'Cows come and go, but that land is there for you forever'
Toolbox
By MEL HUFF Staff Writer - Published: March 16, 2008
STOWE – The word "farmer" usually doesn't bring to mind the image of a woman, but Vermont's farmers increasingly have a female face. According to the 2002 agricultural census, women make the daily decisions on more than half of Vermont's 6,571 farms, and they are the principal operators of nearly 1,000 of them.
Peter Miller has captured women at work on the land in his book "Vermont Farm Women," and the subjects of his photographs gathered at a reception at the Helen Day Art Center recently where their portraits are on display.
The women greeted old friends, talked about their love of the land and pondered the future of Vermont's family farms, though a dark thread of anxiety ran through their conversations about the risk that development poses to agriculture.
Before a question-and-answer period, the Lepine sisters, Vermont's most famous farm women, sat on a bench talking with a constant stream of well-wishers. Eighty-year-old Gertrude – "Everyone calls me Gert," she says – and her sister Jeannette, two years younger, farmed in the western part of Morristown known as Mud City.
"It's been called Mud City since 1898," Gert said. "It's right at the foot of the Sterling Range."
In 1996, after nearly 45 years of dairying, they sold the cows and the development rights to the land.
Gert is a talkative woman who wears her hair straight and cuts her own wood. "I love my chainsaw," she declares.
Jeannette lost an eye in an accident a few years ago and wears a dark lens over her left eye, to the delight of small boys. One approaches her and she confides, "Actually, I'm a pirate. Maybe you can join me and we can play pirates together."
Julie Wolcott, who farms in Fairfield, introduced the Lepine sisters to more than 60 people who came to the reception. "They're my idols, although we've never met," Wolcott said.
"Farming is really a wonderful life," Gert began. "We raise our cows and we know each cow individually – every cow's got a name. I can't see how we would ever want to have 200, 300, 400 cows, which is not that much compared to what they have out West."
She fielded a question about why they had conserved the land.
"It's perfectly selfish," Gert said. "When you've farmed something for as many years as we have, you get attached to that land. A lot of people ask me, 'Do you miss your cows?' I miss them, but it's my land I would miss if I ever let it go. Cows come and go, but that land is there for you forever. You know every acre of that land. You know where every stone is and every problem, the wet areas."
Jeannette weighed in. "Our area, Mud City, is a very precious kind of world because it is so pure, and I think it will always remain that way because most of the land is conserved. We have no progeny because we're two old ladies who have never married, but the land is all part of you," she said.
She said the day will come when they have to part with it, but they will know it's in good hands. "To see land which has given for generations and generations a good living," she said, "to see it sold or just chopped up for development is very heartbreaking."
Bambi Freeman has raised sheep in the valley just below Mud City for 36 years. She calls the Lepine sisters her inspiration: "I always said, 'If they can do it, I'm doing it.'"
When Freeman and her former husband bought Sterling Branch Farm, the house and the barn were dilapidated and the land was exhausted.
"You've got to be on the land and work it," Freeman said.
Giving up the social part of life is the hardest thing about farming for young families, she said. All the money her family made went into building fences, upgrading buildings, improving the land – and buying dogs. "I couldn't farm without my dogs," she said. "I manage grass and dogs."
Over the years she kept improving the land, and in 2000, Freeman was named Farmer of the Year. Her goal, she declared, was "to create a paradise right here."
Freeman used to raise 160 breeding ewes and sell 300 lamb carcasses. Now she raises 40 ewes and sells 125 lambs "by the chop, just like Shaw's." She also sells value-added products like washable sheepskins, yarn, duvets, mattress pads, lamb sausage and lamb pâté.
She is optimistic about the survival of farming in Vermont because of the many "young, innovative, organic, hard-working young people" entering the field.
She sees young Vermont farmers, unhappy with the price of fluid milk, making maple and Jersey yogurt, farmstead cheeses, jams, chutneys and salsas. She says the state should support these entrepreneurs by creating regional, state-inspected kitchens for processing everything from jams to dog biscuits. She would also like to see Vermont Technical College train graduates run regional slaughterhouses.
Freeman believes that at some point rising transportation costs will make it impractical to haul food long distances. Vermont's farmers will then play a crucial role in feeding their neighbors. "We can easily produce quite a lot of food here if we protect our land and make sure it is kept productive," she said.
But growing food depends on having farmland. "It's very important for me that Vermont citizens who appreciate the rural landscape and the rural citizenry believe in this transition in the agricultural community and not promote development of the farmland," she said. "We've got plenty of medium-sized hills that houses can go on. They don't need to be on the bottom-lands."
Rosina Wallace, a fifth-generation dairy farmer in Waterbury, shares Freeman's concerns. She said she always believed that Americans had the freshest and safest food in the world, but she fears "the vast loss of farmland across the United States" could put the nation's food supply in jeopardy. On a recent trip to Hawaii she was appalled that despite the island's year-round growing climate, so much of the arable land has been given over to tourism that Hawaii can't feed itself any more. She was appalled recently when she went to the supermarket saw a display for fresh asparagus imported from China.
"I'm aware that my neighbor's IBM job has been outsourced to Belize, and another neighbor's job in Montpelier has been outsourced to India. I didn't really expect that my job would get outsourced, but I think I am being outsourced," she said. "There's a big demand for development in my area, and I don't see us being able to hang on to the farmland. My goal, as long as I can survive, is to save my farm."
Gert Lepine pointed out that she and her sisters were able to farm because their father bought 360 acres of land between 1943 and 1952. "We're the ones that get celebrated, but you can't forget Papa, who had the foresight to pick up this land when he could. He was the garbage man in town. He was picking up garbage, feeding pigs – sows that produced little pigs – and that's where we got our start. It was a lifetime's work."
Such foresight, the women agreed, is required now as much as ever.
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