Lesson

I wrote this a few years ago, about our neighbor, Melvin. Last December I was signed up to do a local reading and for a variety of reasons (mostly because I am a shiftless sloth of a writer), couldn’t come up with anything new. So I dusted off my Melvin story and refreshed the ending. The changes are small, and some people probably wouldn’t even notice them. But I like the new ended much better, and it’s a lesson to me in how minor edits can make a big difference to a piece of writing. Remarkably, that has escaped me until recently.

I wonder what we really lose when we lose our farms. What we’ve lost already. The talk seems to be one of money, of how the monetary value of these farms is greater than the value of their product for all the economic activity they generate. Tourists, milk truck drivers, tractor salesmen, auctioneers; all are tangential benefactors of the agricultural landscape. Vermont has even determined how much all these parts are worth: $14,000 per cow.

I don’t dispute these numbers. But to me, they ignore a deeper, intrinsic value that can’t be measured in dollars alone. Maybe it can’t even be measured at all; maybe it can only be absorbed, as if by osmosis. I absorb a little every September, when Melvin pastures his milkers in the hayfield abutting our land, and my boys, eager to prove they are growing into the young men they will become, herd them down to the barn for afternoon chores. And I absorb a little every time I pass one of the numerous farms in my hometown – the Ackermann’s, the Stecker’s, the Bothfeld’s, the Paquin’s – my eyes drawn to the cows, some bent to the grass, some loafing in the shade of a fence line maple, quiet, sentient reminders that while humanity’s connection to the land may have suffered under the delusion of our arrogance, it has not yet been severed.

There is a feeling of inevitability surrounding the future of Vermont’s dairy industry. Many of the loans that carried some farmers through the past two seasons have gone unpaid, and more credit will be hard to come by. The state’s Agency of Agriculture has predicted that as many as 200 more farms could go under by year’s end. Even if it’s half that number, it’s shaping up to be a tough year.

Melvin Churchill, buffered from the worst of the downturn by his organic status and the fact that his farm is paid off, acknowledges this reality. “Realistically, it won’t be a farm forever,” he told me, when I asked him about the future of his place. At some point, most likely by force of age or simple weariness, Melvin will move on. At some point, my boys won’t herd his cows anymore, either because my boys no longer want to, or because there are no cows to herd.

There are times when I consider the implications of this and wonder if sometime soon, the barns and pastures of my hometown will be not unlike the Petroglyphs Melvin saw in Arizona. Artifacts. History. The remains of a particular way of life and the people who lived it.

Maybe so. Probably so. But for now, I take some comfort in the fact that I can walk over the hill, across the Melvin’s pasture, amongst his big, gentle cows. For this summer, at least, my boys will spend hours at the edge of the hayfield above our house, watching Melvin mow and rake and bale. This year, and likely for a few more, I will drive the back roads of Cabot, past the town’s remaining farms. I will see people I know doing work they love for wages they cannot or can barely afford, and I will be reminded again that the value of a particular task is not always best measured by the money it will bring. When I get home, I will try to explain this to my boys.

And I will hope, more than anything, they will understand.