Way back in 2018 I wrote a story about the decline of small dairy farms in St. Lawrence County. And since this is a column not a news story I didn’t get updated numbers, but I think it’s safe to say that the trend hasn’t changed. It’s too bad, I think we’re losing something special.
It’s a fact that when I left the farm at 18 to study journalism in Buffalo, my view on the lifestyle was quite different, but man was I a lucky kid.
We had a 50-cow dairy in Lisbon, and we didn’t have tile-drained fields or the most fertile soil in the county, but we sure could grow some rocks.
Anything bigger than your fist was plucked from earth and carried, dragged or rolled to a dump trailer or loader and hauled to the brushline. Your hands would get so dry that a desert would get jealous and you’d often be covered in mud when a breeze carried the dusty field into your sweat-soaked body.
“One more knoll,” that’s what my dad often told us as he worked alongside my brothers, cousins, neighbors and I in the fields. He was right of course, but there was also one more after that one and so on.
In those days in St. Lawrence County fellow farm kids were often friends. Sometimes you’d show up at their house hoping to escape work on your own farm only to end up doing chores with them.
Picking rocks was fairly awful work, but sometimes preferable to swinging a 12-pound post maul from the back of a moving dump trailer hammering cedar posts every 10 feet or so for what certainly felt like miles. If you missed a post, the momentum carried you swiftly, but not so gently to the ground.
That of course wasn’t so bad compared to forking corn out of a silo. You could really move some corn with an 18-pronged fork and the wondrous smell of corn silage, which was somehow worse than manure when concentrated, seemed to hang on to you link cling wrap.
Easily the most fun though, was the summer. While most kids were at the beach, you’d spend the day stacking hay bales from…
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