The Davis family: 'Good cow people'

A series by David Goodman

In this first installment of a three-part series on farming in Waterbury, local writer David Goodman takes a look at the Davis family and its commitment to dairy farming as a way of life. As one of only three remaining farm families in town, the Davises know the value of hard work and strong financial management.

It is 8 a.m., and Mark Davis is where he has been at this hour for all of his adult life — in the cow barn. I find the 47-year-old dairy farmer wedged between two hulking Holsteins. He plunks his stocky frame on a small wooden milking stool and attaches vacuum pumps to the udders of each cow. One cow repeatedly switches its tail, whipping him in the face. With each pulse of a clattering pump, the burly man in the grimy red t-shirt, stained jeans and muck boots continues a tradition that generations of Davises have done before him: extracting milk from a cow.

For more than 70 years, the Davis family has tended to its dairy cows on “the flats,” as Mark refers to the area around his old farmhouse at the junction of Kneeland Flats and Perry Hill roads. Twice a day, local residents are drawn into the rhythms of farm life when they are forced to a stop by the cows, which make a leisurely trip to pasture in the sprawling green meadows on the south side of the road. Cars must idle as Mark pulls a rope across Kneeland Flats Road to allow his animals safe passage.

Mark Davis plies a vanishing trade. A half-century ago, Waterbury Center was almost entirely farmland. Roger Grenier, whose family farmed along Guptil Road for several generations, tells me that there were once up to 70 farms in the hills around Waterbury. Today, Mark Davis is one of the last three dairy farmers still operating in Waterbury and Duxbury.

Inside the barn, tree trunks serve as posts that hold up the hand-hewn beams. The floor, posts, and, well, everything are stained brown with manure and mud. The building is permeated with the pungent smell of fresh manure. When I call Davis to arrange a time to come over, he explains that his schedule is pretty simple: “come find me in the cow barn.” As I drive over, my car radio is chattering hysterically about the crashing stock market. I casually mention the news to Mark. He is hustling around the barn, moving his milk pumps from one cow to the next.

“Well, those Wall Street people can take a lesson from me,” he replies, never breaking stride. “I been knocked down and gotten up so many times I’ve lost count. We’ve never had the good fortune to get out of the habit of being frugal.”

Life on the farm

The routines of the Davis family — Mark, his wife Maureen, and their teenage kids Alexander, Clayton, and Charlotte — are dictated by the needs of their 60 cows. The cows must be milked every 12 hours. Mark is up at 5:30 a.m. and works in the barn before the first milking at 8 a.m. Each milking takes about two hours, “sometimes more, sometimes less.” In the summer, the family can often be seen out in the fields haying until after sunset. The 11,000 square hay bales that they store on the upper level of their barn sustain the animals through the winter, when the animals stay in the large red barn. Davis relies on the generosity of his neighbors, who grant him access to 190 acres of grazing land. Urban sprawl always looms as a threat. “We could be shut down overnight if we lost all our grazing land,” Mark says.

As I follow Mark around the barn — sitting down to talk is out of the question — I am struck by the nonstop intensity of his work. His strong leathery hands are in perpetual motion as he simultaneously milks, shovels manure, tinkers with his milking equipment, tosses sawdust down for bedding, and feeds the cows. His wife, three kids, and five dozen animals depend on him being able to maintain this pace 16 hours a day, seven days a week. What happens, I ask, when he gets sick?

He shrugs. “I just keep draggin’ around, and the kids help. One time, I had a fever and was hallucinating. I don’t remember it. My wife told me I went in the house and was babbling.” The kids finished the milking that night. For two decades, he has had a chronic case of farmer’s lung disease — a hypersensitivity to mold found in hay — and must wear a respirator when working in the barn in winter.

There’s not much down time in the Davis home. Mark and Maureen take off one night each year to go to the Champlain Valley Fair. They arrange for a friend or the kids to do the milking that evening. He and Maureen both remember the last vacation they took: it was in 2003, when they went to Disneyworld for 17 days. “We planned for about a year how to make that work,” recalls Mark. In the months before they left on vacation, Davis sold off part of his herd and bred cows in order to minimize the number that were lactating while the family was away.

Many local kids have worked at the Davis farm over the years. Clayton brings home schoolmates to help with haying. “It’s probably the hardest work they’ve ever done,” says Mark. “We’ve helped raise a lotta kids. We give em a good work ethic here, and hope they take that with ‘em.”

Dairy farming in Vermont has been in steady decline. In 1947, there were about 11,000 dairy farms in the state. Today, there are 1,100 dairy farms left — a 90 percent drop. The 1960s saw the biggest declines in dairy farming, largely as a result of the introduction of bulk tanks — refrigerated containers that hold 1,000 gallons or more of milk. Prior to bulk tanks, farmers would drive cans of milk to a local creamery every day; the Waterbury creamery was located near the railroad station. In the sixties, large dairies such as Cabot Creamery announced that it would no longer deal with milk cans and would only buy from farmers who used bulk tanks. Many small dairy farmers could not afford to change their operations. What followed was a seismic shift in Vermont’s culture and economy: From 1959 to 1969, more than half of Vermont’s dairy farms went out of business. And the attrition continues: since 1991, the number of dairy farms in Washington County has fallen by over half, from about 90 farms to just 41 today.

Despite the dramatic reductions in farms, the amount of milk produced in Vermont has almost doubled in the last 60 years. As a result of improved breeding, food, and animal care, farmers now get three times as much milk from a cow as they did in the 1940s. Milk from the Davis farm, the largest of Waterbury’s three farm operations, typically ends up as Borden cheese and Booth Brothers milk.

Mark Davis grew up helping his father, Maurice, around the farm, then began farming full-time right after graduating Harwood Union High School in the late 1970s. “The last thing I wanted to do was farm,” he confesses, but explains that his dad needed help and he just fell into it. He doesn’t wax poetic about his work. “The hours are long, the pay is miserable and the stress is outta this world.”

I ask him what is most stressful. “Just keeping everything going every day. Fightin’ the weather, keeping the cows healthy, keeping machinery operating. Half the time I turn something on, it breaks. We do everything ourselves, from fixing to building. A lot of what I do doesn’t pay for itself.”

Farming has changed over the years. “Physically, farming has probably gotten easier. Financially, it’s gotten a lot more difficult,” he says. The reason has to do with the changing price of milk. Today, Vermont farmers get paid an average of $1.61 per gallon of milk. But in 2006, farmers were aghast when their milk prices plunged to $1.11 per gallon, ostensibly due to a national oversupply of milk. Davis was spending more than he was earning. “We were down to nothing,” he recalls. He lost $15,000 in one winter before prices stabilized. In the last year, he has been able to make a modest profit. But farmers live with the knowledge that disaster may lurk around the next bend. When times are lean, the Davises heed a Depression-era lesson passed down to them from Mark’s grandfather, “Make do with what you have, or do without. What you have, you use it up and wear it out.”

Mark Davis muses on how the world has changed around his family. “We just don’t fit any more. It used to be that society revolved around farming. Socially, we had get-togethers at the grange. But society doesn’t revolve around us anymore.” He notes that his kids “have other things going — whether it’s a school play, sports, I never seen it. Their mother goes, but I have to be here keeping up with the farm.”

A farm family

The smell of cooking fills Maureen Davis’s warm kitchen. She is cooking and bottling salsa with tomatoes from her garden when I arrive after dinner. The 47-year-old woman with close cropped blonde hair is dressed in jeans, a turtleneck, and a flannel shirt. Home and work attire are the same; on a farm, the two worlds are one. Maureen and Mark have been married 19 years. She stays out of the barn, instead focusing her energies on keeping her busy house running.

“Life on a farm is a lot tougher than anyone would realize,” she explains across her large wooden table. Being one of the last farm families, she occasionally finds herself trying to enlighten people. “I might be in the grocery store and hear people complaining about the prices of dairy products. I say to them nicely, ‘You may not have a clue what process this has needed to go through before this got to the shelf.’”

Maureen is proud of her family and husband, but she worries what it means for her three children to be farm kids. “I wonder, do our kids fit in? I saw written in my son’s yearbook, ‘Hey farm boy.’ Charlotte feels it’s not cool to be from a farm,” she says. Her oldest son, Alexander, 18, has just enrolled at Castleton State College, where he is a psychology major.

Mark tells me flatly, “I don’t see the operation we have being sustainable for another generation.” Maureen hedges. “We both agreed early on that we want our kids to do what makes them happy,” she tells me as she stirs a cup of tea. Her salsa bubbles softly on the stove in the background. “There’s a little hope that maybe possibly they would take a break [from farming], then come back to it. But I don’t have high expectations about it, and I won’t feel disappointed if they make other choices.”

While many people worry about the current economic turmoil, life on the land has prepared the Davis family for whatever lies ahead. “We know that we could survive easier than someone on Wall Street. There’s no doubt about it. We have our resources. Mark is very proud of what he does. He likes the challenge. He knows that he can make it.”

Maureen continues, “I am proud of how hard we work, what we do, and what we get out of it. One thing we get out of it is a nice close-knit family. It’s how we raised them.” She pauses for a moment, then smiles, “Simplicity is good.”

Clayton Davis, 16, takes a break from his homework to talk. From afar, the soft-spoken young man with short blond hair and sinewy arms seems like most teens: he plays on the school baseball team, and is a passionate snowboarder. But unlike others, Clayton plays a vital role in helping his dad keep the farm running. Some nights he is up past midnight milking the cows. “Kids say, ‘Oh come on out for the weekend. You can take the night off.’ But I say I can’t. It’s my obligation. They just don’t know. They don’t have to worry about it.”

I ask Clayton if he would want to take over the farm from his dad, just like his father did. He’s torn. He likes the hard work, he tells me. “I wouldn’t wanna see it go. But I wouldn’t wanna take on a farm,” he concedes. “It’s just such a gamble: sometimes you lose money, sometimes you make money. I think there is so much other stuff I could be doing. I just want a regular job where I wouldn’t have to worry about milk prices and what money you make.”

I ask him what his dream job would be. “Snowboarding,” he says quickly. A smile flashes across his angular face. He already teaches snowboarding at Stowe Mountain Resort in the winter. He’d love to make a career of it.

It’s 9 p.m. I wander out into the cow barn to find Charlotte, 14. She and Clayton alternate nights helping milk, and tonight is Charlotte’s turn to be in the barn with her dad. Charlotte has resisted milking … until now. “I got a new horse,” says the cheery young woman with long blonde hair pulled back in a pony tail, “and the deal was that I would milk. I’m training the horse myself,” she says, flashing a smile. “I think that’s pretty cool.”

I follow Charlotte around as she confidently works beneath the animals, moving pumps around like an old pro. Her grandfather Maurice told me with pride, “She can throw bales of hay like the boys. But don’t arm wrestle her — she’ll whoop ya!” The bubbly teen dismisses the talk. She enjoys playing on the Harwood softball team. And she says she prefers to shop for clothes and hang out with her friends than work in the barn.

“When I was in first grade, I thought it was cool to be a farmer,” she tells me as we are wedged between cows. Hungry calves pull and chew on my shirt as we talk. “But by fourth grade, it bugged me that people would say I live on a farm, or that I smell — even though I take a shower! Now,” she reflects, “I think people respect me. They say I’m a farm girl, and I’m all strong and fit.”

Charlotte has had to reconcile herself to the fact that her life is different than most kids her age. “Sometimes it bothers me that my friends go to the movies and I have to work. I don’t think my friends get what I’m doing. They wouldn’t understand how much work it is.”

She picks up her pump, moves herself over to the next cow, and looks up from her milking perch. Her tone suddenly changes. “There are only three farms in Waterbury,” she says proudly. “It’s cool to be on one and say that I had that experience.”

Over on the other side of the barn, I find Mark right where I found him a few days earlier, working hard as always. His baseball cap is pulled tightly over his short brown hair, and he’s hunched over a cow. A Red Sox game is blaring over the radio — “they’re gettin’ spanked,” he updates me.

I ask Mark about the future of the farm, and of his family. “I foresee me staying at it the rest of my life. But I don’t see the farm going another generation.” I ask how he feels about that. “Sad. But as a parent, I’m happy for them. They will probably have a better, easier, happier, more financially secure life doing anything but this.”

He’s told me a lot about what’s hard in farming. I ask him what he loves about it. He stands and mops his brow, and pauses to consider it. “I like seeing calves born, and seeing how they grow up and what kinds of cows they become. I like animals, I guess. I like nature, and I like watching grass grow, putting hay up, and growing nice cows here and there.”

He makes it sound simple. But Mark Davis has done something that only two other Waterbury farmers have managed to do: he’s survived. How? “Hard work and good financial management,” he replies. “We’re just good cow people, I guess.”