Category: Years on the Farm

A Place To Take Root

Our Tay Creek Farm, The Road Back From Our Cattle, Our Barn In The Distance

Just as we were getting married, my mother-in-law-to-be told my bride-to-be, “You know David (me) has a lot of miles on him.” It was a true statement but probably not a compliment. At twenty-four years old, I had driven around the country, driven to Alaska and back, plus wandered as far north as Gander, Newfoundland, and at the time was living on the Nova Scotia shore, 1,300 miles north of Mt. Airy, North Carolina. Even so I was still looking for the right place to make a home.

After we got got married, we traveled back to Nova Scotia, and we continued my search for a place to farm and make a home. In spring of 1974, we found a farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick, twenty miles north of the provincial capital, Fredericton. The first time we looked at the farm was earlly May and there was still snow on the ground. Even with the snow, it immediately felt like home.
It was very different from where we were living in Nova Scotia. Tay Creek was an old farming community with a couple of country stores, three churches, a community hall, a saw mill, and a number of active farms. It still had a tradition of farming with horses. Where we lived in Nova Scotia was just a settlement with just a handful of houses. The Nova Scotia shore had winds that never stopped. New Brunswick had snow that only stopped long enough to give the black flies a chance to breed. There was a never-ending forest of spruce and hardwoods in New Brunswick. Nova Scotia had a rocky coast and a lot of wind-stunted spruce. New Brunswick was by far the best place to farm. It also turned out to be a great place to have our children and give them a good start in life.

For nearly a decade we put down roots and learned how to be part of a farming community. That encompassed everything from clearing snow from neighbor’s driveways with my tractor-mounted snowblower to digging a grave when someone died. We became such a part of the community that when we decided to disperse out cattle herd, many of the men pitched in to make sure our dispersal sale was successful. Even when I went to work in town, we were still a big part of the community.

One other element that I credit with building ties to the community was my haying operation. I bought standing hay off three or four old farms that were no longer being actively farmed. I got to know the older couple and most were glad for a little extra income and to have their fields cleaned up each year.

What we learned and the strong roots we developed made it much easier to live in other places. When you are twenty miles from town in area that was easily isolated, you quickly learn that you are as much your neighbor’s safety net as they are yours. Our first year in Tay Creek we had twenty-three feet of snow. My first chore every day was to shovel the sidewalk. My youngest daughter claims that the sound of snow shoveling helps her sleep. It came as no surprise when we learned that until the late fifties, the road to town was not plowed during the winter. Any winter travel was on foot or by horse-drawn sleigh. In late spring every year a bulldozer would clear the Royal Road which led to town. Some of the cohesiveness of those years was still there when we moved into the community.

At the heart of community were the country stores, the churches, and the community hall. Where we lived in Nova Scotia, neighbors rarely dropped by but it was a different story in New Brunswick. People were always stopping by to chat on the front porch and to see how things were going. Talking to each reinforced the sense of community. Not once do I ever remember anyone talking about politics.

I also learned to stand up for what was right. When the Provincial Minister of Education declared that those living in out in the country should not expect to get the same quality of education as city students, my wife and I organized our community and fought for our school with meetings and letters. I ended up in a newspaper debate with the Minister who boxed himself into a corner and ended up having to resign. I have never forgotten how it felt to win against what seemed like overwhelming odds.

Living that far from town, we also learned to be self-sufficient. We had wood heat, spring-fed water, a generator and plenty of food in the cellar and freezer from our gardens and cattle. We even had a flock of hens who never failed to give us some eggs and a Guernsey cow that provided three gallons of rich milk every day. If something broke, I fixed it unless it was a serious problem with one of the diesel tractors. We built two huge barns and I often could be seen at the far end of one barn with an electric welder or acetylene torch. I was carpenter, electrician, and plumber. We faced blizzards not with fear but with a sense of calm, ready for whatever the storm could throw at us. We were the farm that people came to if they were stuck and needed pulling out of a ditch.

What we learned from farming for a decade served me well. I used to joke with the computer sales people I was training that if you could convince someone that one of two black cows was worth a thousand dollars more than the other because of its genetics, you could sell almost anything to anyone.

By the time we moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, the roots that we had put down in Tay Creek served us well in making a home there, and later in Columbia, Maryland, and Roanoke, Virginia. There was nothing that office politics could throw at you that came close to a blizzard at minus forty with 60 MPH winds and a cattle herd a mile away through the woods that needed to be fed.

Yards Connect Us To The Soil

Our Backyard After The First Mowing Of 2026

People outside the cities in the first half of the twentieth century likely kept their connection to the soil by gardening and small-scale farming. By the time I was growing up in the fifties in Lewisville, North Carolina, yards, flowers, and shrubs had largely replaced gardening for food as a connection. As a youngster the condition of our grassy yard often stood between me and a trip to my uncle Henry’s fishing ponds. My mother who claimed the only yard she had as a child was packed dirt swept with broom straw wanted our American-dream yard neatly clipped. In driving by our old home, I am little disappointed the town did not put in sidewalks in front of our house during my youth. It would have eliminated the slope on the front yard. It was by far the hardest part of the yard to mow as a youngster.

Going away to military school (high school) and then college got me out of mowing yards for almost a decade. My first home after graduation was a two-hundred year old farm house located in a sheep pasture on the Fundy coast of Nova Scotia. No sheep came with the old farm house but long grass around the house did not bother me as a young farmstead owner. When I first moved there in the summer of 1971, the yard was the least of my worries. Getting hot water plumbed and running so we could stop taking showers at the local campground was close to the top of the list. By the second summer I had a tractor with a nine-foot-wide bush hog which I used to mow around the house a couple of times a summer. That was all I judged it needed in my days of being single. After all, I mowed plenty of mature grass or hay, starting with the twenty acre field behind the house which served as one of the few very nice backyards in my adult life.

Then came the summer of 1973, and I married Glenda, the love of my life. She came from the world of well-manicured yards in North Carolina. Her mother often mowed their yard twice, the second time against the grain, just to catch any grass that might pop up after the first mowing. Sometime during the summer of 1974, Glenda decided the long grass had to go. She and my neat-lawn-loving mother who was visiting us formed a conspiracy. They drove down the mountain to Bridgetown ten miles away and came home with a Toro push mower. The yard became manicured soon afterwards. I spent much of the next forty-forty years sharing the task of mowing whatever yard happened to be attached to our personal home.

For the ten years or so when we lived on our farm in Tay Creek, we had a nice riding lawn mower which was adequate for much of the yard. Even Glenda did some mowing. When we lived in Halifax, our yard was postage-stamp sized. By the time we arrived on the mountain in Roanoke, Virginia, I had come to somewhat enjoy mowing. There are those times in your life when something as simple as mowing a yard can be very satisfying because you can actually see what you have done.

One of the immutable laws of mowing is that the farther south you live, the more miserable the task of mowing can be. Sometimes, even the most careful home yard person can end mowing in the oppressive heat of the day like I did more times than I want to admit after we moved to the North Carolina coast. As I wrote then, there is a true brotherhood of Southerners (both men, women, and teenagers) who have mowed yards when they never should have. I almost had a heat stroke once mowing our big yard there.

Mowing is one of those circular things in life. In your early years, you are too young to push a mower, so it seems fitting that in the later years of life, it is also okay to be too old to push a mower. You come to a point when you are faced with either hiring someone to mow the yard or buying a riding mower which I’m told requires better reflexes than we older folks have. Since I spent many years straddling a John Deere farm tractor, we chose not to revisit those days after a back problem slowed me somewhat. For a couple of years, I shared the task with our mowing service, choosing the hard spots that required a push mower for myself. However, it was an easy transition to giving it all up. When we made our 2021 move from the land of coastal centipede grass back to the fescue grasses of the Piedmont, we left our third Toro mower with the father and son team that was doing our mowing. I even gave them my gas-powered trimmer. After all by then i was over 70 years old.

When our current, very capable mowing team shows up, I know the noise will be over with in a few minutes as opposed to the hours that it would have taken me with a push mower. I still enjoy our green space especially the backyard which is the nicest we have had since that twenty-acre field that came with our first home.

We are trying to go more natural in the backyard by not using any chemicals or herbicides. I would like to see more fireflies and butterflies like I remember from my youth. No one ever worried about a little clover showing up in your yard in those days.

We continue to garden a little like old southerners are supposed to do. However, I have backed off the serious gardening that I did in 2023 and the slightly less ambitious garden of 2024. My six Cherokee Purple tomato plants produced over four hundred and eighty tomatoes in the summer of 2024. We had to sell some at a produce stand after we filled our freezer. Last summer we cut back to three tomato plants. This summer maybe we will have one or two, but I have already been out digging in the garden getting it ready. There is no danger of me losing my connection to the soil for a while longer.

No Regrets-Years On The Land

Headed Home On The Road That Took Me To The Cattle

After I graduated from Harvard, I spent over a decade on the land. First, I was part of the early back to the land movement and then later as a cattleman with two hundred head of cattle before we sold them all in fall of 1982 after enduring 20% interest rates. It was a hard life with little room for error and no vacations but the rewards and lessons far outweighed the challenges.
My training other than my Boy Scout years involved wandering the woods shooting the odd squirrel as a teenager, fishing whenever I got a chance, lots of camping during college, and a summer traveling to Alaska in my Dodge Powerwagon. Studying colonial history during my college years had little value when I headed off the Nova Scotia and the old farmhouse on 140 acres overlooking the Bay of Fundy that I bought with my mother’s help.
Rebuilding the old two-hundred year old farm house was really where the training started. I grew up without a dad so I had no one to teach me many of the skills that I needed in 1971. It is surprising how much I could pick up from the free Sears Roebuck manuals on electrical wiring and plumbing. Carpentery I learned from friends who spent some time in Nova Scotia with me that first six months. Gardening and farming I learned from Roedale Press, Malabar Farm, Living the Good Life, Firefox, and the Whole Earth Catalog.
I learned how to do a Thanksgiving dinner when a handful of Harvard/Radcliffe graduates came to see the place that had captured my soul. It was the first turkey any of us had ever cooked but we managed even the careful negotiations on how much celery went in the stuffing. I had grown up knowing the basics of cooking since my single mother often worked late and if I wanted to eat, some knowledge of getting food on the table was essential.
Gardening while guided by the books but was heavily infludenced by having actual hands in the dirt. I was lucky the first old farm had some giant piles of ancient well-rotted chicken manure. The combination of great compost and Nova Scotia’s foggy shore was so good for growing broccoli, we often picked it in five gallon buckets. The cattle started with a few head on the Nova Scotia place, but I quickly figured out the Nova Scotia shore was a lousy place to raise cattle.
In the summer of 1973, I married a wonderful Southern lady who had grown up in the same area as me. Her mother was a part of the same growing, canning, and cooking environment that my mother had lived. By the fall of 1974, we had found our farm in the hardwood hills north of Fredericton, New Brunswick. There there was plenty of advice on how to farm. I incorporated some of those ideas with my own plans. By 1975 we were wintering our Angus herd in the woods and putting up our hay in round bales. My only help was the previous owner of the farm. He had farmed with horses and eventually a small tractor to help with the loose hay he put up annually. Even in his sixties he took to the world of big tractors like a duck to water. He also helped me build a couple of big barns, one 128 ft by 41 ft and the other 69 ft by 64 ft.
By the time the barns were done, we were putting up 200 to 300 tons of hay per year. I could build anything from kitchen cabinets with my radial arm saw to barns with a chain saw. I could use a welder and an acetelyene torch. I had survived working in over 100F temperatures to to feeding cattle in minus 40F a mile back from our farmhouse. In the dozen or so years we lived on the farm, I amassed enough stories to fill a lifetime. The experiences carried me through a coporate career and have defined my life.
My wife and I still have special friends from those years on the farm. Our lives were fundamentally different from those living off the grid today but many of the lessons we learned are the same being learned in Alaska. We heated with wood, supplied our house with running spring water, grew much of our own food including having a milk cow and chickens. The freezer was always full of beef and there was never a shortage of potatoes in the cellar or vegetables we had canned. We lived in a close-knit community where the men dug everyone’s graves and when the funeral was over, they went out and put their overalls on and gathered their shovels to fill the grave.
We battled as much as 23 feet of snow in one year. It was wild enough that we had no fences in the back of our farms. In the early years snowshoeing on six feet of snow was common. I know what it means to grow animals which you end up eating. My wife’s first lesson in local food was walking into our Nova Scotia kitchen early one morning and seeing a freshly dressed lamb that I had hung from the top of a door frame so I could cut it up. We sometimes ate salmon that the local tribles sold door to door. There were even a few meals of wild native brook trout. In the spring we gathered fiddlehead greens from the marshes. Before our cattle herd got so large we could often pick chantrelle mushroom from the edge of the forest. They were a staple when we lived in Nova Scotia.
The challenges that we faced on the edge of civilization made us stronger people. Living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Columbia, Maryland, Roanoke, Virginia, and Cape Carteret, North Carolina ground any rough edges off of us and helped us give our three children, all born on the farm, a good start in life. Even at 77 years old, I still garden and I love the feel of rich dirt in my hands.
I have no regrets about the years that I spent living on the land.

Everyone Needs A Wild Spot

Snowy Woods Road, Tay Creek, New Brunswick, Canada

The years in Cambridge drove my need to escape to wild places, I explained.
Goose, “I was born into the wild so getting close to it makes my fur feel alive.”
Me, “Does your fur feel alive when you go out on the screened porch?”
Goose, “The outdoor air smells different. Sometimes I can smell other animals like foxes. The wildest thing I have ever smelled is that long-haired cat that sneaks around the house. That puffs up my tail.”
Me, “I have always had to travel a little to my wild places but the reward has always been far greater than the effort.”
Goose, “Going to a place where you can focus all your senses on what is around you is very rewarding. If you close your eyes, you can imagine the place you are visiting in a different light. The screened porch in the morning is not a screen porch at all. It is a hill overlooking a grass-filled meadow filled with little creatures and the occasional larger creature that causes my fur to stand on end.”
Me, “Does you mind let you wander the meadow?”
Goose, “Even better, my mind absorbs the meadow environment so when I nap, I am actually out in the meadow hunting in my dreams.”
Me, “That’s very human-like. The older I get the more my dreams try to pull together pieces of places that I have been. I often find myself in a problem-solving situation that I never quite have enough time to finish.”
Goose, “We all try to solve problems in our dreams. I am always trying to open a can of pop-top cat food. My dreams have never figured out how my two paws can do that.”
Me, “You are very talented with paws, I have seen you take your paw and wrap it around a knob on a cabinet door and pull it open.”
Goose, “Yes, my paws are big enough to do that, It is easier if one of my sisters is there to use their paw to hold the door open while I change positions.”
Me, “I haven’t been to my special place in the park here in a while. It is a bench among the tall oaks with a tiny brook nearby. I am hoping that as warm weather returns, I will get back there. I know that I need it.”
Goose, “Hopefully you still have some of those wild places stored away in your mind.”
Me, “Yes, I have written about my special wild placesmany times. Those posts and the pictures attached to them are a great help.”
Goose, “We all need to pull ourselves out of our daily live to get some perspective.”
Me, “I agree. Once I did it so successfully that in my dreams I was flying fifty feet above my life. I still remember how vivid those images were. I could see things I never imagined. This was in the eighties, well before drones. It was very different that any experience in my real life.”
Goose, “Our brains work in mysterious ways. Mine is telling me that I need a nap.”
Me, “Yeah, I think you are overdue.”

A Life of Icy Roads

An icy road in the woods, five days after our second storm of the year.

The first time that I can remember facing an icy road, it was probaby 1961. I was a twelve-year old passenger in car headed back from Camp Raven Knob, a Boy Scout camp west of Mt. Airy, North Carolina. Adults had come to rescue us from another frozen, icy night in the three-sided Adirondack lean-tos. I wasn’t particularly worried about the icy roads because I wasn’t driving.
Seven years later I am home for the holidays from college and my mother is hosting a Christmas party in Mt. Airy, NC, for her extended family which are mostly from the next country over. Mount Airy is in the transition area between the hill country and the Blue Ridge Mountains. Weather forecasting in the sixties was a little more rudimentary and a snowstorm hit early in the afternoon. Snowstorms are not every day occurences in the North Carolina foothills. Our relatives were becoming worried about getting home. I was going to school in Massachusetts so my old Bronco had snow tires on all four wheels. I offered to escort a convoy through the worst hills. It might have been the first time I had driven in North Carolina snow which isn’t anything like northern snow. It is rare when NC snow isn’t slush or packed ice. That first trip was in slush which is no problem with snow tires. Everyone drove in my tracks and I took them half way home to the point there was hardly any snow on the road. I was young and probably didn’t worry about it very much.
There were many opportunities to drive on snowy roads during college. Four of us even took a trip to Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island in November our junior year. Cape Breton welcomed us with snow, sleet and freezing rain. We faced some very cold camping and tough driving in the old Bronco.
After graduating college, I moved to eastern Canada. Over the course of the next seventeen years I owned a variety of snow worthy vehicles from Land Rovers to Land Cruisers and 4WD trucks. We even had 4WD drive tractors on our 400 acres farmland.
My wife was in her orange rear wheel drive Volvo wagon on a very snowy day coming back from the doctor with our first child who had swallowed a bunch of Flintsone vitamins. The syrup of ipecac hadn’t worked at the doctor’s office. I had just found out when I came in from barn chores and rushed to the doctor’s office in my trusty 4WD Chevy pickup. I crested a hill as I was speeding to the clinic and there was my wife’s car stopped in the middle of the road. She had stopped because our daughter had started throwing up and she was afraid she would choke in her car seat. I didn’t have time to think, I avoided hitting my wife and daughter by putting the truck into a snow filled ditch. With the big snowbanks, I ended up safe, and I rode home with my wife, grabbed a tractor and a neighbor and we retrieved the truck without any problems.
Snowbanks along the rural roads were a great safety feature. You could slide into a snowbank without worrying about damaging your car. After we quit farming, I became a sales manager for the first Apple microcomputer dealer in the area. I had to travel to three locations in New Brunswick, one in PEI and another in Halifax, Nova Scotia. At first I did it in my old front wheel drive Subaru. One time I came home from a trip and was barely able to get the Subaru far enough in the driveway so I could get our tractor and snow blower around it.
Soon after that I switched to a rear wheel drive Volvo sedan. I put snow tires on all four wheels and fifty pounds of sand over each rear wheel in the trunk. I went everywhere in it. After I joined Apple, I once drove my sales manager from Toronto from Fredericton, New Brunswick to Charlottetown, PEI in a blizzard. He was amazed what the Volvo would go through and even more surprised at the ice encrusted ferry that we took to the island.
Four years later we are living on a mountainside overlooking Roanoke, Virginia. We bought an AWD Nissan our first winter there. We had a variety of AWD vehicles there from Subarus and Grand Cherokees to my wife’s AWD Volvo wagon and my AWD Acura MDX. The little Nissan Axcess was a favorite because I could put chains on all four wheels. There were storms when Little Limo as she was fondly known was the only safe way up and down our mountain. I ferried many people with groceries up and down the mountain to their parked cars at the foot of the hill over our seventeen years there. The Acura with its locking AWD mode was the second best vehicle on the mountain. It is still with us and now 21 years old.
We lived on the NC coast for sixteen years and only had ice a few times. With no hills it is not much of challenge. Here in the Piedmont where we now live there are certainly enough hills to make things interesting but snow and ice is a rarity. Still in the last two weeks we have had two storms, one four inches of sleet and the other a foot of fluffy snow. We had no need to go out but I did go to our butcher shop located on the ice road pictured at the took. The Acura MDX never hesitated even a couple of really icy hills. It brought back some memories, even a snowy one to Newfoundland pictured below.

Toyota Land Cruiser on a snowy road to nowhere in Newfoundland, March 1973

Doing it the hard way

In the sixties or early seventies, the back to land movement was well known. The 1968 Whole Earth Catalog was the instruction manual dedicated to it. Helen and Scott Nearing were its inspirational grandparents. Many in my generation’s back to the land movement were vegetarians like the Nearings. Some were vegetarian by choice and others because of necessity. Because of my proclivity to cattle and farming, I studied Louis Bromfield’s book, Malabar Farm. Today there there is a new generation of people going back to the land.
In this century they are known by the label “off grid.” Few of those folks are openly vegetarians. This new generation proudly hunts and fishes for protein to supplement what they grow. Though their animals are more likely goats than cows, there are some with cows and even horses.
Many of today’s off grid folks are often in places deliberately difficult to reach. Most back to the landers in the seventies went where they could find cheap land whether it was alongside a road like my house and barn or back in the boonies where my friends in the dome lived.
During the seventies, the rural Annapolis Valley where we shopped did not have supermarkets. It had small grocery stores and cooperatives where you could get your food, your baler twine, and some beef fattener for your steer all in one shopping trip. Beaver Fruit Cooperative got most of our business. I also did some bulk orders with the folks in the dome. We had a local hardware and a Sears catalogue store which is where we ordered our appliances.
There were times in the early seventies when I thought about getting farther from the roads that connected us to the rest of the world. Reality always intruded. I thought about homesteading in Newfoundland, but my wife took one look and said I would be homesteading alone. I even found a great spot high on a hill on my land in Nova Scotia.
It is pictured at the top of the post. It was over a mile off the road which does not sound very far until you factor in the heavy clay soil and the astronomical expense of building a mile-long gravel road where gravel is in short supply. Then there would be the likely impossible task of getting power to the homestead. In those days there were no solar panels and battery systems to give you electricity off grid. Drilling water wells on our North Mountain was also problematic.
By the time we moved to New Brunswick we were well on the track for serious farming. We still gardened on a large scale, had chickens, and a milk cow. We did move to having someone butcher our annual steer for us instead of doing it ourselves. In creating our farm, we built well over a mile and a half of roads with New Brunswick’s ready supply of gravel over our rocky soils. I also convinced New Brunswick power to bring power a quarter of a mile back to the new barns that we built. We drilled a well back by the barns. It provided so much water that it was hard to measure.
So by 1976, all the elements were in place for us to move farther from the village of Tay Creek near our new barns but with no close neighbors. It wasn’t in the cards. While we had not had a great experience with the people of St. Croix Cove, the people of Tay Creek had been so welcoming that neither my wife or I would consider having the village become less accessible. It was also a great convenience to be by the road where the school bus picked up our children. It turned out we liked being part of our small farming village. We valued the connections of people dropping by to chat. I did not even mind cleaning the driveways of some residents who became close friends. When we needed them, our farming neighbors were there to help as much as they could.
In the end it seems the biggest difference between the back to the land movement of the sixties and seventies and today’s off grid homesteader is that the homesteader of today is often working to isolate themselves from others. In the sixties and seventies back to landers were still interested in community. I loved the small country stores, but today’s off grid folks are much more likely to seek out the anonymity of COSTCO. The money that some make from YouTube makes it even easier to not have ties with nearby communities. We were part of communities because we needed connections and income. Even today you will find exceptions and some off grid folks are much more community oriented than others. However, when I hear the term off grid what comes to mind are people living in places that are only accessible by four wheel drive, snow mobile or ice road for at least part of the year.

Life Sneaks Up On You

The Royal Road, Tay Creek, New Brunswick, Canada

Just after I graduated college in the summer of 1971, instead of going to Law School, I headed off to Nova Scotia. I was part of the generation that felt strongly about getting back to the land and understanding a lot of things that modern society was hiding from us.

A decision like that is possible when you are young, I believe that as age and life will sneak up on you, it gets much harder to go off on your own in a wild adventure as you age. How older people have done it, remains a mystery to me.

Eventually, I got married and my wife and I moved to what I considered a real farm or at least one that I believed that I could make into a modern farm. We never really gave up all modern conveniences like many back-to-the-landers. One of the first things that I installed in our Nova Scotia farmhouse was a dishwasher. I also put one in our home in New Brunswick. I plowed my garden with a John Deere tractor not a horse.

The road in the picture ran 20 miles back to Fredericton, the capital of New Brunswick. We were lucky to have schools, churches, a couple of general stores and medical services in our little community of Tay Creek. Forty years after we left, the churches and general stores are gone. If you want to buy gasoline or a nail, you have to go to Fredericton.

Taking on building a home for your family in an isolated spot which at the time was subject to amazing snow storms is something you only do when you are young and your body can take on almost any challenge. In my twenties and thirties, I never doubted that I could do everything for my family aside from medical care and schooling. Plumbing, electrical wiring, installing appliances, those were expected of the folks who lived beyond the city. There was no one to hire to mow a yard or even change faucet. While we had an oil furnace, most of our heat came from a wood stove. The furnace would come on during the early morning hours as the house cooled. Our water came from a spring. Our food came from our garden, our milk cow, chickens and cattle herd.

As nice as the life on your own in the hardwood hills of New Brunswick was, it was non-stop work. It was ten years before we went on a real vacation. After we left the farm, we mostly lived in suburbs. Seven years after leaving the farm we were in subdivision on the side of a mountain in SW Virginia. For many years I kept the steep slope behind the house clear of brush and small trees. It meant working with a chainsaw on a hill where I could barely stand. Fortunately, I never got injured. It was another activity reserved for youth.

By the time we got to our next house twenty-four years after leaving the farm, the strenuous work was down to mowing the yard, keeping our skiff running, and hurricane preparation. Good preparation for a hurricane often meant the cleanup afterwards was relatively easy. A storm like Hurricane Florence meant extra cleanup for everyone in the area no matter how much you prepared. The older you get, the harder all that is. Polywood outdoor furniture is nice until you have to haul it all into the garage.

When we moved from the coast in 2021, my wife and I were both over seventy. We were far from our children and family. Our house had too many steps and we were both tired of the hurricane routine in spite of never having any real damage to our house.

My wife had almost five acres of raw farmland which was a hayfield in Surry County. We briefly considered building a home there, but quickly decided that we were too old for all the work needed to build a home so we found a great subdivision with public sewer, water, and fiber Internet. Moving to North Carolina Piedmont close to where I grew up has turned out to be a wise decision.

We are glad that we moved when we did. We have friends our age that would like to move from the coast but have decided that they are too old to try. I can relate to their feelings. Getting our coastal home ready to sell and moving with our four kittens was not the easiest thing that I have ever done. I am pretty sure that three years later, I would be reluctant to move again unless I just had to move.

You don’t think about these things when you are young and can handle anything. Life can sneak up on you. It is good to plan a little for the time when you can no longer take on the world with one arm tied behind your back.

All in on Cattle

Our red Angus bull, Yellowstone, with a small part of the herd- 1981

My first cattle were purchased in the summer of 1973, when we were living in the two-hundred year old post and beam house along the Bay of Fundy in the village of St. Croix Cove. I laugh when I tell the story that our cattle got mixed up with a dairy farmer’s herd and I barely knew enough to separate the two herds.

It did not take much farming on the North Mountain of the Annapolis Valley to figure out that there had to be better places to make hay than a slope that was often covered with fog during the haying season.

I was looking for a new place to farm when I met my wife, Glenda, on a blind date while visiting my mother back in North Carolina. I guess the theory was that a beautiful North Carolina girl would keep me in North Carolina. It did not work and the beautiful North Carolina lady headed off to Canada where we even explored Newfoundland as option for our next farm.

Finally, in the summer of 1974, one year after we got married, we found our farm. It was in the rolling hardwood hills north of New Brunswick’s provincial capital, Fredericton. It was a good place to make hay with much warmer summers than Nova Scotia. It also had winter weather that tended towards snow instead of rain, snow, rain, snow, and finally freezing rain which was typical of the Nova Scotia coast.

When we moved, we sold our first cattle and started fresh. We probably had a couple dozen in the herd that first winter. I was still learning and I got talked into tying the mature females in the barn that first winter. It was the first and last time that we would do that. After a trip to Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta to buy some better brood stock, I was convinced the cattle would be better in the woods than a damp barn. For the next eight years we ran our cattle outside in the winter. For the last few years, we calved an average of sixty cows per year.

The important statistic is that we never had a vet on the farm for a calving problem or a sick calf. We were heavily mechanized using a round baler to put up 300 t0 400 large round bales per year.

The large framed Angus and big bulls that we imported from the west turned out to be pretty popular. We had a good spring trade of selling performance tested yearly bulls. Our cull bulls were sold for beef at twelve months of age.

As we had got several daughters from our original feedstock, we started selling them for breeding stock and replacing them with their daughters. It was a lot of work and lots of promotional work. Yellowstone, our giant red Angus bull from Montana was a show stopper for most people.

In the fall of 1982, we dispersed our herd. Interest rates had risen to 20% and according to the Provincial farm board, we were too successful to qualify for a government-backed two percent loan. I always thought it was because I was a young American with too many new ideas for them to swallow.

In 1974, when I started farming in New Brunswick, I was one of a handful of farmers using round bales to put up their hay. The Provincial Agriculture people told me round would never work in New Brunswick’s climate.

Unfortunately the statistics were on my side. I fed two hundred head of cattle with them for over eight years. I was also told that running the cattle outside would never work. We built two large barns designed around the theory that a cow could have its calf outside in the snow and spend a night or two in a barn before the cow and calf went back outside. Yearlings had a large pole barn to run into during bad weather. We never lost a calf to a cow calving in the snow.

When I went back to New Brunswick forty years later, I found my two barns still standing, almost everyone using round balers, and very few cattle farmers. I guess that shows how effective agricultural experts can be in destroying cattle farming when they put their minds to it.

There have been lots of things that pushed farmers out of beef cattle but having clueless agricultural experts certainly didn’t help. I have often wondered if would still be farming if I had gotten the two precent provincially-backed loan.

My son and I walking through the herd during the summer of 1981

Haying Stays In Your Blood

Hayfield
Hayfield Near Farmington, North Carolina, April 22, 2023

Of the over fifty years that I have worked since I graduated college, only a little over a decade was spent farming. I did grow up in North Carolina in the fifties and sixties when everyone we knew had gardens, some had chickens, and even a few had a milk cow. It was not unusual to see hog killings in the fall and to receive some fresh country sausage as a gift.

The land was what gave life to us all, and where we go when life is gone. The land was at the center of all, and how could understand anything without first being on the land?

The Road to My Country

I felt that I had to go back to land. I was a little shellshocked after the sixties, four years in a military school and another four in the funny lights of Cambridge. I bought an old farm in Nova Scotia the summer that I graduated from Harvard. The skies in Nova Scotia were like the ones I remembered in my youth.
The urge to work the soil was strong even though I did not grow up on a farm. The immersion course we got in farming was intense but somehow we thrived for over a decade. We might have stayed on the farm if interest rates had not hit twenty percent in the early eighties and there were better local opportunities for our children. We dispersed our cattle in the fall of 1982 and sold the farm three years later after I spent a couple of years working in the city.

Farming has stayed with me all these years, even during my years in technology. It was only a year or two ago when I was driving from our home at the coast through the Virginia Mountains to headquarters when I saw a field of grass down. It was well on its way to being ready to be becoming hay. I had to stop, roll down the windows and enjoy the smells and remember all the good memories.
It was not unusual for our “team,” Harvey and I to put up sixty tons of hay in a good day. Harvey was in his sixties when I bought his farm which he had farmed with horses. We sometimes cut hay with two nine-foot mower conditioners. The big fields Harvey would rake with our twenty-one foot rake and the small fields with a ten-foot rake. I would bale with the big Vermeer baler and one of the 105 HP International tractors.
You could start cutting hay in the morning while the dew was still on it. Raking the hay before noon was okay, but I rarely started baling the hay until the afternoon. Large windrows that the tractor could barely straddle helped me churn out a nearly 2,000 pound bale every five to ten minutes depending on how much turning had to be done. When the hay was rolled up, we left it in the field until we had time to haul it back to the farm in the fall. Our hay farm was a couple of miles from where we kept the cows. We also cut hay all around the area wherever we could strike a deal with the owners. Before our children came, my wife even used to rake hay.

On a good day, making hay was something that gave you a feeling of accomplishment. A good crop of hay started with clearing the field of brush and rocks, applying lime, then working the ground, planting the grass seed in an oat cover crop, and sometimes fertilizing the fields in the spring. It doesn’t sound like much but it was lots of back-breaking work and sweat.

There were bad days making hay. Our mowers in those days had cutter bars with blades riveted on them. If you hit a rock and broke a blade, you had to stop and replace it. There are few things dirtier that replacing a blade on a mower conditioner cutter bar that has been collecting bugs, seeds, and dust for ten acres on its platform. If you didn’t itch from something that got on you, just remembering all the bugs would make you itch. The worst thing is when the equipment broke when you had hay ready to bale and wet weather was on the way. You try to forget those days. Getting hay that was ready to be baled dry after it was rained on is not a lot of fun.

There were some great memories from those haying seasons. Sometimes I would stop for lunch and my wife and the kids would show up with a real lunch. While my wife and I ate lunch, the kids would pick red raspberries on the rock piles. There were no snakes so it was as safe as it could be. Few of the raspberries they picked made it to us but they were so plentiful you could pick all that you wanted in a few minutes. The hay farm was high on a ridge and you could see for miles. There were no places any nicer on a summer day in the hardwood hills of New Brunswick.

It should be no surprise that I stopped recently to look at a field of grass (pictured above) that needed cutting. It is the last week of April here in North Carolina. There will be no thoughts other than my dreams of cutting hay in New Brunswick, Canada for another couple of months.
If I am lucky in the next two to three weeks, I will get to smell some curing hay in our rural area. I can hardly wait because it is still in my blood.

We Find Our Farm

An aerial photo which a super-imposed elevation of our old farm with picture of the house, a barn, and some cattle.
Tay Ridge Angus Aerial Photo

While we were still working on our old farm house the winter of 1973-74, we were also trying to find a place to move where we could have more success farming. When I look back on it, I am amazed that we found a place which was forgiving enough for us to take what little we knew about farming and have a run at being successful. Still I wanted to work the soil.
We looked in several places in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island without much success. We took a trip to New Brunswick from St. Croix Cove to deliver Sophie, the goat, and to lend a hand moving to my college roommate and his wife. Mostly my job was to upgrade the electrical panel in the old house that they had purchased.
The trip there was quite an adventure, the Saint John River was flooding and as I have said many times, the only way we made it through the flooded roads was staying in the wake of a tractor trailer that was in front of us on the Trans Canada highway.
This was well before cellphones and the Internet so you might say that we were flying blind but we got there, delivered Sophie, and on the first weekend in May after surviving a night in my roommate’s newly purchased and almost flooded old house, we had a look at a nearby farm that would become Tay Ridge Angus.
It was a spur of the moment decision to look at farm near where my college roommate had found his old farm. It was the first weekend in May. There was still snow on the ground. A rational person would have said snow in May, no way.
My wife and I have talked about it a number of times, but we were hardly on the farm when it was clear that it was love at first sight. The farm had a lot of sheltered areas where cattle could be kept in the woods during the winter. There were plenty of streams and brooks for water, and the land matched the soils that I hoped to farm.
We finally came to an agreement with owner that carved off a couple of acres on the front of the farm so he could build a new house and have a garden spot.
It would take a few years, but Harvey, the previous owner, would become the main help on my farm which he had farmed mostly with horse-drawn equipment. He would transition from raking with a converted horse-drawn rake to a double one that was over twenty feet wide. It made the Vermeer round baler that I built the farm around very happy.
After one winter with a few cows housed in an old barn, I transitioned to cattle running in the woods and calves born on the snow. It turned out to be a wise decision. In the seven years that we farmed there, we never had the vet on the farm. Even Harvey came to believe that cattle were healthier outside and that in spite of what the Dept. of Agriculture said, round bale hay worked for them.
In hind sight, there are a lot of things I might have done differently, the first being to have kept our herd smaller. A lot of things and cows are one of them, you have to learn the hard way, having just a few cows is a hard lesson to learn. We eventually got to two hundred head. It was too much work and required too much equipment. However, that was the dynamics of farming then, get big or get out. The second is that I would have tried harder to get a government-backed 2% loan. We tried once and were turned down.
The twenty per cent interest rates on our operating loan killed us while our neighbors with 2% loans did just fine. We could have built a third bard to store our hay and save a lot of waste. However, with no government loans, we crunched the numbers, weighed the options and decided going to work in town was the better of the two. We had a very successful dispersal sale. We sold our cattle in the fall of 1981. I went to work helping people market their cattle but quickly moved to selling computers in the fall of 1982 and by the fall of 1984, I was working for Apple which turned out to be a career of nearly twenty years which came with a good dose of magic before my wings melted.
Still, I would love to relive those years on the farm with the knowledge and skills that I have gotten since then. However, I doubt the old body would hold up to all the work that a farm, even a modern one, requires.