Freedom On The Farm

Academic Anne Buchanan relates the daily routine of her sister Jennifer, a dairy farmer in Vermont:

Farmers have an old saying: ‘I’ll keep farming until the money runs out.’ Working a small farm makes for a hardscrabble life — no time off and always something more to do, usually for very little pay. But, after the animals are hayed, grained, watered, milked and midwifed, sick ones taken care of, hooves trimmed, bales of hay stacked in the haymow or the driveway ploughed — and more often than not, the neighbour’s too — broken pipes fixed, the neighbour’s errant cows shooed back into their fields, milk processed and yogurt made, the broken hay tedder repaired midfield, lunch served and dinner prepared; if there’s any time left in the day, and amazingly there often is, Jennifer and Melvin are free to do whatever they want to with it. They answer to no…