A Conversation

Twenty plus years ago Carl O’Neil put two big items on his bucket list. The first was to preserve his farm. The O’Neil farm was the last remaining dairy farm in Duxbury and is a property that has been in continuous agricultural use since the early 1700s. Carl had carried on an over 100-year-old dairy business on the farm. In his words, his vision was to “make the land available as a working farm and [creates a plan] for the wildlife that could be carried on for centuries.” Carl, the conservation nonprofit Wildlands Trust, the Town of Dux-bury, and countless others worked hard to create The Historic O’Neil Farm, a nonprofit organization to own and manage the land forever. That project was finished 20 years ago. Check that off the list.

The second item on the bucket list, finding a farmer to take over the operation, would take more time, primarily because 20 years ago Carl was not ready to retire. But now, 20 years after creating the nonprofit, Carl finds himself ready to retire. The Historic O’Neil Farm, the organization he was instrumental in creating, and which he entrusted to care for his legacy, is working to find a successor farmer who can carry on Carl’s commitment to the farm and to the stewardship of the land. The board has issued a Request for Proposals and is currently reviewing the submittals.

Wanting to get Carl’s perspective on the search for a successor, I meet him on the farm. He is in the barn, where he’s probably spent a good portion of his life doing one thing or another. At the moment he is trying to sort out a problem with the automated milking system. It’s a complex network of pipes, hoses, tanks, and compressors. When it is working right it collects milk from the cows and stores it in a refrigerated holding tank. It then cleans itself through a series of acid, detergent, and hot water rinses to assure that bacteria do not grow in the pipes or tanks. When I arrive, the system of switches and valves are not communicating as they should. Carl the farmer is now Carl the repairman.

Priorities

Clearly my arrival is at an inopportune moment. And while the cows have to be milked in a few hours, Carl gives me the time to pose some questions–the first being what he might do if he were the farmer on this farm and was forty, fifty years younger. “I’d probably have a retail market for ice cream or cheese. I like cheese.” What’s his favorite cheese? “Cheddar. I like a nice cheddar.”

The farm has never had a truly retail operation. Other than the small kitchen garden that Carl keeps for himself and the chickens that the 4-H club maintains for eggs, the farm operations are strictly dairy. But Carl and his brother did try to branch out in the 1950s when they started a home delivery service for milk. The timing was not good. Supermarket chains were replacing local markets, and with that, locally sourced food was pushed out in favor of national distributors. Increased federal regulations made it difficult for small dairies to operate independently, so most farms started selling to wholesalers and cooperatives like AgriMark that then sold the milk to regional bottlers, who then sold it to the supermarkets. “People liked home delivery, but the convenience of a supermarket won out and the supermarkets undercut prices of all the local farmers.” Carl, like many farmers, had to work off the farm to make ends meet. Though he continued the farming operation, he was also the Fire Chief in Duxbury for years.

Challenges

What has been the biggest challenge of farming? I query. He laughs. There is no one thing. “Dairy farming is all a big challenge. That’s one of the reasons I like it.” He tells me it’s not like raising beef cows or other livestock that are only around for a season or two. He cites the care that dairy cows require to remain healthy: the challenge of raising calves and heifers, managing the fields so that the cows are productive. “A healthy, well-fed cow can produce over 20,000 pounds of milk a year. That is a lot of food from one animal. They are strong animals, but they work hard.”

With so many decades of farming I’m curious if there is “best moment.” “You have a lot of best moments. [In the spring] you see a field coming in beautiful and then you get a crop off it and if it doesn’t get rained on, high quality hay, and you can enjoy that right through the whole year because then you get it in the barn and you start feeding [it to the cow] and putting it out in the winter. You look at it and you know it’s good for the cows and you see how much milk you get so you get to relive your enjoyment over and over again.” He pauses and chuckles. “And then of course it can go the other way.”

I ask a few more questions, which Carl graciously answers, but I know it is time to go. I say goodbye and Carl heads back to troubleshooting the milking equipment.

As I’m leaving Carl adds that he would like to be around to see another farmer succeed. “I’ll try very hard to see that it goes in the right direction and that’s exactly what the Trust was established for.”

Thinking About It

As I write this I sit at the northern edge of the farm’s pasture where it abuts Autumn Avenue and I look toward the south where I suspect Carl is still working in the barn. Patches of the field are just starting to show signs of spring. A few green shoots stick up among the brown. Only a few trees along the margins of the field show buds. Robins poke for worms while a threesome of crows watch from the fence-line cawing at one-another, or maybe at the robins. Above, a pair of hawks soar in circles. Puffy clouds dot a blue sky.

A thin strip of mature oaks grows along the edge of Halls Brooks, where it flows across the field. Beyond the brook, through the trees and in the field beyond, I see Carl’s cows grazing. Beyond that, the dairy barn and farmhouse. In an hour or so, if the wind is just right, I might hear Carl or one of his milkers calling the girls to the barn. I have heard it many times. “Cows, Cows, Woo Hoo, Cows.” Call it a New England version of yodeling. This pastoral view has not changed in over a hundred years.

Renewed interest in “local” bodes well for any successor farmer. “I’d like to see it stay in dairy,” says Carl “but that’s not really up to me.” Carl knows that he cannot control the future—none of us can—but he can be certain that whatever the future holds for this farm it will be in agriculture, and as he would say, “hopefully dairy.” That much is enough. Find a successor farmer and check that item off the list.