A Year on a Dairy Farm

13. Chapter 13 Coda

Hazel calved on the eighth of August. It was a heifer, brown-and-white, born at four-fifteen in the morning to no particular weather. Tom told me about it on a phone call. The calf had been an easy birth. The calf was healthy. Hazel was fine. Sarah, in the background of the call, said something I couldn’t quite hear, and Tom laughed.

I am writing this in November of the same year, in a city, in a building, three hundred miles from the farm. Outside my window the trees are bare and a person I do not know is walking a dog past a parked car. There is no animal in this room. There is no field. The cheese in my refrigerator came from somewhere I have not been.

This is the ordinary geography of most of our lives. We are, almost all of us, on the consuming end of a system whose producing end we do not see. The visible part of our food economy is a refrigerated case, a register, a paper bag. The invisible part is everything that came before it. This book has been a small attempt to push back against the invisibility — to put one farm, one farmer, one worker, one cow, on the page in enough detail that the reader carries something they did not have before.

What did the year teach me?

A few things, none of them tidy.

That the cow is a creature. I had not, before I started this book, spent meaningful time around dairy cattle, and I had thought of them — without examining the thought — as something halfway between a mammal and a thing. They are not. They are large warm specific animals, with friends and enemies and routines and memories, who watch you with calm attention and chew their cud and live the lives we have shaped them to live. To stand in a barn at four in the morning and feel the breath of ninety-four bodies in the dark is to feel a kind of presence that is not human and is not nothing. Once you have felt it, you cannot un-feel it. It changes how you read the carton on the shelf.

That the work is harder than I thought. I am not a person of soft hands, but I had not, until this year, understood the cumulative cost of a kind of labor that does not stop. Tom is fifty-six and his body is older than that. Marcelino is twenty-nine and his body is, in some ways, also older than that. The toll is not abstract. It is shoulders. It is knees. It is the specific knot in the lower back that returns to a person every morning of their life. The food on most American tables is built, in part, out of this toll. The toll is mostly invisible, and mostly uncompensated, and is borne by people who are mostly not in the rooms where their lives are being decided.

That the system is not anyone’s fault, and is also a fault. Tom is a farmer doing his best inside a structure he did not build. Marcelino is a worker doing his best inside a legal regime he did not write. The retailer in Boston is selling a carton at the price the market will bear. The shopper is paying that price and going home. No single person is to blame for the shape of the whole. The shape of the whole is, nonetheless, what it is. Whether anyone has the responsibility to change it, and what that responsibility might require, is not a question this book has tried to answer. It is a question worth asking, slowly, over years.

That the people who do this work love it, mostly. Tom loves his cows. Marcelino loves his daughter, and is doing this work because of her. Sarah loves the place, and the rhythm of the year, and the book she keeps in pencil that says where every cow is and what every cow has done. The work is hard and the pay is bad and the schedule is unforgiving. None of that is the whole story. The whole story includes what the work also is — a way of being in the world that some people have chosen and some people have been chosen by, and which, on the days when it is going well, is unlike anything else.

And that the wheel keeps turning. The book began in February with a cow about to calve. The book ended in December with that cow carrying the next calf inside her. By the time this book is in your hands, that calf — Hazel’s August calf — will be six months old, and she will be in the heifer barn, growing into the cow she will be. By the time you are old enough to remember reading this, she will be in the milking string. By the time your children are old enough to read it, she will be gone. Mabel will be older. Hazel will be older. The farm will still, with luck, be there. The work will still be done. The milk will still go out the door.

This is what a year teaches a person. That the world we live in is held together by quiet, daily, unromantic acts performed by specific people in specific places, and that those people and those places are visible if you look for them, and worth looking at.

The book is over. The farm is not.

All 14 chapters of A Year on a Dairy Farm · Library · All courses