• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“My brothers and I bought the farm from our parents. They didn’t give it to us. Instead, they sold it to us, because they wanted us to decide who really wanted badly enough to do farming to be willing to pay for the farm. Each brother and spouse own their own land and lease it to our family corporation. Most of the work of running the farm is done by us brothers, our wives, and our children; we have only a small number of non-family employees. There are very few family farm corporations like ours. One thing that lets us succeed is that we all share a common religious faith; most of us go to the same community church in Corvallis. Sure, we do have family conflicts. But we can have a good fight and still be best friends at night; our parents fought too, but they always talked about it before sundown. We have figured out which hills are worth dying on, and which are not.

“Somehow, that family spirit got passed on to my two sons. The two of them learned cooperation as children: when the youngest was still only seven years old, they began shifting 40-foot sections of aluminum sprinkler pipe, 16 sections in a line, one boy at each end of a 40-foot section. After leaving home, they became roommates, and now they are best friends and neighbors. Other families try to raise their children to maintain family ties as did our children, but the children of those other families didn’t stay together, even though they seemed to be doing the same things that our family did.

“Farm economics are tough, because the highest value to which land can be put here in the Bitterroot is for homes and development. Farmers in our area face the decision: should we continue farming, or should we sell our land for home sites and retire? There’s no legal crop that would let us compete with the house development value of our land, so we can’t afford to buy more land. Instead, what determines our survival is whether we can be as efficient as possible on the 760 acres that we already own or lease. Our costs, like the price of pickup trucks, have increased, but we still get the same money today for 100 pounds of milk as we did 20 years ago. How can we make a profit on a tighter profit margin? We have to adopt new technology, which takes capital, and we have to continue to educate ourselves on applying the technology to our circumstances. We have to be willing to abandon old ways.

“For instance, this year we spent substantial capital to build a new computerized 200-cow dairy parlor. It will have automatic manure collection, and a moving fence to push cows towards an automatic milking machine through which they’ll be moved automatically. Each cow is recognized by computer, is milked with a computer at her stall, the conductivity of her milk is measured at once to detect an infection early, each milking is weighed to track her health and nutritional needs, and the computer’s sorting criteria let us group cows together into different pens. Our farm is now serving as a model for the whole state of Montana. Other farmers are watching us to see if this will work.

“We have some doubts ourselves whether it will work, because of two risks beyond our control. But if we’re to have any hope of staying in agriculture, we had to do this modernization, or else we would have no alternative to becoming developers: here one either has to grow cows or to grow houses on one’s land. One of the two risks beyond our control is price fluctuations in the farm machinery and services that we have to buy, and in the price we get for our milk. Dairy farmers have no control over the price of milk. Our milk is perishable; once the cow is milked, we have only two days to get that milk off the ranch to market, so we have no bargaining power. We sell the milk, and buyers tell us what price it will fetch.

“The other risk beyond our control is the public’s environmental concerns, which include our treatment of animals, their wastes, and associated odor. We try to control these impacts to the best of