Farm life: ‘You can’t make a living’

Maurice Davis had no doubt he’d take over the family farm in Waterbury when his parents retired.

He was born in 1926. When he was 8, his parents, Jennie and Clayton Davis, bought their first parcel of farmland on Kneeland Flats, and that’s where Maurice grew up.

Jennie and Clayton acquired more land in 1943 to run their dairy operation, and Maurice and his father farmed side by side until Clayton could no longer keep up with the farm work.

Then, Maurice and Mark became the father-son team behind Davis Family Farm.

Maurice died Jan. 27, 2019 at age 93.

Mark Davis and his wife, Maureen, had taken over the Davis Family Farm in 2006.

“We just kind of shifted gears as the years go by. He did less and I did more,” Mark said.

The couple have three kids, now in their 20s; all helped on the farm as they grew up. But Mark and Maureen don’t think any of their children want to take over the farm someday, and to them, that’s the outlook for small dairy farms throughout Vermont.

A year ago, Waterbury had three dairy farms. Last April 1, Rosina Wallace’s farm burned down, killing her 23 cows, and she is no longer in dairy farming.

That leaves two — George Woodard’s is the other — and Maurice Davis’ death was a blow.

Dairy in decline

“All the small family farms, they are pretty much a thing of the past,” Mark Davis said last week after reflecting on his father’s death and what it means for dairy farming in Waterbury, and statewide.

Mark and Maureen have 95 cows, and used to hire young people in the summer to help with haying, but these days, those young people are in short supply, and many aren’t interested in learning about agriculture.

“It’s been harder and harder for us to find any hay help during the summertime. The help we do get are grown young men that have other jobs that come here after their other job is over for the day. To find younger kids is really tough, actually,” Maureen said.

Milk prices have not kept up with expenses, and the cost of everything keeps going up.

An education problem?

The Woodard family has farmed in Waterbury Center for more than 100 years.

George Woodard took over his farm from his father, also named George, who died in 2008 at age 88.

Woodard has 27 cows, and says he’s seeing the same things as Mark Davis.

Woodard thinks part of the reason is the way agriculture is treated in the education system.

“College education teaches you to be big farmers, as opposed to small farms,” Woodard said. “I know that farming is never mentioned on the radio unless it’s a farm show or something. It’s never mentioned … as a possibility of an opportunity, because they don’t know anything about it. It’s all about technology and computer stuff and other kinds of jobs like that.

“Also, I don’t think that the teachers know anything about agriculture anymore. I bet there’s not one out of 50 teachers in the state that grew up on a farm anymore. If there’s not that, it’s not something that’s going to be brought to a kid’s attention as a possibility of a career,” Woodard said.

“There’s really some good things that happen when you learn how to work on a farm … but there aren’t many kids who are willing to look at that direction,” Mark Davis said.

He says a 60-cow farm is considered small, and chuckled when he called his own herd a “gentleman’s farm.”

“I think small farms are looked upon as not real profitable. The way things are now, with land prices and everything, it’s kind of gotten that way with any kind of farm, I think, which is too bad,” Woodard said.

He thinks the cost of farming can put off many young people, even those interested in picking up the milking mantle.

“A lot of farms around this area have been sold off for housing developments. There’s no farms around that a young person, if he wants to, could actually start farming. If he was small farming, he’d probably be told that, ‘Well, if you want to be a farmer, you’ve got to be big,’” Woodard said.

The trouble with big farms is the milking commitment, which can take up to eight hours a day.

That’s a full workday for many people, and that’s before doing maintenance work on farm equipment and running the business of the farm.

And business isn’t great, Mark Davis admits.

“I’ve told my wife for a long time, if somebody came in here that was disassociated with the family and just looked at what we were doing as a business, they would have shut us down overnight. The reason we’re still here is because we love it, rather than making any money. It doesn’t look like it’s going to go back to that way anytime soon,” he said.

It’s been “bad for so long that it’s wearing us out.”

One of his sons, Clayton, 26, is “looking at some diversification here and trying to find a way to make the farm work without milking cows, eventually,” Mark said.

“It’s a good life, but you can’t make a living at it anymore.”

Hard to watch

Woodard says if a farmer does see a profit, it won’t be for decades of long, demanding days.

“It seems like no matter what a young person does, if he’s got the desire to own his own business, I don’t care what it is, it takes 20 years to get out from under it so that you’re making a profit,” he said. “You have to marry into it or something.”

For the Davis family, it’s hard to watch family farming slip out of Vermont’s economic and cultural reach.

“It’s been a good haul. I’ve enjoyed it most of the time. My father and I worked together and farmed together my whole life; it’s been toward 40 years we were partners,” Mark said.

Maureen praised her kids for helping out on the farm as they grew up.

“It’s something I think about every day — wondering how much longer we’ll be doing this, and how the process will go when we’re not anymore. We don’t have a big plan, really,” she said.