A Year on a Dairy Farm

11. Chapter 11 December The Year Counted

The first heavy snow of December comes on the ninth, overnight, eight inches between dusk and dawn. Tom wakes up at four to a kind of hushed brightness in the bedroom that snow makes when it has fallen against the window. He puts on the same clothes he puts on every morning. He goes downstairs. He starts the coffee. He goes outside.

The path to the barn has to be plowed before he can do anything else.

He gets the skid steer out. He runs the bucket down the path. The light from the milkhouse is yellow against the white. Marcelino is already in the parlor — Marcelino is always already in the parlor — and the cows are already standing at the holding pen gate, blinking in the bright light at four-fifteen in the morning, in the first deep cold of the year, ready to be milked.

December has arrived.

Bill Moriarty is the farm’s accountant. He has been the farm’s accountant for twenty-two years. He inherited the work from the man who had been the farm’s accountant before him, a man named Frank Moriarty, his father, who had worked with Tom’s father since 1981. Bill came to the farm for his first year-end review in 2003. He has come every year since. It is the second Tuesday of December.

He arrives at one in the afternoon. He drives a Subaru. He is fifty-eight. He brings a thick manila folder and a laptop and his own bag of cookies because he is on a diet and Sarah’s cookies are a problem. He sits at the kitchen table with Tom and Sarah and the laptop and the bourbon Tom brings out for the occasion. They will be at the table for three hours.

This visit is the closest thing the farm has to an annual physical. Bill tells them what the year looked like. What was earned. What was spent. What the depreciation schedule is. What the federal forms will say. Where the year stands relative to the year before, and the year before that. He is the only person besides Sarah who sees the farm’s complete financial picture, and unlike Sarah he sees it from outside the kitchen.

The year, in summary form: gross milk income $537,400, slightly down from 2024 because of a soft October. Operating expenses $341,200, slightly up from 2024 because of feed costs and one major equipment repair (the bulk tank refrigeration). Net before taxes and family living: $196,200. The drought reserve account, which was drawn down in 2022, is back to roughly half full. Anna’s tuition for the year was paid. The family’s medical insurance was paid. The mortgage was paid. The new water heater was bought.

“You made it,” Bill says.

“That’s what it looks like.”

“You did better than you think.”

“What does better than I think look like?”

Bill turns the laptop a little. He shows them the chart he has made. The chart shows their net farm income for the past ten years. There are years above the trend line and years below. 2025 is just above. 2022, when the drought hit, is far below — a deep notch. 2018, the year they bought the eighty-acre piece, is a notch in the other direction. The trend line is more or less flat.

“Flat is good in this business,” Bill says. “Flat is good.”

The federal government does not run American agriculture, but it is in the room.

The Farm Service Agency is the part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture that administers most of the federal programs that touch a farm like Tom’s. There is the Dairy Margin Coverage program, which is a federal insurance program that pays out a small amount per hundredweight when the difference between the national milk price and the national feed cost falls below a threshold. There are the Environmental Quality Incentives Program and the Conservation Stewardship Program, which fund things like fencing for rotational grazing, cover crops, manure management, soil health practices. There are crop insurance programs. There are disaster relief programs. There are loan programs for farmers who cannot get credit from banks. There are dozens of forms.

Tom is enrolled in the Dairy Margin Coverage program. He gets a small payment from it most years. He has used the conservation programs for fencing and a stream-buffer project. He files the forms. He tries to remember the deadlines. Sarah, who has been filing federal paperwork for thirty years, makes sure they get filed.

This is part of how a small dairy stays a small dairy. The federal programs are not generous. They are not transformative. They are not, in any sense, a solution to the structural problems of small dairy in America. But they are something. They are a thumb on the scale, in years when the scale tips far enough, that keeps a farm like Tom’s from going under.

Without them, the farm would not exist in this form. Bill knows this. Tom knows this. The forms get filed.

There are things the spreadsheet does not capture.

It does not capture that Bertha is not in the herd anymore. The spreadsheet shows a smaller herd average for November and an “asset disposal” line for $1,840, which is what the auction paid for her at New Berlin. It does not show the place she had walked to first on every turnout day for seven Aprils, which is now a place that no cow walks to first because no cow remembers it the way she did.

It does not capture that Marcelino is still here. The spreadsheet shows a labor expense of $58,700, which is up from last year because Tom raised his pay. It does not show that on the morning of November 14, when Tom was walking back from the truck, Marcelino was the one who finished the floor of the parlor without being asked.

It does not capture that the equipment is older. The spreadsheet has a depreciation schedule. The depreciation schedule is a stylized thing the IRS uses to allow farmers to deduct the cost of capital. It is not, in any literal sense, the actual aging of the actual machinery. The skid steer that Tom is using to plow the path this morning is twelve years old. It is going to need a new hydraulic pump in 2026 or 2027. The bulk tank refrigeration that was repaired in 2023 is not the same unit it was before the repair, and it makes a sound at night, when Tom is in the milkhouse late, that he does not entirely trust.

The spreadsheet captures what the spreadsheet captures. Some of what matters about a farm in any given year does not show up there.

After Bill leaves, around four, Tom puts on his coat and walks the barn one more time before evening milking. This is a habit. He has been doing this on the day of the accountant’s visit since he was thirty.

The herd is ninety-one. There are twelve heifers who will join the milking string next year. There are eight more who will join the year after. Mabel is in the older heifer group, in the back of the heifer barn, standing at the bunk eating with the other nine-month-olds. She is half-grown. She is a brown-and-white animal with the long legs of a calf still and the chest beginning to fill in toward the cow she will become. Tom stops at her pen. She lifts her head. She does not, exactly, recognize him; she has not had enough interactions with him for that. But she does recognize the shape of a person at the gate, which means feeding might be about to happen, and she takes a step toward him, in case.

He moves on. Hazel is at the bunk in the milking barn, eating, her belly still mostly the belly of a non-pregnant cow but slightly fuller than it was in September. Inside her, the calf is the size of a kitten. Tom pats her shoulder as he goes by. She does not turn.

The herd is the herd. The cycle is turning.

Anna comes home from Cornell on the eighteenth and stays through the second of January. She is a senior now. She is talking, vaguely, about graduate school in soil science, and she is talking, less vaguely, about a young man in her department whom she has been seeing for three months, and Tom is listening to all of this with the careful neutral face of a father trying not to be a problem. Sarah is more direct. Sarah likes the young man, whom they have not met. Anna says they will see each other at Christmas if it works out, which has not yet been determined.

The Christmas tree goes up on the twenty-first. Sarah has been putting up the same Christmas tree for twenty-eight years; it is not a real tree, it is an artificial one that came from a Sears in 1996 and which Sarah has periodically threatened to throw out and never has. The ornaments are mostly homemade. Anna’s first-grade clay handprint is among them. So is a small wooden cow that Tom’s grandfather carved.

Marcelino is in his trailer. He comes to the house for Christmas Eve dinner, as he has every year for five years, sitting in the seat at the dining room table that has been his on Christmas Eve since 2020. He brings a bottle of Guatemalan rum that he has saved for this. They eat ham and Sarah’s pierogis (she is half Polish from her mother’s side) and a green bean casserole that nobody especially likes but is, somehow, a tradition. They give him a card with three hundred dollars in it, which is the same gift, adjusted for inflation, that Tom gave the man who lived in the trailer before Marcelino. He says Gracias. He says Feliz Navidad. He goes back to his trailer at nine, with leftovers wrapped in tinfoil.

At eleven that night his phone rings. It is Marisol. It is nine in Guatemala. She is opening the present he sent — a doll with curly hair that he ordered from a website in October and had shipped to the house in San Pedro Necta — and she is screaming with delight.

¡Papi! ¡Papi! ¡Mira! ¡Mira!

The phone is on speaker. The trailer is small. The doll, on the screen, is held up by a seven-year-old in pajamas. The doll, like Marisol, has dark hair. Marcelino watches his daughter for as long as she will let him, which is several minutes, and then she is off — to show her grandmother, to show a cousin, to do something important with her present that does not involve the phone — and the phone screen is lying on a table in a kitchen four thousand miles away, and Marcelino is sitting on the edge of his bed in upstate New York at eleven o’clock on Christmas Eve with his eyes closed.

In a few minutes Lucía comes back to the phone. They talk for a while.

He sleeps.

The year ends. The cows are milked. The snow falls. New Year’s Eve passes without much ceremony at the farm, because four o’clock comes early on January first. The Christmas tree comes down on the third. Anna goes back to Cornell on the second.

By the second week of January the farm has begun the deep winter rhythm that it will be in for the next six weeks. The cows are inside. The calves are in the hutches. The trailer behind the barn glows yellow in the dark at five in the morning. The milkhouse glows yellow at four. The skid steer scrapes the alleys. The vacuum pump runs.

Mabel grows. Hazel grows the calf inside her, who is now four months along and the size of a small cat. The herd settles into the long stretch between the year that just ended and the year that has just started, and the work goes on, without ceremony, the way the work has gone on through every December and into every January in this barn and on this farm for as long as anyone here remembers.

In a few weeks Tom will be in the kitchen at four in the morning, putting on the second of his two pairs of socks, and Marcelino will be in the milkhouse, and the dry cows will be in the pen at the back of the barn. One of them will be Hazel. She will be six months along. Her calf will be the size of a small terrier. In two more months she will calve.

This is the wheel. This is what it does.

It does not stop.

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