Hi there,
What a summer. It has been absolutely packed, top to bottom. The farm & creamery crews have been tending to the myriad tasks each day requires. Come September, when the burnout is creeping in, but I know it would be so much more severe in the absence of our incredible crew, I experience immense gratitude for what we’ve all accomplished in this glorious but impossibly busy season.
We’ve had so many visitors to the farm this year. We certainly don’t keep track but it feels as though the number of people who come through grows significantly year over year. We’ve had school groups of all ages, employees from the stores we sell to, other farmers, ag support groups, customers from all over Maine, and from time to time, people from far flung places throughout the country, and beyond.
To witness people’s reactions to the farm is always entertaining. The initial wall of smell that hits upon arrival - animals, grass, dust, manure, diesel - may elicit mild revulsion, or can be redolent of childhood for people who span a wide range of ages.
There was a group of Food Coop employees here a couple weeks ago, and after sampling yogurt we all went into a paddock where many large cow mamas are in the home stretch of their pregnancy, grazing and gestating. To watch these sweet folks greet the cows so gently, yet with such overflowing enthusiasm was truly, sincerely, a joy.
I love experiencing, second hand, older folk’s nostalgia as it comes over them in the dooryard. Whether what they’re reminded of is their own home farm from childhood, a neighbor’s farm, a first work experience, a relative’s farm visited every summer, what they recount is so specific, down to a detail about an animal they connected with, a farmhouse wood stove, fresh milk, sometimes a brush with danger or injury while operating equipment. The stories always involve at least one eccentric character, sometimes many.
I love the children who scrunch their noses at the first whiff of the farm, shriek at the sight of a cow peeing, do some pretend puking. At the end of a visit when I ask what smells they’re noticing, they’re often surprised at having gone somewhat nose blind to the smell, and how it now barely registers. I hope these kids are lucky to frequent farms throughout their lives and that some of those visits might transport them back to a dairy farm in Monmouth, Maine. May the magic trick of olfactory time travel bring them right back to where a calf licked them, they got to harvest grass and feed it by hand to dairy cows, or how they found a perfectly intact snake skin in the pasture while eating lunch under the shade trees as cows grazed nearby.
Farms give our lives such texture. They are messy, smelly, chaotic, and overwhelming. They are peaceful, expansive, rich with life, and no matter how we individually interact with farms, they are a well into which we pour our care for our communities, and by extension, the world.
To work on a farm, to partake in the food a farm produces, to recommend a farm to a neighbor, to understand the place and importance of farms, means to acknowledge their essential role in the order of our modern world. People will always need to eat, they will always need to trust the people who produce their food, and the land where that food begins needs to be stewarded with an intent eye towards the future, may it be long, may it be abundant, may it be peaceful.
Warmly, from all of us here at the Milkhouse,
Cait
*Thoreau
