The sadness of farm closure

By Becky Nelson
Bramblings
As I struggled to find time to write this week’s column, and struggled just as hard to pick a topic, I thought perhaps I should write about the struggle. Spring and early summer are hard times for us here at the farm. Heading into our busiest season of the year out of our slowest season of the year for income, it is always a stressful time. Usually, our loyal customer base helps us through this very scary financial time for us, but a slump in business to below receipts of a decade ago and the changing nature and habits of our customers has put a tremendous financial and psychological strain on us farmers as we try to continue doing business as usual.

As I read a story this week about Taylor Farm in Meriden going out of the dairy business because other enterprises in the farm business were paying to feed the cows as milk production has become a money-losing proposition for small and medium size New England farms, I am wracked with sadness. We read a lot about the passing of small farms, but what I worry most about, because I sit in the seat, are medium-size farms. We are constantly walking the tightrope of disaster forcing us to become smaller or become larger. The middle of the road is a dangerous and scary place.

A recurring topic around the farm table this spring is what to do. Do we drop production that doesn’t make money or continue because it’s what our customers seem to want? Do we cut back on all production across the board accomplishing only as much as the handful of us can do and not hire help to help the dollars stretch? Do we tweak store hours, close a couple of days a week and cut back employee hours to lessen the load and risk losing customers in the change? Do we raise prices as we should and suffer the sticker shock and loss of more customers because we can’t compete with grocery and chain and online stores? Do we close the store completely and focus on wholesale and pick-your-own only?

This never ending conundrum suffered by medium-size farms that try to support a single or a couple of families is a strain that takes a terrible toll on the folks who try to run these, our, businesses. Small farms are largely part-time ventures already, with the farmers holding off-the-farm jobs to support the families and farming as more of a hobby or second job than a career. We mid-size guys and gals who try to support ourselves solely as farmers must either join or re-join the ranks of the part time farmers in the outside employment world or invest lots of money, which most of us don’t have and lenders are leery of lending, to get bigger and hire more folks and become more efficient. We mid-size guys and gals are already struggling, trying to keep older equipment working, trying to keep prices competitive to retain customers while struggling with unsustainably small margins, already juggling expenses and staff and struggling to make ends meet, on the edge financially so lenders won’t even think of lending to us, so getting bigger is not usually an option.

While talking with a fellow farmer last week, I learned that their family, like ours, has maxed out all of their credit and has dipped into retirement and savings funds to meet the monthly bills. My friend had actually borrowed funds from a family member to meet the week’s payroll. A completely unsustainable scenario, this reality has demanded all of us medium size farmers to make some very tough decisions. Sell the farm? Find a “real” job with “real” benefits to support oneself? Change the very nature of the farm and develop the land because taxes cannot be met? Sell the development rights to try to hang on for a bit longer? Tough choices. Sleepless nights. Emotional and psychological stress. Hard work. Uncooperative weather. Long days. We are all just waiting to wake up to the perfect thought, the perfect business plan, the perfect solution, hoping that thought, plan or solution will save the farm from the “perfect storm”.

These thoughts are not written to look for pity for us farmers, but to alert my readers that the winds of change for us mid-size farms has picked up speed. Thousands of small and medium-sized farms have closed up shop across the nation and the handful of us still in our immediate community are also changing, shrinking, changing focus or closing to remain viable in whatever manner the particular families find “viable” to be. Just as mom-and-pop stores selling any commodity that can be purchased online and delivered to the door are closing up shop because they just cannot compete, we farmers are finding it impossible to compete with the grocery stores, wholesale produce suppliers, online shoppers and stores that offer one stop shopping while we sit out of the way and out of the minds of most consumers.

Like my grandfather, an executive and investor in a shoe shop in Manchester who suffered the closing of all shoe manufacturing facilities when the Depression hit the state and the loss of his livelihood in the market and business change, we may very well be facing some business changes that make us change our mode of survival, as well. This is probably not a bad thing, as it is the minority of consumers that seek our wares and services in our brick-and-mortar farmstand, but it is very sad. I concur with former Agriculture Commissioner Steve Taylor who was quoted in the June 12 Valley News article about liquidating his milk production: “I grieve over every farm going out because it’s part of a continuum of the destruction of a culture.”’ It’s not about the quart of milk or the bucket of squash. Farm closure is completely about the loss of the values, commitments, beliefs, families and people of a culture, and it makes me sad.