A new barn for Butterworks Farm

A small farm with a new barn that harks back to the 19th century Victorian era

By Charlie Calley
Photographs by T. Gilson
March 1983

Jack and Ann Lazor of Westfield, Vermont can’t wait to move into their new five-story, post and beam barn. It’s a handsome structure that stands 57 feet to the top of the cupola and cantilevers six feet over the long sides of a 36 by 48 foot foundation.

The gambrel-roof barn is of a late 19th century design and was built the old way, with wooden pegs, instead of spikes, and mortise and tenon joints, instead of steel joist hangers. Yet it utilizes modern technology too — metal roof, cement foundation, greenhouse.

The Lazors are students of agricultural history and prefer many of the farming practices used in New England a century ago — and still used in nearby Quebec — to modern techniques. This is one reason why they decided to build a Victorian era barn, rather than a modern structure. “This kind of barn offers better use of space inside,” says Jack Lazor. It gives you lots of 12 by 12 foot bays that are uninterrupted by structural supports.”

“From Wisconsin, we came with a corn-oats-legume mentality. But … We’ve been very influenced by farming practices in Canada.”

“The new barn pulls together all the facets of the things we want to do and puts them under one roof,” says Ann Lazor. She and Jack have so many farming projects planned and underway that it will probably take years to complete them. Finishing the inside of the barn and building the outside portion of the high drive are major projects in themselves. But Jack and Ann are used to working 18 hour days and they love to farm.

“We built our house and the sheds here by ourselves;” says Jack, “but we decided to hire Jan Lewandoski to build the barn and it’s one of the best decision we ever made.” Lewandoski, out of Greensboro Bend, Vt., is a restorer and builder of post and beam barns, houses, churches and meeting houses.

“Jan came here and talked with us extensively about our farm and what we wanted it to be in the future and then he designed a barn to suit us,” says Jack. “The barn is authentic in every way to the last half of the 19th century,” said Lewandoski, “but there’s nothing in it that’s there just for the sake of being old-fashioned. Barns like it were common in this state between 1850and 1920.”

Higher is cheaper

“The reason the barn is so tall,” said Jan, “is because Jack and Ann wanted to cut down on foundation costs. So I told them we might as well go high. It’s cheaper to go high, rather than long. Also, they wanted to use the second floor for their cheese making and milling operations, so the barn had to be designed to allow hay to be stored up high.”

The 16 foot high doors on the front of the barn will allow big loads of hay to travel up the high drive. Then, by using a conveyor, the Lazors will be able to put hay anywhere inside they want.

“Many of the old barns had high drives added on years after the rest of the barn was completed,” said Lewandoski, “but the Lazor’s barn was designed to have a high drive.” Thus, the support posts that the high drive runs through are 24 foot long eight by eight timbers. Holding the timbers together are more than l,000 ash pins, most of them made by Ann Lazor, but the real strength of the barn comes from the extensive diagonal bracing. “When I was inspecting old barns,” Lewandoski said, “I found that the ones in the best shape had a godawful number of diagonal braces. They make a strong triangle under every beam.”

The cantilevers are diagonally braced also. “l don’t have much faith in cantilevers so I braced them at four feet, even though it might restrict the usable space under them,” said Jan. ”They do allow Jack and Ann to maximize their foundation and I think they are useful in keeping run-off from the roof away from the foundation.”

All the sawing and joining work on the big timbers was done on the ground and they were raised into place with the help of a barn raising party and a crane with a 100 foot boom. “When I arrived to begin the job last April, Jack and Ann had finished pouring the foundation and they had put up their old silo that said Butterworks Farm. The silo looked big then, but it wasn’t long before we were working above it.”

The barn was roofed and sheathed by last Fall, but much work remains. Some of the floors have yet to be laid, windows need to be installed and stairs constructed. Jack and Ann plan to concentrate first on completing the quarters for their animals in the bottom of the barn. “Our sows will be farrowing next month and we’d like to have them moved into the new barn before the piglets are born,” Jack says.

“I studied the agriculture in my hometown in Wisconsin between the 1850’s and 1890’s”

It will take longer to move the cows in. The Lazors have six grade Jerseys milking this Winter and keep about a dozen head of bred heifers and young stock. And the new barn lacks stanchions, automatic waterers, vacuum lines, calf pens and a manure removal system.

A solarium

An area on the South side of the barn under the cantilever and just outside the cow quarters has been glassed in to make a solarium. This sheltered loafing area near the barnyard will keep wind off the cows and let the sun in to warm their back on clear days.

Above the solarium are the greenhouses. “We hope to use cow heat to keep the greenhouses warm,” Ann says. “Heat from the cow barn will be exhausted into it.” She and Jack plan to start plants in the greenhouse and grow greens and other vegetables out of season. This will allow them to further diversify the product line carried on the weekly delivery route that is their primary means of making money.

Jack and Ann have been farming part time since they moved to Orleans County in 1975 from Wisconsin, and full time since 1979. They were renting a house in Westfield in 1976 when they bought their land at the crest of a gentle hill. Jack was teaching at the high school in Newport and Ann was a counselor for mentally retarded adults.

They worked full-time town jobs for three years to raise enough money to allow them to become full-time farmers. “We had been growing crops here since ’77,” said Jack. “Then Ann got pregnant in ’79 and I left my job in the Spring of that year. It seemed like just the right time to make the plunge.”

Their land consists of 60 acres: 20 in woods and 40 in gently sloping fields. They rent a 10 acre pasture from a neighbor and have their eyes on another 40 acre field to rent this Spring.

“When we first came here from Wisconsin,” says Jack, “we came with a corn-oats-legume mentality. But since then we’ve been very influenced by farming practices in Canada, which is just a few miles from here.”

“Agriculture in Canada is different from the United States,” he says. “It’s more diversified and small-scale, more self-reliant. They don’t have an Iowa and California to depend on like the United States.”

“North of the border farmers are more grain oriented. There are grinding and rolling mills all over the place and farmers load their grain and ear corn into the pick-up truck once a week or so and take it to a mill to be ground. The mills sell various supplements and add them to the grain as the farmer wants,” Jack says. “The whole New England agriculture system has moved so far away from local grains that it’s incredible. There’s hardly a grain mill left in the state of Vermont.”

Both Jack Ann grew up in Wisconsin, but Jack came East to attend Tufts University in Massachusetts, while Ann attended the University of Wisconsin. “I was a history major,” said Jack. “I got so interested in agriculture of colonial times that I went to Sturbridge Village and worked on the farm there in the Summer of 1971. I learned something about grains there and how to milk a cow by hand: It was fun but I found out that I was a lot more interested in the agriculture of the Victorian period. So, I studied the agriculture in my home town in Wisconsin between the 1850’s and 1890’s.

After settling down in Orleans County, Vermont, Ann and Jack got a chance to try out some of the practices he had learned, such as planting in a grain-hay-hay rotation. “I got a Brillion seeder in Quebec and it’s a great drill,” said Jack. “We’re plowing very little now and harrowing instead. It’s six feet wide and weighs over a ton. It chops sod real good.”

After harrowing a piece, Jack loads the drill with 100 pounds of grain seed per acre and 12 to 15 pounds of clover, or mixed grass and heads out on the tractor. “The grain acts as a nurse crop for the clover,” he said. “We cut the grain in August, leaving eight to 10 inches of stubble. Below that is next year’s clover.

Jack and Ann grew nearly all the feed for their cows last year. They harvested wheat, oats, barley and flint corn from 15 acres and had about 30 acres of hay. They call themselves “biological farmers” and use no herbicides and “only a small amount of super phosphate on the grain last year.”

“Weeds are the biggest problem we’ve had growing grains,” says Ann. “Mustard is the real killer. It cuts down our yields considerably.”

Compost manure

The Lazors compost their cow manure, piling it in long heaps designed to produce internal heat that begins breaking down the manure and bedding. As soon as the fields dry out enough they will pitch it into the spreader and add a whole slew of exotic soil amendments. “We’re big on trace elements,” Jack says. “Copper, zinc, boron, a lot of magnesium, rock phosphate. We put them all in the cement mixer and stir them up good and put them in the spreader. We do our own soil tests.”

For power sources, Jack and Ann use a 30-year-old John Deere 40, an equally old Farmall Super M and a little horse named Chester, who in Winter, is hitched to a sled and used to draw hay and manure around the barnyard.

One of their home-made pole sheds is used to store the grain harvest and to house a big winnowing mill that has a fan and 40 different sorting screens. It separates the grain from the chaff and sorts the grain into three different head sizes. Next to this mill, stands a small, tractor-driven burr mill used to grind wheat, barley, or oats. The Lazors have already purchased a much larger grain mill from a feed store in Orleans that hadn’t used it for years. This, along with the winnowing mill, will be installed in the new barn for this Fall’s harvest.

Grains are stored in burlap sacks and milled once a week, or so, then brought down to the old cow barn attached to the house. There, in a small grain room, Jack and Ann mix their grains daily and add vitamin and mineral supplements in the rations they prefer.

“Mixing our own grain like this is very time consuming,” says Jack, “but it’s better for the cows and the job will be much easier in the new barn. Last Winter, I ran out of grain once, before I could mill some more, and had to buy a sack of commercial grain. The cows wouldn’t eat it.”

The Lazors used to milk six Jerseys by hand, but it was taking so much time that they switched to milking machines. Milk is processed in the big kitchen of their house. “We have sold raw milk,” says Ann, “but we’ve found that the more we can process our milk the more money we can make. Homemade maple yogurt is their most popular item, but they also sell plain yogurt, cottage cheese, farmer’s cheese and butter. Once a week, Jack loads their station wagon with the various dairy products, along with eggs from their chickens, and heads out on a route to 30 stores, restaurants and private homes.

“We used to deliver twice a week,” says Jack, “but it got to be just too much work for us to handle so we cut back to once a week, without hurting sales too much. Most dairy farms concentrate on just one aspect of milk production, but we do all the processing and marketing ourselves, as well as production.”

“Yogurt is our best selling product,” Ann says. “It gives us the best return, too, because there is no whey like with cottage cheese. We started out by selling yogurt to our friends and the business grew. We have sold at the farmers market in Newport, too. At one time, we were making 25 pounds of butter a week.”

Quebec cultures

Jack and Ann give careful attention to the bacteria cultures used to make cottage cheese and yogurt. They are stored in covered Mason jars in a refrigerator. A stainless steel spoon is used to introduce the cultures to whole milk. “It’s taken us a lot of time to get the right cultures,” Ann says. “These latest ones came from Quebec.”

“See that wooden box under the table,” says Jack, pointing to a homemade box of pine boards about the size of a bread box. “There’s a cake rack in the bottom and a light bulb in the top and we use it to maintain the right temperatures for the cottage cheese and yogurt.”

“We processed $6,000 or $7,000 worth of dairy products through that little box last year,” he says. “We just did our income taxes and we couldn’t believe it, but we grossed $10,000 last year from all or our dairy products.”

In what little spare time they have, Jack and Ann like to drive with their daughter through Quebec, learning what they can from farmers there and buying used equipment. Jack had learned French, which has enabled them to overcome the language barrier.

One item they bought North-of-the-Border is a cheese-making vat they plan to install in the new barn to make more hard cheese. “With the vat, we’ll be able to make cheese in larger quantities and we can do it a couple times a week rather than every day.”

“Last Winter we made a lot of hard cheese,” says Ann. “It was very tasty, but it wouldn’t melt. We went to an expert at UVM, but he couldn’t tell us what was wrong.”

“We found out one time when we were in Quebec,” Jack puts in. “We went to a monastery near Lake Memphremagog where they make a lot of cheese. They introduced us to a brine cheese, which we hope to make in the future. They gave us a three-hour cheese-making lesson all in French.”

One of the toughest challenges Jack and Ann Lazor have come up against so far is dealing with the Vermont Department of Agriculture. She points to a wooden butter churn powered by a hand crank. “They want us to have a stainless steel butter churn,” she says. “It seems the state doesn’t have any regulations about making butter, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture does and the state feels it has to enforce the USDA regulations.”

Another federal regulation the Vermont Agriculture Department is considering enforcing on the Lazors concerns putting lids of the containers of cottage cheese and yogurt. “They don’t want us to put them on by hand,” says Ann. “They want us to have a machine like the big commercial creameries have.”

Ann is optimistic, however, that she and Jack will be able to meet the government requirements. “I think we can invent a little machine that will lift one lid at a time from a stack of them and toss it onto each container and perhaps the state will let us press them into place by hand.”

Inventiveness, after all, runs in Ann’s family. Her grandfather was a successful inventor who left her and Jack enough money to build their new barn.

UPDATE