fewer weeds stealing nutrients from the harvest. These changes meant that he could finish fieldwork earlier and spend more time with his family. Still, in his lifetime William had seen production go up and real income go down. Economies of scale now dictate that to stay viable farms must become larger. The library books on farming, had William cared to read them, may have been right.
When the time came, William had decided he is too old to expand, his knees too sore, his shoulders too arthritic and the debt load of expansion too great to work off in his remaining days. So, William, in consultation with his wife of forty-two years decided to retire. Many of his neighbors bought each other out and expanded. William heard at church or in his local café, the stories of his neighbors. Since William had lived the changes the library books talked about, he didn’t really care to read much about them. When he did read, it was in the morning after milking and after breakfast. Then William would allow himself a cup of coffee and a few moments to enjoy the local newspaper.
It would be here, in the morning paper, that he too often learned of farm accidents in the community. Short of crab fishing in Alaska, farming is the most dangerous occupation in America. The papers ran the stories on farm safety at the same time they would run the obituaries. In one ten-year time span, William had read about a neighbor who got his jacket caught in power-take-off of his Ford tractor and spent two years in rehabilitation just getting back use of his arm and shoulder. He read about the little boy who went to the fields to call his dad in for lunch and was accidentally caught up in the combine. One of the last stories he read was about his neighbor’s teenage son who was helping load corn and fell into the corn trailer and smothered.  Farm accidents are not rare.
Word of mouth travels faster in the country than the papers can report, so by the time William had read the papers it was mostly revisiting the story, hoping that it couldn’t be true, that it had been a mistake, and another of his neighbors really was fine. But, somehow it seemed to make it final to read it in black and white. These periodic events served to renew his respect for the machinery. He was reminded of the dangers from the stories he heard from the neighbors he talked with, and from his own ongoing close calls with the machinery and animals that inhabited his work place. These risks were known and navigated day to day, one chore at a time Maybe because the farmers know these risks, most of the time they overcome them. Although, some times they do not, not completely.  The stories of those few who do not are told in community paper.

Everywhere we look someone is telling some story about American agriculture and the farmers who make it possible. From the grocery store milk carton, to the piles of farming books at the public library and on Amazon.com, to the local papers and even in the obituaries. Each outlet gives us glimpses into the life of the Wisconsin farmer. Each allows us, for small moments to imagine the daily worlds of farmers like William. Maybe that is why we read them.
 But for those of us from rural Wisconsin who knew William, for his neighbors, his friends, or the grand children who never came to know him, there is another story. It is a story that had shaped his life and, I would like to say, hastened his death. But it did not do that.  It is a story he was never aware of. He did not read about it in the papers, or hear it from the neighbors, or learn of it in the grocery store.  And, if it were only his story I would tell it, but not here-not now. His story is bigger than William. It is a story that stretches across the dairy farms and croplands of America and into the bodies of everyone who eats food grown on a farm-and a story of their children. A story the children need to know.

            This introduction ends where the untold farming story begins. I must apologize to you who are reading this, as I know how frustrating unfinished stories can be. I read them each day; I see them on the news each night. The effects of their silence resonate in my mind late into the night, where they have stayed in darkness as I’ve struggled to make sense of their absence. I have not.

            So here, on these pages will be the story fragments that we hear in the news,
and the stories we should hear… but don’t.





Next William's Story
LJ Pfeiffer

1 comment:

  1. An authentic story that resonates with and evokes memories for those of us who lived pages in stories that begin much like William's. The rest of William's story? It could have so many directions in which it could turn.

    The only thing we know is that there will be far fewer stories to be heard from the grandchildren of those much like William - even those that had an opportunity to know 'him.'

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