 Northfield State Expand for sponsoring this event, as well as our lead sponsor for the whole season, which is the Frankenberg. We do have, we just put out pictures of ice water and cups back there. At the end, we will also have out flatters of watermelon from a real pool farmer. I know that it's great for our website. We'll just leave it that way then. There's a donation basket for the watermelon if you're interested, but also, again, it basically costs us $250 to open our doors without air conditioning on a night like this. So, there is always the donation box in the back, or our end of year appeal. Two coming events that I just want to announce are the next Thursday. So, the week from Thursday, September 6th. We're having an open mic tonight. And part of that is actually not so much this event, but last year when we had the growing up in Brookfield Tales, things like that, that there are people that don't necessarily get asked, and it's not a slight, you know, thing or no, those types of things. So, if you have a story, if you have a joke, if you want to read a poem, if you want to sing a song, anything like that, that will be in the Herald this week. I think it's in the email blast that we'll be going out next week. We are just asking for some registration just to, you know, get an idea of the crowd. You can play music. The only thing in there, we're basically asking that, you know, it's not going to be a chamber music quartet that needs to then tune up because we're asking for no more than a three-minute transition in between to make it fast-paced even. So, we'd love to see you there. And the other one is a big event in mid-September. It is the Sunday of Tumbridge Fair weekend. So, after you've eaten all of your fried whatever, you're going to want some healthy soup. And that is our super supper event. I believe it's our fifth annual that I could be gone. And that is a fundraiser that we do for the Old Town Hall and the Brand-off Food Shell. So, it's a great event. It's the Sunday of Tumbridge Fair. So, as you know, the fair shuts down at five. We open at six. Perfect. And we will hope to see when there's other events in September that you will also get noticed on. I just want to say before I introduce Keith, I got the idea for this event when, oh, I don't know if it was even a couple years after I moved to town, so-called in 1990, Alan Wheatley was telling me how they used to clean the syrup pans. And I don't know if it was when you were a kid or what you- But anyway, that stuck with me. And when I talked to him about doing this event, he then added about actually how the method fit with the farm chores for the seasonal, you know, how it fit in with getting the work done. And so, it's just a fascinating interest. And then last year when we had the Growing Up in Brookfield stories, Keith did such a great job of asking questions from the audience that, you know, sorry, even though you don't want to do it next year, that's exactly it. And then one other thing you might notice, maybe you've noticed is at this point, I'm the only female facing you. We will take care of that next year when we have the females all up here. And I'm probably going to require that all of you attend to hear that call. But anyway, I'm sorry. So I'm not sure if we'll talk to you about it if you want to help with that event next year. But that's the plan. So hopefully we'll see you next year as well. And I'm sorry, Keith. So is that good over there? Yeah. So anyway, Keith Sprig, extremely honored to be here tonight, to be asked to do this. And of course, I will continue to do it by the next year, just to send you all. Anyway, with that being honored to do this and to lead this group of foreigners through this discussion, it's very much honoring, like I've said, but I use that word very lightly leading this group of farmers because my entire life I've worked with this generation and I haven't seen anybody beat them to this point. You'll listen. They usually tend to go their own directions after that. So I think you'll see that on display here tonight. But all kidding aside, what we have here is a group of a generation that grew up on farms, farmers in their day as they were kids, and then some of them even continued to be living doing it. So they not only pioneered farming and what it's become today, but they pioneered a way of life that is seeped by many people. Even to this day, there's people that just want to live the life that these guys have lived their entire life. I mean, from childhood right up until this point. So with that being said, this night is about these guys. And also with that being said, this night is about you and the audience and because of my poor social skills, I'm going to need some help from you guys and get in these guys' point. But that being said, I say with warning last year I asked, I think, five questions, maybe six, and here I am. All the counting questions, anybody get close to that? We're going to start making lists. So also with that being said, if there is a question please raise your hand and honestly I hope there's tons of them. And we'll get to the microphone. And those reasons are because we are being recorded. So it's not only us that are here. There's people that this will be watching us from our time. So with that being said, I'm going to ask these guys to say a few words about the farms that they grew up on. What it was for a farm, if they can take maybe three to five minutes and describe a farm. And then from there I have some questions if some questions aren't arising and we'll just go from there. And I did not ask, what do we have for a time line here? An hour? Okay. Great. So I'll start with Stuart if you could just introduce yourself. Great to be here. I'm Stuart O'Shea and I grew up with all these gentlemen. We were kids once. In East Brookville our farm was with the O'Shea farm under 14. It's a great farm now. I've always thought that I was so blessed and I've been so thankful to grow up in that era where we had farm life and friendship and parents all had friendship and just such a great time. And so I've always been thankful for that. Farm there until I graduated in high school and I didn't go along to farming directly. Not like some of these gentlemen here who have spent their lives farming. But had great memories there and had my own farming experience later in life. But it was all good and I just will reiterate that it was such a wonderful time to grow up. One of the farm life, the neighbors helped each other and we had a great time as kids. So I grew up down in a row from an older farm, a great new farm. When I was growing up we'd probably milk 30 to 35 cows. It was just hay and it was faster. I remember my brother and I all did the milk before we went to school. And then we'd catch a ride to Spalding and then we'd hitchhike home at night. We'd hitchhike all day. I can't understand how you do that. But back then we'd hitchhike home very in about an hour because everybody's doing it or trying to get a ride home. But we sugared and probably tapped around 500. We got into the horses and we were quite young. We got to ride to our horses back home and we got down to the end of the day. But the sparring that Paul killed told us about the sugar in his hands. A friend of mine, Paul Stacey, told me that it was sugar in his leg on the sparring. It was getting time to get on the sparring board. We used to just flood the pans with sap and then by July when we got on the hand we'd go back and it turned to acid and it'd clean right up. I was like, well, we're going to try that. And if that didn't work, I'd slack. So I'll turn the mic over. I will say I continued on the frang and we ended up, I'd knocked 200 head, knocked 100 at the end and sold my knockouts in 97. We'd worked with Keith, raised in Heiferous now. We'd have about 200 Heiferous out there. I mean, Stowe had a farm over in the Timmie neighborhood over there. It was a big farm there to go. But the time I came along, it got kind of winded down. My gun got him out to three, four, half a dozen shells with a hand. And we made a turn to leather. It used to be a locker down the Randolph, a big drawer. We walked in the drawer and we had lockers for like drawers that you could pull out and put meat or whatever you had in there for Keith. But dad had, I think two or three lockers down there. So then in summer we made platter and then put it in the locker for winter. The gun bottle was good to hand out. But I got into that a little bit. And then I went, where I went to school was a Killing School. It was a one-room schoolhouse. Under-graduated, I was only one in eighth grade. And then we were going to hold a ceremony for me so I'd ship me out of the Randolph Center with the rest of the kids. So then I went to VTC and then I went to Cabot, worked a couple of years up there and came back down. That time I got married, thought maybe I'd get a job. So I helped area farms around there, getting in hay, cleaning the barn and stuff. My dad is a good gardener. He usually had about three gardens. Brothers and I were out there, we got to pull the weeds mostly. So even was that... What was good about it? Was it dairy and saw mill? Was that like the main sources of income on the farm? Yeah, we had that little mill too, we ran for years. We put a lot of lumber through that. And then after a while my dad, like I said, he was a pretty good gardener. And then he decided he wanted some raspberries. So he filled up a place and bought us some raspberries and we had a raspberry patch. And for a while through the summer the money from raspberries was what about the groceries? Dad used teatrop and everything, every penny, every berry. And he said that one year we picked 650 quarts of raspberries. We got a single-picking raspberry. Alright, we'll let these guys introduce themselves. They have no open questions. I'm Dennis Hill. I grew up in a farm down in the Berkfield Center. Youngest of five. We had a small dairy farm. I think it was the largest number we had. One-time milking was 15 holsters. My dad's a lot of folks here. My dad he found a dairy up until three months before he died. He was a male here in town for 38 years. Fryman was his life. I decided after high school that Fryman wasn't my life. So I left one off in the military and came back and went through a couple of different careers. But I have to tell you growing up on a dairy farm in Vermont was the last thing that could ever happen. Here in Deaton we talked about the lockers down in Randolph. It was a packed market, that's how I remember. I remember whenever we'd call a cow and butcher the cow on the bar on the floor we'd cut it up and take it down and put it in the meat locker and then we'd go down once a week and get our meat for what we're going to eat for the week because we didn't have much that freezer even at that point. I do remember though that my mom worked at the hospital. She was a medical record librarian. I do remember that packed market would get seafood once in a while. My folks would get clams. They'd do home without that clam stew. It was just about the best thing there was and I couldn't even look at the stuff. But one thing that I remember that I think really changed dairy farming a lot was the advent of the bulk tank. They did away with the milk cans. It used to be all the farms had a milk room, a milk house and they had a cooler which was nothing more than a glorified cold water going through to keeping the milk at a certain temperature. And so you'd lug the milk down, have the can strainer on the can and pour the milk through the strainer down in the can and lift the can up, put it inside the cooler. And it was guys with trucks, quite often other farmers that had a milk route and they'd come around and pick it all up and take it to the processing center. And some of the stories, I can't detail all of them but some of the stories some of you guys used to tell about some of these guys at the record with each pickup a can in each hand and just rolling up. I said, listen, your son had to get quite old before I could even win one of them. But again, dairy farming was totally different then. Most everybody at that point, back when I was growing up people had one tractor and one tractor was all they had and not everybody had all the equipment. It was trading back and forth of work. One might have a baler, one might have a corn planter and that's how it went back and forth and one might have a combine, you might have a tractor that was big enough to run the combine to do that or cut the corn. We raised, I can remember as a kid, we raised a lot of sweet corn and I remember picking a whole bunch of sweet corn every summer, we'd take it and we had a whole GNC pickup with a good body on the back and we'd throw beers of corn in there all day long and take them down to the old canning factory in Randolph which is located down by the old Eason Allen plant. It's now a storage area down there but that used to be a canning factory and you'd sit down there and they had a conveyor belt and you'd back your truck up there and you'd sit there and throw the corn on that and you'd get paid so much a pound or whatever. I never had part of the money. So anyway, hello. I'm Guy Wallow, grew up on Brookfield East Hill and my father and my folks had cows and 20 jerseys and there was always some competition between the jerseys and the Holsteins but, you know, the jerseys kind of won. Later on along the jokes was that we should actually get a Holsteins so we could bring them out of the buckets. Anyway, my father was diversified in the income. It's pretty amazing. He had 20 cows and six kids and he made his income right there off the land and he also had raspberries and he had some strawberries he sold and he had blueberries. He had one of the largest blueberry plant collections around Brookfield for a long time and that supplemented the income. We also sugared and he had chickens and one barn we took down to a racy store and supplied them for their regular customers to go there and get the eggs that we raised. So that was pretty remarkable for a fellow and a family with 20 cows to survive and we did and we probably weren't very well off but we didn't know it so it didn't matter. So we were, you know, looking back we had the hand-me-down foals and other goodies and I'll tell you one thing about the water supply was a couple thousand, maybe 2,500 feet away the way up on the hill was a spring and it wasn't too good and so water was always rationed and you begin to realize that when you're the third one to get in the bathtub. That's what I call it. But yeah, in fact it's the same water. It's one of the warmest ones at one time. But that's the way we grew up and just we were fairly isolated we could see one of the house and barn up on the hill but that was it. And when you were young and growing up and all of a sudden the vehicle came to you you got behind the maple tree and you keep trying to figure out who it was and if you didn't know, you didn't come out. So that was, and that was, we had some good times back in those years there was crust and we had, you could actually go out and if any slope on the land you could slide all day long on a sled that had iron, the rails were iron and you wouldn't go through and we haven't had a crust like that in probably 20 or 30 years in a real one. But that's how we grew up and for entertainment we had skis with a single leather strap. So that was way back but that's how, where we grew up and I thought it was all remarkable and probably made it with 20 cows. Joe, Guy, did you have a pipeline system with a figuring back then? We did. Father had a, it was a metal and it was before the plastic came out and he tapped around the file but yeah, he had a pipeline and it ran with strong wires through and that system worked pretty well. Sometimes, you know, branches would get into it but he actually sugared for quite a few years and part of the income did well. So was that like open trains? Yeah, it was. I had three pieces to it and when he got no sugar and that's where the stuff stayed and didn't collect it. Yeah, just go for it. Just go for it. That's a long time. Yeah, I'm John Sprague. I lived down on Route 14. And I had two brothers and a sister when we grew up together. So I was the youngest boy so I knew what it was to get knocked around. You learned right off the start of what it was, the lowest one on the totem pole. So anyway, we know, I think, about 30 cows. For the time, we had a fairly modern barn and we had a litic area which had a track and load manure into it and roll it out and dump it into a pit. And in the winter, I can remember hitching, I was probably three years old. I can remember hitching the horses up or helping and taking the manure out and going across the main road, throwing snow on the main road and spreading the manure out of a splat. On the ground, I can remember the highway crew stopping to complain something and putting snow on the road. Okay, so my... That's some of my earliest remembrance but as thinking about farm and my grandfather farmed there before. My father did and he was, they more or less sighted off what they raised on the farm. They had goats and sheep and whatever. But my great-grandfather was part of starting the Gulf Road Creamery. And then my grandfather, who was a school teacher, took to go into Boston and sell them... It's like the Gulf Road Creamery made butter. And so he... He went to Boston and probably was more than a day's trip. But anyways, it's selling butter. And so when my father come in line, my grandfather helped him change the barn over. It's an upstairs stable. An upstairs stable is all wooden and you tie the cows up and wooden stanchions and then behind them you open up a grate and the manure would down below. So anyway, they converted the barn to a cement barn with the soil, the hay, went in the mail and was on the same level as the cows. And the hay barn was all set up with a hay fork but you come into the hay and pick the hay up and drop it in the mail. So getting back to Gulf Road Creamery, my father was the first one that actually had a market and he sold cream and then milked the Gulf Road Creamery. And from there we got a bulk tank when I was probably 15, 16 years old. And, you know, farming just changed dramatically from then. But when I was old, I can just remember back in the war, back in 46, in that area our neighbors started buying tractors and tractors were hired to come by and I can remember our neighbors, I think it was the mountains that got a tractor and had iron wheels on it because during the war they didn't put rubber tires. And about a year or two later we got a tractor and our other neighbors did and they had rubber tires rubber tires on their tractors. And the farmers all worked together. It's like corn cotton and they had a harvest and they would cut the corn and put it in a bundle with a, like, bail string around it and there would probably be a dozen of salt stalks or maybe a few more. And they'd leave it there a day and let it dry and then the neighbors would come in and they'd pick it up and put it in a what they called a chopper blower and they'd go in this conveyor and blow it up into the sial. And as a kid I got to get up in the sial and level it off and throw corn cobs at my brother. Being the only one I got most of the cobs. But that was in the hay in what was done with what they called a haymower. It's a conveyor thing. You'd drive over the hay and it would walk the shoe onto a wagon or a truck. And then you would go in and back it in under hay fork. Hay fork, pick it up, raise it up and run it down a trolley in the hay mail and then you had a trick roll and it would dump it. We had a hay hoist. It was an electric winch thing. You'd pull the hay up and down the track but a lot of people pulled the hay up with a horse or tractor and then pulled it down and dumped the hay. Quite a bit different than what we might see today. The other thing is when I was like four or five years old and I was old enough to know what was happening I always knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a farmer. So that was my life. Luckily enough I still have opportunities today. Another thing I might add I went to school within 500 feet of the farm in one-hound school and I used to go home at noon in New Chor. I went from a one-hound school to Spalman High School which had 213 kids in my class. I think today and I found a school in back but I think a culture shock that was and how it is today. So anyway, that's pretty much my book for you. Yeah, we did it pretty well in our five-minute interview so I might find a little light on the fact that I'm not going to lead this I'm just going to make some suggestions and we're going to go from there. But anyway, with that being said I would love if I saw some hands raised because now we're going to pick some of my boring questions. I don't need them. I just want these guys to... I want these guys to reflect on maybe what age they started driving the car quickly. So they want to know what age you started driving the car into. Well, we... too young. We didn't have only one tractor but several jobs for that tractor especially during Hay. So I think I was on raking hay ten years old probably and then the jobs came more and more after that. But I think raking hay was probably my first job at around ten. Probably about the same for me. First I had a brother that was a year older than me so he got the mowing and the veiling and I got the raking. I was about 12 years old and my grandfather and I were picking up Russian Georgia. He says, you want to drive that thing? He didn't have to ask me twice. We had a little Ford 8N we bought an old from Ted Green and I was a start-breaker. He used to sell primary machinery over there. And my dad worked in the woods and I got the job of skidding logs. He would cut them and my brothers would help him get them ready. And I got this for a long time and only two years I knew when that tractor was second in the reverse. I think I probably started driving about that same age. I do remember the only reason they didn't start driving earlier was we had a farm hall age and if you're familiar with old farm hall ages the seats that way back so tell your life is going to be long enough there's no way in hell you're going to cut it. Now we started early got a couple of stories actually we started as soon as we had strength enough to push the clutch down and sometimes it took both legs so we started real early and my sister Grace is a year and a half older than I am and she tells and the story is that the first time she drove my father was with her and they were driving along the gateway which was poles three poles they went up fairly close and my father says you're going to start and she didn't know how we had to repair that that seemed to be a little bit of an issue Well as I said earlier I had two older brothers and they got to drive and probably seven years old I got the job of milling and I was small enough so we had an in-ground hand cooler I was young enough small enough so I couldn't put the hands in the cool line but I was old enough so I could mill that's probably So the question is when you first learned that milk was it by hand or by machine? No we had milk machine So was there a vacuum pump or did you pull the vacuum off the motor off a tractor or a tractor? No we had a vacuum pump the electricity was out the tractors on the intake manifold had a a stock off we called what you plugged the pulsator into through the holes and when the electricity was off you would use the tractor to milk one cow at a time the vacuum pump we could milk two cows at a time another question another question I'll repeat I have a story about not driving a tractor and I had a question I grew up on a farm just north of the on the original just north of the north of Randolph and my grandfather was there in 1912 and my father had and Harry Cooley had a sugar operation they made over 400 gallons but I don't know how to collect I thought I had a team of horses that was full pulling a tank and I thought I was driving a team my twin brother he was over there giving commands and here I was thinking I was driving a team question I had I can remember and this was back in the early 40s I in battle I thought I got ice from up here in the pond you know for cool milk did any of you folks do that on your farms did you use ice off or milk glue I'll start that no we didn't we always had a cooler because we always had electricity I think they followed the branch the main group 14 probably got electricity before a lot of farms did back up on the hill so we used a can of cool milk and we did not we did use ice when I came along they only had about three forward maybe half a dozen cows by hand he was a good hand milker and dad I was raising a couple of pigs in the spring and he had chickens and we had our own milk and put the surplus to fit in the pigs and the chickens so it didn't need to cool down so your milk was never down to the gulf health screenery and never was processed in the butter or when others just used on it we used to sell cream I ran across some slips in the house oh so the cream made there on the farm yeah separate break that thing by hand that was fun did we turn one of those no I have it's hard to it's hard to get them going this one had a motor on it but the motor wasn't big enough so we had to crank it to get it up to speed and the motor carried it we had the same as the rest I've learned to look at all of them and think of something you've already mentioned because it's a charm to forget I mentioned earlier that this was just kind of a humorous thing as I said a lot of the farmers just you know trade work back and forth I remember and he lived just down the hill from the historical that's Royal Abbey and he worked for Gerald Fulham and he worked for Daniel Rock and he worked around in the summers and through the winter he had had a farm previously and his barn had burned I always had a car we drove on Sundays and we had another older car that he drove to work well they were cutting corn and I was off to school and he parked his car in the driveway of our house and he was a tobacco cheater well the backseat of his car was full of empty tobacco pouches boxes at the time when I was a kid I had a pack of gold he came back to his car and I hadn't been working all day to find the gold stand in the front seat of the car and he didn't go to the cheater he was to say I didn't have a pack of gold much more than that we never used ice we did have a can cooler we also had a spring fed cooler it had four cans and that's where the milk went when the can cooler was full we never got over eight cans of shipment it was a small operation but that spring fed cooler still there to fire them every once in a while they would look out and say hmm that's where the cow's drain on the back side of that was also my father never had a watering for the cows in the barn it always went out down through and in the wintertime you had to get a stove there a stove in the tank and you had to fire it out of because there was ice on it and you had to wait until the ice got in then you'd go and break it with an axe but in later years I said hmm in the wintertime the cows didn't make a whole lot of milk something new how much water and of course he always timed it so that the cows came in in the springtime when they were out on the grass and that was a couple of things to mention I had put hay on a wagon by hand and we had a scattering we always had a velcro which my father always had converted horse drawn equipment to the tractor and the tractor was made in and came from Ted Green Ford and I remember I can remember when that came it was quite a big day and there was quite an innovation and he had a mower that was six foot but it wasn't in the back it came out of the side and it was innovative at the time and he went around and didn't cut the mowing for people he still had the horses but he could do it so much quicker so that was part of his income for three or four years he won quite a few farming rounds and mowed their hay we had a cement paddock it was in the milk house and it stuck up about two foot and then it dropped down probably two foot so it was submerged in cold water so did you the cold water became cold from electricity? yeah it was a refrigeration unit that cooled the water circulated and kept it clean so a question back to you you said that you guys would use the ice water what was the ICU score? I remember as you guys talked I remember now it's a long time ago I remember he did have he had about 40 pets it was a fairly good size farm for that time it was organic too at the time he had water cooling but I remember then using ice for something and I just I was a little kid I missed this before 45-46 so I remember that that's what I asked the question I wasn't sure what he used it for I think you guys had it so easy I grew up on a farm in Alabama where we had three cows didn't have them well and they walked down to the creek to get out of water but we didn't have electricity until 1951 so I'm curious to know if you had electricity or if you don't have electricity I don't know when we got electricity but I can go back in the 40s and we always had electricity so I think I must have been in 30s when we had electricity I heard a couple of stories and I haven't told any so I thought it is mine I had two brothers I was the youngest of the three which I would agree is a rough spot to grow up in and the tractor driving experiences were very one I remember specifically we had been to our dump which is over in the back field and I'd gone with my two brothers and my oldest brother Bill was driving the tractor and we were headed back and the trailer was hooked to the tractor with no keys so he had that in high gear going just as tight as he could go with the bumps and the thin came out and the turn on the trailer went straight into the ground and John and I were flying because we were standing up in the back we were kind of driving a horse so we were flying out of the top flat we didn't break our necks and my brother never knew it came on foot so he went all the way back to the barn and went the back into the trailer so he seamlessly came back looking to see where he'd left so that was always kind of a joke it wasn't so much of the time but there's fun now that we look back at it so do you remember there was an electrician I was on the air fire now I don't remember I don't remember being allowed I was there I'm a little bit later in the 40's so we had the juice there we had electricians I can remember seeing pictures of room 14 when it was not paid and that was back in the 30's the electricity come in the early 30's room 14 so because I have some gray hair I'm going to tell a story too but in regards to electricity as I can remember as a kid when the power went out which was often just to this day but the power would go out and so at the time in my memory there was about three farms that were in the valley Allen's was one of my fathers and Mark Hackett's and it was really really exciting for me only because there was one generator so everybody we could get in there was only one tractor that could run that generator in the 70's so we would take that generator where we got left the last time we would get those cows milked so there was lots of people around and chores were all of a sudden became easy and then you went down to the neighbors fire marks or Allen's and you did those chores but anyway I'm looking at another question back here did you have a question? I don't have a question to say I heard by the way I heard somewhere that I think it's victory didn't get electricity until 1960 something which totally amazes me that's right now Steve your mother my parents went up to victory but they just got an idea they had an ice house give her the microphone the ice house worked out great it was insane the size and I had a truck in one hand and it worked we cut the cans of milk until they came to collect it and that ice house worked real great so my mother decided to take some hands and hung above that saw and had a little too much fire and John came up and asked her what she wanted to do with the hands she thought after the fire was put out she thought that was a little crazy but that was when we tried to start the water until that saw the hands got down to the fire of course there's something we had a two-hand and my neighbor came up and asked her how do you expect her to ever afford that next year he had a two-hand second comment and I'll be quite admitted Dennis you mentioned Roy Levin he and Jesse Fiss are my two heroes because he ran the barn at my weekly grandparents on Ridge Road and that man had the patience of Joe because all of us kids who came up in the summer would just pintail it to the barn and I'm sure I was maybe a leading contender for wanting to know everything everything you could tell me about cows and milking and hay and why can't I go see the bull etc. and it seemed like wonderful for me and I remember asking Abbot or rather when I was 12 I'm old enough to help with the hay ear of girl said he and I said that is irrelevant and he finally succumbed and let me know what we did was use those forks to roll it because it was in rows you know rolled up and then just throw it on the top of the truck and of course mom was horrified which was the result of me but oh my goodness we had so much fun because he was either in the barn with him or riding at Jesse's or swimming at the pond and it just happened so I'm here but we haven't talked anything about what we did before which I remember before oh yeah that was a little bit before my time I've seen pictures but I've never had any tournaments yeah we had horses team of horses and it was quite a challenge my father used them that's what we had but he was actually afraid of horses very very cautious and he sort of instilled about I don't like horses today when they came in from the field to get in the barn we had to go somewhere else and because he was afraid of what might happen and I can remember using them when we were hitting sometimes and on the front of the wagon which was an iron wheel wagon we had to put a strap in a metal strap in front and that was to hold the kid in from falling off while you had to hold the reins and I can remember sometimes that got a little uncomfortable when you were having your shirts gone because it was hot and you had to hang on to the reins and drive those horses in I can remember doing that horses I haven't gotten any compliments the question is horses to tractors well I never drove any horses my grandfather had a couple here on the farm but I don't remember him doing anything he went out with a cow and my uncle when they got us he was a horse guy he came got him one day and about the power coming through I think it was around 1950 it would take a while to spread the line the power of the line by the house with a team of horses I think it was around 1950 I'm not sure as I said his dad had a 20 cal farm that was a good sized farm back then a lot of them were smaller than that and you had the right I don't know about those jerseys posties and grandfather was a jersey man and the guy over on the corner there where our gimmick is now was a hostie they used to pick on each other well they got to talk him one day and the other guy says to my grandfather he says well you can tell when you've got a pure red jersey you melt her out you dump the milk in the pale and you throw a bean in there and from nothing on the cover of the bean you've got a jersey and the other guy says well and says how you can tell if you've got a pure red hosting you melt her out and you throw a bean in there and from nothing on the cover of the bean you've got a jersey he was talking about them remember I was talking about hay and I'm thinking well the first round bale that I remember was the gauges and they had a bale that bailed these little round bales and that was the first round bale that I ever saw and that was a long time ago what time frame was that oh in the fifties yeah Alice Jones Alice Jones yeah it was but we talked about all the equipment and I just happened to think that your dad had that round bale yeah there's lots of stories when we get started and they would go on but the cows jerseys were the part of the breeze my recollection in those days you know it's always been that joke about you probably should know the Holstein glass so you have something to wash out the machines with but jerseys were pretty efficient during those times and they were I think the consularity but there's different opinions that you can go down the line but even spray car no jerseys back in the day so anyways what did you guys do? well we were gurnees we started out with gurnees and the old golden gurnees milk so it started with and that was when the father was attracted to we slowly went over the jerseys but that was kind of although there were some gurnees environment around at that time but yeah it was a little different during the mid 50s we we had to do square bale also but the method of picking them up we had what was called a heaver bale over this guy we went down and invented this thing called a bale and it hooked on to the side of the truck and we left one side of the truck it had its own set of wheels and a conveyor chain so my mother and my sister and my younger brother we all learned how to throw bale we rolled them into a straight line and you drive around in the truck with this thing and it would bring them up up on the truck so we had one guy riding in the truck back in the hay so we always picked it up with a heaver bale over and that was in the 50s I'll give it to my dad he was one of the heaver bale loaders so our fireman I don't know 1400 acres of crop land now anyway one of these fields, the wings down that we use we got stuck in this wet hole, the middle of the field so I'm like, what's this all about so I Larry Heaver owns the land now which is the son of our grandson maybe of the heaver bale loader inventor who ran private factories and I'm like what was it for a factory anyway it was a well there for water that fed the factory and they made the heaver bale so life comes around we didn't have one of those heaver bale loaders it was made by two brothers we were the heavers the other thing I thought about some of you, Dave they pastured your cows and come may you pastured your cows that was the way you did it and some farms didn't have enough pasture and they used to have what they call a summer farm and so they would drive their cows to the summer farm and melt their cows there in the summer and drive them back in the winter and there was quite a number of farms that did this we were fortunate we had the 200 acre wood dog that was now a wood dog but back then it was no patch but I can remember being a kid and walking up there and playing with the cows we're ready for some more questions here is there a microphone fat yellow we're going to go over here first so my question is about the marketplace and I think about this quite dead because I spent a lot of my hours you know avoiding no plant building down on Pearl Street and Randolph which is pretty much the same as it was in 1920 just with a bunch of sawing machines now and I think about what note price was back say if you were growing up John or how it made change over the years and kind of what that equivalent would be to a heap if you can quantify that in any way or maybe you have to do it through volume of farms and work here what note price was back in the time I think my mother had some old milk slabs and I believe they were in Keith's office where they got a dollar something a hundred dollar $0.35 a hundred weight for the milk and the golf ball and that's about all I can remember but that was that there's like a little site note we own some land which I do off Montgomery Road and there's a place up there where I can stand and look and I can count what used to be seven farmers so they're all small they're all down to all spray-farm land for their crops which is pretty amazing how it's changed and I suspect that there's more cows built on root 14 now than there ever was that I'd like to reflect on that a little bit too for those of you who are familiar with the river road that I was thinking today that if you went back 35 years if you went from the historical house and you went all the way out to the avid farm and Chester avid farm if you included this fryer you could probably count eight dairy farms that were operating at that time and where I grew up in Brookfield center there was the terrarium farm there was the pearl farm there was the rock farm there was our farm there was the milling farm and the thing that was so amazing was that when all the work was done these were all large families the terrarians and the rocks that when we get together at night we would have anywhere from 15 to 25 kids just unbelievable and I think about that so often how kids grow up today they can't get away from the television or the video game we used to just kick the can around the dark and chase each other around so the original question was about no price if there was any reflection of that I'm not sure I don't know really my concerns talking about the number of dairy farms on route 14 from Collins all the way down to Gaylord's there were 17 dairy farms of course now there's just the one and I agree there's probably more cows on route 14 now than there ever has been before but there was quite a community and Arthur Gaylord had a pile of tractor with a bucket on it and in the spring we'd stack haul manure at his house and all the neighbors up and down the valley would come with their tractors and spreaders and load up and haul there until the manure was gone and move up to Harrow-Libsons and do the same and the women would have dinner ready for them at that fire and they did that and it was really quite amazing but yeah there were two good times and I agree with Dennis I don't know what kids do today because after a night in whose hide-and-seek environment kids would come and where do we go until the bell rang it's time for better How many kids do you think there are 17 families? I don't know Steve I think Steve Allen had a question a little bit before I just wanted to know he talked about different grades with cows care? two cows and he looked at me and I think he was a father and I thought we were the same breed we had long roles we had long roles I've reminded a bit of you around Swiss how was the camera going once you had the horseman on stage and he bites you I see the cows coming up that ramp what the hell is that how do you recognize some of the breeds? we have good cows we have good cows well as long as I had that mic for just a second if that's alright yeah nowadays with dairy farming or farming you hear diversity almost constantly the farmers are diversified and they can survive but growing up you guys have mentioned diversity whether it be corn or raspberries or blueberries the levesons had chickens and Oscar had a big chicken farm and he also raised meat and here I'll put it to these guys and they want them to comment on that sure on the chicken the question is chicken we had chicken on our farm when I was just about the time I was born my parents sold the lumber off the sugar bush and built a cement stable down the stairs and after that they raised like 200 laying hens each year and I remember boxing up eggs and they went to boxing every week and then some fall the truck came and put all the old hens and wouldn't break and down the road it went and started with the new batch of chickens and eventually the price fell to the floor and that was done but chickens and eggs were a big deal well my dad used to raise about 250 chickens every spring but they were Mr's and hens both and he just asked the roosters to sell them and we kept hens to raise we raised chickens just for our own but you mentioned the minks I remember the minkfire but I also remember George Battles in the bravery he raised on a lot of mink and I was right up until I want to say the early sixies he had a minkfire and over there a big minkfire and of course earlier I mentioned we did have chickens and took the eggs down to raise the store and I might have got a little tired of cleaning the eggs but if you realize after a little while if you use your jackknife just right you get a little bit of broken eggs there maybe I shouldn't do this the only thing I remember about chickens is we had a chicken house and we had a flat roof on it and all the windows in the front one Sunday when my folks were gone my brother got up there with a rope and a water bowl and he swung the water bowl and broke all the windows the farm kids they get pretty restless on days they don't walk around they probably want the only things to have that's one of our numbers I'm quite mistaken I just can't remember nothing I'm not related to this but it's rather gradual with cows you're just having that and it's black and my brother painted a rear fender breath one more kid I need to calm down my brother Phil so my mother's got a microphone now she's going to sit I was just wondering if you had any cows that were able to expand when they opened up the barn for primary education and how did that work here come somebody who yes they were I don't know how it worked I didn't shed most cows there was a lot of them dancing upstairs but yeah they had cows in the beginning and I guess it worked all right for them they kept open cows for a while now did they charge you admission for those dances oh yeah and roller skating and roller skating and then the bar camp was the police were in charge and somebody went on a little older than I was he'd come down and check in on the car there and admission he'd like to take his hat off and put it on the car and have it bare with him put his hat back on go down and through what years well these would be 50s and late 50s but they probably went mostly through the 50s I would say into the 60s until nothing new opened up there I would say you couldn't understand why they had to throw the empty gear out of the car out into the pasture this is Arthur Gaylord what was the answer do you guys want to come can I talk you can I think whoever's next here I've got a story I wanted to tell Steve about Taylor I called him Steve earlier you mentioned I think one of the followers used to get together and use share their equipment and it would be a really nice thing I remember I think it might have been 41 so I graduated from the dump area but I was available and they told me that I might as well drive the team and ran the forklift but I wasn't having a very good luck with that team and Julian said you know you don't have to learn to toss it was Dan Harold Hage Harold Langston Julie Hill and they included Johnny Beard in the group because Johnny had kind of a hard time getting hand up and he kind of sparks in the barn and the square so they thought they'd be good neighbors but I remember when Warnshire I had been feeding and my father really worried about that he said you know this poor woman she hadn't got anything much to do with and she shouldn't have to feed us but she insisted now my father was kind of a man of few words when it came there was compliments for food and things and he came back and he said you know we had one fine dinner he said for a woman that had absolutely nothing to work with she put out a heck of a spur I remember that I didn't feel much of my life thank you alright we have some more hands yeah sure that's good enough thank you gentlemen for coming out and I appreciate it I know we're kind of tired but I think that I appreciate all your the bygone era stories but I think that I'm really interested in finding out what your thoughts are on the vanishing landscape of Vermont and the dairy farms and if any of your family is taking over or finding a different way if they're purged by or the latter well it certainly is a concern I don't know what the solution is the farms that are going now speaking of dairy bigger and bigger and bigger and they're taking more and more of the land and the smaller farms which are diversified you know organic or vegetables or both they have a hard time as well and it's a lot of work and so they're young and the time will tell after they've been doing that for 15-20 years because they are still there so it's certainly a deep concern as far as the landscape is concerned because it's always been our biggest asset from an income standpoint from the state for tourism and that sort of thing I have a brother that still has a farm he doesn't have a farm but he still owns it but it's a big concern there's one program that helps the farmers quite a lot of that used value program where your land is taxed by the use so that basically it's a traditional land property tax but without that program you see more and more land you develop to build a farm and you know it's hard to keep it all open like this without a good program like that it seems like depending more and more on tourism all the time and a lot of these little farms like the boys said they're diversified there's a lot less fire than they used to be they used to be able to go around just got any road around there there's only one or two farms that's definitely good I think that while a lot of the smaller farms have disappeared I think a lot of the farming methods in the last 15 years and the way the large farmers are picking care of their land and stopping ground off and so forth but it's keeping the property open keeping the metals open which I think is still a great tourism point I think the rebirth of the small dairy farmers you know some of the organic farmers have done it but it's a tough road to go and I don't know what the answer is yeah it's a shame to see the fields you can drive around almost any road you'll see something about 20 years ago that was an open field with a lot of projects and it's just a shame to see but it seems to be what's happening and if you go to the grocery store and read some of the labels distributed by this California company there's way in a minute this is for mom but it's got California on the labels which is a little scary back when I started farming in Wisconsin was the big dairy state they produced 30% in that area maybe 25% of the milk produced in the United States and now they're way down the line milk is made in California Arizona Mexico Texas Pennsylvania places like that the technology has made it easier to supply the market and change the complex of the whole dairy operation when I started farming I had a margin of 6% when I get out I had a margin of 2% and I don't know what it is now but it's a lot less max so in order to maintain you just have to produce more product and the computer analysis and availability of technology has made it possible for farmers to be more efficient that was a great question Sherry and with that farming it has definitely changed but these guys grew up and farmed it in the era that's brought farming to life is today whether we like it or not with that being said I've seen this one more question which I'm happy to do and then it will be 8.30 here by the time that's over I guess the last question I'm your records I I've heard tell that we are suddenly allowed to grow hemp I don't know why people aren't pulling on that bandwagon because about 20 years ago maybe a little more one of my son's friends who was in college in California sent me a list of 1,000 uses for hemp for a field in the 1850's had a lot of businesses and if we just turn these fields into hemp fields and put up a factory or two quickly ah man that's does anybody have a question come on we've had a great number of long oh now last one absolutely we've got to get to microphone and to grow hemp at this point it is legal in 12 states in the United States those states have the Department of Ag registered that the federal government does not recognize the legality of it that they're allowed in these 12 states to trial it but just having 12 states trial it the price of Canadian hemp has dropped 70% in last year and growing it there actually has to be the market demand before we don't have people resting a lot in place so from that point of view that's fine so before I let he finish we're going to put out the watermelon I also want to say that I forgot to say your thank you present and it's certainly not for weather it is a bag of air and potatoes called purple vitamin and this beautiful purple pink skin tells you how to and hopefully you can vouch for that but we will give you those at the end and I just want to really thank you it was really special just have a more round as we go through and then from there we'll close it up with respect to the milk market and depending on the volume normally there used to be 3% of the nation's milk supply and the MA was 1.8% 2% of that volume and today New England is 1.5% of the nation's milk supply and Vermont is 1% of that but when you think about all the wax that they never produced any milk in New England it wouldn't even be missed 1.5% service over production thank you, enjoy the evening and we're going to go listen to the red socks pretty soon it's been fun I have one little bit of humor about the sock it's getting like in the wake of the other night the day of the wedding and we get talking about it we had a thing on a green dress we brought it started in mind growing up on the farm there the floating bridge down here have to swim off the raft and whatnot then we get a little hungry for ice cream at the time the green trail was operating we had Jesse Fitz there who was running the fork shop restaurant well it didn't take us long to figure out the way you get a free ice cream is just walking to the fork shop just about 4.30 and she's got everything all laid out for all the hyphal gas just walking through the water she gives you an ice cream console fast and free yes I don't have anything more this far it's been fun and it's been also fun to sit here with these kids I grew up with and talk about times and as we talk more and more things come to mind that we could talk about but I'll go back to what I said originally I was so thankful that I grew up and the time that I grew up and I grew up with the community that we had at that time and these folks were all part of that and they're still here so it must be something about the era thank you I haven't think to do my dad saw that we had plenty to do pulling weeds in the garden working in the woods we had a lot of ideas alright thank you guys