“The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.” ~~Masanobu Fukuoka
**This is long and does not follow the format of past posts. Feel free to read if you want.
“Ka-boss! Ka-boss! Ka-bossy!” still echoes in my ears as if I had yelled it just yesterday. This was the cattle call my dad taught my brother and I when we were children to call the cows down to the barn in the summer when it was milking time.
If we were lucky, the cows came running with their tails up. Otherwise, we’d have to set out on foot to round them up and drive them down to the barn off of the big hill. Granted they never came for us like they came for my dad. Bovines aren’t the most intelligent animal in the world, but they definitely knew the hand that fed them, and that wasn’t my brother or I.
My dad had the call perfected. As a kid, I wanted to be just like dad, the dream of most adolescent youths I think. But my squeaky voice was nothing like his rich baritone floating over the hills to the far edges of our property. He’d step out to the back of the barn, take his pipe from his mouth, wet his lips and let the cry come from deep down in his diaphragm. He’d wait a few seconds and then he’d do it again. Wait a few seconds, and then call a third time.
“Ka-boss! Ka-boss! Ka-boossyyy!” he’d shout, drawing out the last syllable. His words would come echoing back to him along with the faint answering bellow of a hungry cow. They had heard and they were coming with bells on.
My dad told me once that when he was a child growing up on his father’s farm, the hills echoed with this call. All the farmers in the area used it to bring their cattle home. I can only imagine what this sounded like; this tradition had gone extinct by the time I was old enough to even form the words, “Ka-boss.” When I was a kid, growing up in southern New York, our hills were the only landscape that echoed with “ka-bossy”. The neighbors probably cursed us every afternoon for the racket we made as we wandered the woods rounding the cows up on foot.
I grew up in the farm belt of New York as I like to think of it. Yes, there is more to New York than just that infamous glittering strip called New York City. Our closest two neighbors were dairy farmers and extending out around us in all directions was a lengthy network of dairy farms. When I graduated from high school several farmers had thrown in the towel. By the time I graduated college, that network had been reduced to a small number and the land sold for housing development. Every time I returned home to visit, a new house stood where it was once pasture land. However, a few farms still held on, my father and mother included.
In our barn, the cows weren’t tagged in the ear with a number for identification. We were small enough to know each animal by name. They were animals with personalities and my dad knew how to interact with each animal differently. Yes, he’d curse them from time to time for acting up but these animals were as much his kids as my brother and I were, and yeah, we received our fair share of curses too and they were well deserved. Babysitting two unruly children who did not get along, while also trying to run a family business was no easy task we gave our parents.
I have many memories of my dad standing scratching a heifer’s chin, talking nonsense to her while she chewed away at his shirt, and another slobbered away at the back pocket of his pants. They loved my father and he loved them. I didn’t really understand this until I was older. He had found something that he loved to do; that doesn’t happen for all of us.
A common question I get asked is why I or my brother didn’t take over the farm once we were old enough to do so. My parents probably wondered this too in the beginning. I can’t speak for my brother, but for myself...
It is our nature as humans to often question what our destiny is. What is our life path? Where are we supposed to go, to do? We can’t control it any more than we can control the weather. Our life takes us where it is supposed to, you fight it and you just find yourself where you’re supposed to be a few years later. This is the only answer I can give.
I grew up, ended up going to college which wasn’t something I had ever really expected to do and stumbled into the field of outdoor education by chance and fell in love with it. From there, it’s been one journey after another. My career took me out west and it wasn’t often I looked back. Perhaps that was selfish of me. New York has the Adirondacks, but once I saw the mountains of the west I knew it was out there I was supposed to be. I discovered I had a love for wilderness that ran as deep as my father’s love for the farm.
Back then, I thought maybe I was running away from my destiny. Maybe I was supposed to take over the family legacy and make my parents proud. But now, I know better. My parents raised me to be the person I am today. I give all the credit to them. I fought it for a while, but I have realized that I am a product of their creation. They may not have always agreed with the path my life has led me, but I know they are proud of what I have become and done. I am true to myself and my beliefs and I think that is something they have always wanted my brother and me to walk away with.
In some ways, I am much like my parents. Being a farmer is my father’s life and the only life he knows. Rambling around the remote backcountry with a backpack is my life and the only one I know how to function in. My mother is a strong, shy woman who in the words of Tammy Wynette, stands by her man. Growing up, a lot of kids at school thought my mom was just a stay at home mom. They had no idea that my mom ran the family farm with my dad and managed the majority of the finances. She was his partner. She worked just as hard as he did, if not harder since she had two kids to look after in addition to a barn full of demanding cattle. I thank her for her tenacity and depth of dedication, traits she has strived to pass off to my brother and me.
Roots never become fully uprooted, no matter how hard one might try to unearth and replant elsewhere. I am still a farmer’s daughter. I still feel the prick of freshly mown hay, smell the sweet fragrance of a wagon full of alfalfa square bales. I can still hear the ruckus the cows would make in the evenings when they wanted to be fed. They weren’t shy about telling you how they felt. The pungent odor of fresh cow manure and urine that comes with living on a dairy farm is still fresh in my senses. It makes some people’s noses curl, but to me, it was a welcome smell. It was the smell of home, hard work, and reality. It was and always has been a safe haven for me. I return to New York to visit and I don’t leave the farm. It’s the only place I am content to be when I am there.
Time passes and we pass with it. We age but it takes a while for that reality to catch up with us. As a child, I think we easily forget that our parents can grow “old,” and as a parent, I think we can by far forget that our children will sooner or later be mature adults. Eventually that day comes. This reality has been hitting me more and more of late.
I got off the phone the other day with my mother a bit flabbergasted. I had just told her I was considering graduate school in a year and half expected to hear some sort of complaint about it being the worst time to be considering a continued education and why couldn’t I just settle somewhere. Instead, she said that was great and went on to inform me that her and my father was thinking of selling the cows this coming fall. Hearing that was in a way like hearing she had just told me she had been diagnosed with cancer. All thoughts of graduate school vanished.
This was something I knew I, they, would have to face eventually, but that didn’t mean I had to believe it would ever happen. All good things come to an end. That is the harsh reality of life. My parents aren’t getting any younger and the economy isn’t getting any kinder. My first question was: what is Dad going to do without the cows? And then, what is mom going to do with Dad if he doesn’t have the cows? The cows are my father’s life as much as my mother is. The thought of my dad without the cows was hard to fathom. They were one and the same. The idea of it was kind of like an amputation. Would he feel phantom limb pain once they were gone.
The year of my conception was a monumental year for my parents. I can only imagine what it was like for them that year. They were young, full of vigor and the economy was in a recession. Sound familiar? They had one healthy child; a second on the way, and they were debating on going full time as dairy farmers during a time when farmers had been hit hard economically. My father’s destiny was set in stone for the next thirty some years the day they poured the concrete for the barn floor and inscribed his initials there in the aisle.
And then he up and sold the cows one day in 1980. My mom was pregnant with me and he couldn’t do it alone, so they sold out, only to turn around and buy as many of the cows as he could get back the very next day. He was back to milking full time by the time I was born in the spring of 1981. When my mom told me they were finished come this fall, this scenario came to mind. Would he do the same thing he did thirty two years ago? Turn around and buy them all back because he realized farming was his life and he couldn’t live without them?
I felt angry. Not angry at my parents, but at society for forcing small business owners out of their very livelihood. My parents have struggled for several years to make ends meet and stay in business. Every time when I thought they were done, they always seemed to make it work, thumbing their nose at the federal government while they were at it. They are one of the few small family operated farms still in business in the area I grew up in. But the fight is now taking more out of them than they are taking out of the fight.
The last time I was home to visit, my father said something I never thought I’d hear him say. “I thought I was good at farming,” he said. Those words were like a knife in the gut because my father is a talented man. He has been a dairy farmer all his life. It is what he was born and bred to be. He is a cultivator of animals and a harvester of crops. He has run a business for over thirty years that is categorized as one of the top ten most dangerous industries to work in, yet my father is one of the safest people I know.
My parents are good at farming; the world is not good at recognizing that we need small family operated dairy farms for many reasons. This might come across as a bit of a rambling piece of writing, I can’t help it; a lot has come to mind as I think of the implications of my parent’s selling the cows. So bear with me. I look at this situation from quite a few different angles. I am the daughter of the farmers soon to go out of business. I may soon see my parent’s bereft of everything they know how to do and I don’t know what to do about that. I don’t know how or if I can help them.
I am an outdoor educator in a society where the outdoors has become a scary place for today’s youth. It is my job to try to get people outside, recreate and take advantage of the therapeutic-ness of leisure. I had the privilege of growing up with nearly 200 acres as a playground at my fingertips. These 200 acres may go to housing development in the near future and that is a crushing reality. How many more acres will go to housing development and how many more children will miss out on the opportunity to grow up outside?
Can someone buy my parent’s farm to keep it running, no probably not. And that is not what I am asking.
Can someone buy local organic agriculture? Yes, easily. Can you support family operated small businesses? Yes, seek them out in your local community. Can you take the time to explain to your child where food comes from and why it is important to know where your food comes from? Yes, without a doubt. Can you take your child outside and let them know that butterflies are not something to be terrified over? Yes, please do.
I don’t really know what I’m asking. Perhaps I’m not asking anything. Maybe I’m just getting personal fears and thoughts out on paper. All I can say is that if we as a society do not make a stand we will lose something very vital for future generations. Could I drop my career and move back to New York and take over the farm for my parents?
Maybe.
Except I wouldn’t be nearly as good as my father and he’d probably send me packing because I would just make his life more difficult. Nor do I think that is the solution. Things run their course and perhaps the Haynes family farm has done just that.
But, after four months in Asia and exposure to a world that is turning into a concrete jungle, I do know this: We need farms; we need wide open spaces and clean air. We need to teach our youth that the outdoors is real and safe. We need to show them where their food comes from.
We need to go outside and shout at the top of our lungs: “Ka-bossy!” and see what answers back.