Interview With Edward Holden
The farm is about the same as it always was. Well, the farm itself was started, to my knowledge, by the Colgate family, and prior to that the Conklin family. Mr. Colgate had a big mansion on the top of the hill, going up the mountain on the left hand side, which has since been torn down. He operated the farm and bought a lot of neighboring farms which we still refer to as those names, such as the Dulin Pasture, and the whole mess of them together, and when he passed away in 1946, his family sold it to the employees. At that time there was a dairy processing business as well as a farm; I just mentioned the dairy processing business on the farm. But the farm at that time was 600 acres and the sum of that has been sold off, as non-agricultural land that’s not tillable to grow crops on. So there’s about 500 acres now, plus or minus, that make up the bulk of the farm where cows were milked when I was a kid (I lived here all my life). And back into the middle forties when I was growing up, cows were milked in three different barns, and there were probably 175 cows being milked on the farm. Each barn had employees working in them, maybe 6, and that was separate from the so-called outside crew that grew the crops that fed these cows throughout the winter. The cows were largely pastured in the summer and in the winter they ate hay and corn that was grown in the summer. It was probably upwards of 20 people working and that continued along until the mid 80’s, I think, and from that point on until about 2000, the farm was rented out to a neighboring farm, the cows were sold, and management was concentrating on the dairy business. In 1990, that was sold and in ‘96 or so, we decided that we wanted to get back into the farm. At that point my family owned the dairy and bought the farm from the corporation and owned, not the dairy, owned the farm, the part you’re interested in, crops were grown and in 1999 and we built a large free stall barn with 250 cows, I guess, and we have since added on to where we are milking 300 cows and we are renting land from neighboring areas: the Hearst farm down in pleasant valley and some part of the LaBrease farm that’s over in Hoosac, and our neighbor Mr. Johnson, to the east, 15 or 20 acres, so the farm in total is, let me see, something like, about 425 tillable acres, between our own and what we rent. And like I said we milk 300 cows with about 315 milkers on the farm, and my son manages the farm for the most part, but I also try to be helpful with the books and help and grow crops in the summer and try and be generally helpful, but he’s the main operator of the farm. Like I said, I’ve been here for 62 years.
“When you milk the cows, is it still by hand or is automated…”
Oh, that’s right, you did ask that question about milking. I can take you from… I can tell you in the 20’s cows were milked pretty much by hand and then machines came into play, but I’m not really sure when they came in (John Page would know more about when it was started). My most distant recollection was milking machines that had the milker inflations that go on to each of the four tits, and milked into a pail. The pail was dumped into large cans, which were cooled in water. These large milk cans, 40 quart cans at 86 pounds (heavy and bulky), and they were transferred to the milk plant where they were pasteurized and put into bottles and sold. That happened to be here, but it could have been any place. A lot of farmers would send their milk to Eaglebridge over in Buskurck, that area, and they went on a train, these cans went on a train, from there to Boston to be processed in Boston. Some went to Albany and some went to other cities, kind of local dealers. The Hearst Farm for example, that we rent now to Hearst Dairy, in Bennington, which you probably don’t remember, but that operated out of the Hearst family name into the 60’s I guess, or early 70’s. It went from that into pipelines that cut out the cans, and the pipeline went into a milk tank, a large stainless steel refrigerated tank so the milk was collected directly by a direct expansion refrigeration tank as opposed to going into cans. Then a tank truck came and pumped it off into the tanker and the tanker took it to the plant and pumped it into larger tanks. And that effectively cut out a lot of handwork, and that was in the mid-60s, starting, and by the 70’s most all milk was purchased, or produced and stored on the farm in a refrigerated tank and them pumped into a tanker and driven to the plant. So that eliminated the cans in the late 50’s, early 60s, which eliminated a lot of labor.
And then, in the 70s, we began to see house…what you call loose housing, or free stall, where the cows went into the stalls on their own as opposed to back in the 40s and 50s, that I recall, they were stantioned, they stayed in one spot and they went out for exercise, but when they came back in they stayed in one spot and all of the milking operation came to them. And by hand in the 20s, or by these cans, that were then later changed into pipelines. The milker unit and the man went to the cow. When free stall housing was started, milking parlors were built, and they, the cows, were housed in what they call free stall, where they could walk in and out, she could walk in and out, on her own and walk to feed on her own. As opposed to having the feed brought to her, and the milking equipment to her, cutting down a lot of labor. And then she was milked in this milking parlor which held anywhere between 4, 8, or 10 cows and into a pipeline again, but a much shorter distance, as opposed to going all the way around the barn and then into a milk house where there was this tank that went from the milking parlor directly into the tank, which you’ll see when we take a look at it. It is a fairly short distance. Now to where, the herds were all kept individually, we tested cows once a month, during the Herd Improvement Association, which was a government sponsored program where a tester would come in to do an official test once a month to see how a cow is milking. Then, based on what she was milking, you could tell how much to feed her to get the optimal amount of milk. But it was always a month lag between, so the cows, they continue in their lactation, and have different kinds of needs nutritionally as well as others, what kind of feed she takes.
Then, soon after that, automatic take-offs came in to play, so instead of a person making a decision when the cow was finished milking, the machines turned off when the milk flow stopped. There were some electronics added to this part. So now what you’ll see at our place, in our milking set up, is a computer, its computerized in that each cow’s milk is weighed and the operated has a little CRT, like this, where he can punch in some numbers and find out what she milked last time. If she is down a little bit, he can punch in and see what her history has been in milking to see if she may not be feeling well and therefore take some action to treat her later on. And that information goes to a computer in the office and is compiled so that you know what each cow produced each day and based on the information, that sort of instant information, you can make a lot better decisions a lot sooner on what to feed her to get the optimum amount of milk production from the cow and make them much happier, quite frankly, because they are not fighting with their system, by not getting enough feed, to produce the milk they want to produce and their system is calling for, therefore taking some flesh off her back versus giving her the optimum amount of feed and therefore making her feel much more healthy. Gaging your activities, your decisions, on her needs as opposed to after the fact, the sort of stuff, which has worked out, like all other industries. The computer age has done wonders for the dairy industry, the same as it has done for all other industries that give more information quicker.
“Has that enabled the farms to expand and aided the growth of big business? How has that affected the small, family run farm?”
Well most of the…there really isn’t any difference in the family-run farm. It is transparent, there really isn’t any difference between the small family-run farm and the, I guess out in the west in California and Idaho there are some large corporation-type farms. In the northeast, which you know is Pennsylvania, New York, Midwest, Ohio, and New England, dairy farming is still controlled by family farms. Now in some cases, two families may have gotten together to pool their resources and formed a small corporation, instead of one family, maybe two families. But its still family controlled, so there isn’t any difference between the small family farm and the large family farm except their size. Like any other industry there are incentives for smaller farms to become larger farms with this automation, which allows them to be able to manage more cows easier with the automation that is computerization for one, like a lot of businesses. Like anything else, in order to keep your costs down, milk more animals and produce more milk, to spread the overhead over more animals. Farms are getting larger all the time, there is no question about that, and farms will continue to get larger. There is much pressure to do that because the price of milk hasn’t gone up anywhere near the rate of inflation over the last forty years. The only way to do that is to have more cows and fewer people to milk to produce the same produce at somewhere near the same price.
“What was the average day on a farm like – before and after the introduction of the parlors?”
Well, this, the 175 cows that are on this farm, 30 to 40 years ago was a large farm, where the average farms were 20, 30, 40 cows and that is all a family, you know a father, mother, couple of daughters and couple of sons could handle with a hired hand. Because most of it was hand milking, milking took, I have no idea what milking took by hand, that is beyond my comprehension. It could be only ten cows on a farm because it took them ten, twenty minutes to milk one cow. It was a lot of hand-work both in the field and in the barn, so you couldn’t grow as many crops in the same amount of time because you mowed with horses or small pieces of farm equipment. For example, when I was a kid growing up, an average farm could grow probably fifteen acres a day. Then the next day dry out and get ready to bail it, and all of that was done by hand. Take the bails and stack them in the barn, it was very labor intensive and time consuming. Because of the size of the equipment in the automation, now we could let down a hundred acres of hay, hay as an example. And, you could mow a hundred acres at once and chop it the following day and the chopper dumps it into dump trucks lose, no bails, and the dump truck delivers it to the storage area where it is dumped in large bunkers like silos and then is packed by tractors going over the top of it to just seal it so it ferments properly and doesn’t spoil, to get the air out of it in other words. And so in maybe two or three days, we would have all of our hay grounds, so called, which is a couple hundred acres mowed, chopped, and put in the silo. And that might take a month for a forty-cow farm forty years ago, or at least a couple weeks. That limited the amount of time to do other things and limited the amount of time to manage, so things are substantially different in terms of time and the volume your able to do. The equipment is much faster and has a much greater capacity. The speed and the capacity created the ability to go faster. And the need increased, and the pressure created in the industry by the lack of price increases to match the inflation. The costs are going up like this for the farmer, and your price is only going up like this, you have a bigger gap between the cost and the price and you have got to cover that somehow. So the somehow that you do it is you make an investment in a piece of equipment that cost you more money, but you spread that over more land, and you have fewer people working with the equipment because it is much more automated. Where it might take six or seven people to operate a forty-cow farm in the forties, it takes the same six or seven people to operate a three hundred cow farm in the twenty-first century. And it only takes a couple more people to manage or operate a five hundred cow farm, whereas… there was no way to be able to farm five hundred cows in the forties. It was just too labor intensive and you couldn’t get enough money for the product.
“I know that when you managed Fairdale you used to deliver milk door-to-door. Has the influx of large supermarkets influenced this at all?”
Well the same kind of pressures have happened, so to speak, to dairy processing that has happened to dairy farmers. The price of milk didn’t go up for the farmers at the same rate as inflation because the cost to consumers didn’t go up at the rate as inflation. That created pressure on the dairy processor to control and to reduce his cost per quart of milk and the only way to do that is to get larger. And the ability to get larger depended on the population you had available to you and the area you could serve. It is thought that in Bennington, for example, when I was a kid there was Sweet Dairy, Hearst Dairy, Double T Dairy, Fairdale Farms, an outfit up in Shaftsbury, Polly Meadow farms, that’s six, and there was probably a couple more; there was eight dairies. And now, there is only one milk plant, that was just in Bennington, people processing and packaging milk, and the place the size of Rutland would have ten or twelve, Burlington fifteen, now there is one milk processing plant operating in the state of Vermont. Now that doesn’t supply all of Vermont, milk into Bennington comes in from Albany, it comes from Boston, Agawam Mass., and it comes from Berre, Vermont; it is trucked. So I guess we’ve probably gone from a hundred businesses that process and distribute milk to one in Vermont in the last forty years, and it was a gradual process, it didn’t happen overnight. And the same thing has happened to farms. There are fewer farms producing the same amount of milk that there was forty years ago.
“You mentioned when you were you growing up, did you live on a farm?”
I lived here.
“Oh, you lived here? Did you always plan on working the farm here or plan on pursuing a career in farming?”
Well, I always enjoyed it, either the farm or the combination of the farm and processing business. I went to Bennington Catholic High school, which has closed, and then went on to UVM and got a Bachelor’s Degree in Agriculture and Business, and worked when I was at UVM in the UVM Dairy and the milk plant that was in Burlington at the time, then came back (I considered going someplace else) to work at Fairdale in 1967 or ’68, and have been involved in one way or another since then.
“Could you tell us about Act 250?”
Well, Act 250 is what is referred to as a land use law. Back in the 60’s, then Governor Davis noticed that a lot of Vermont’s landscape was being developed sort of willy-nilly. He and the legislature put together this act called Act 250, which was intended to manage the growth of the state in a reasoned kind of way instead of willy-nilly. You know, a shopping center here, in a cornfield, as opposed to on the flats area on 67. Act 250 was the first instrument that was being used, along with some local zoning laws, to manage what development occurred and how it occurred and for people to control their own destiny. You could use your land in a reasonable way. It did intend, and was quite successful, in preventing you for using your land in what most people see as an unreasonable way. There has been lots of controversy in that some people say that it infringes on your rights and, on one hand, and other people would say that it allowed too much growth and didn’t do enough to conserve and preserve the land, and that it resulted in a lot of widespread development that shouldn’t have happened, and that it prevented the landscape from being developed. Obviously there is more to it than that, actually, that is a great question to ask John Page. For instance, one reason that our property was dropped down from 700 to 500 was that we used 85-86 acres to get the Act 250 permit to build the village at Fillmore Pond, you know that project down there, that occurred on what was once Fairdale Farms land. That process resulted in the preservation of 85 acres, which allowed the construction of that project on about five acres, but I’m just talking off the top of my head, it looks like five acres, maybe ten acres, that encompasses the buildings and the drives and the pond. So that was the result of the Act 250 process. As time went on, more and more communities developed their own zoning, and land use planning laws that tended to be specific to Bennington and Bennington issues, whereas Act 250 tended to be a state-wide land use law that tries to look at the impact of this project on Bennington as it relates to the region, whereas Bennington town planning and zoning looks just at the local impact.