Meg Fife “runs her own show”

by Joe Adamowicz
April 1984

New Hampshire brother & sister have unique partnership.

For Meg Fife, a single woman who runs a 100-cow grade Holstein operation, the paid diversion program signed into law by President Reagan last November, was an opportunity to get a handle on her herd size and relieve some labor management problems.

“The biggest thing was that the program helped me get my cow numbers down to a manageable number,” says the personable 27-year-old redhead, who’s been in the dairy business for herself for the past two and one half years.

”l have an antique milking parlor and was spending 60 hours a week in there, which was insane,” she says. “It didn’t leave me time to take care of the sick cows and calves.”

Meg Fife farms in Franklin, N.H., with her brother, Daniel Fife, 24, a 1980 graduate of UNH with a bachelor’s degree in dairy science. Theirs is a partnership, “but we’re financially separate,” says Meg, who owns the cows and runs the dairy end of the farm. Dan leases the land, owns the machinery and does all the cropping work: In addition, he owns a successful retail whole beef and finishing feed lot enterprise on the farm. Together, the brother and sister lease the buildings from their father, who started the farm with twelve grade Helsteins back in 1959.

Because Meg’s milk production for 1983 (almost two million pounds) was down by about three percent, and she was not burdened with a heavy debt load, inflexible operating expenses or machinery costs, Meg says she was in an ideal situation to benefit from the diversion program–which is estimated to save the federal government $280 billion in fiscal 1984.

On January, 11, after establishing a farm plan and base level on her milk sales during 1982, Meg shipped out 27 cows to the Lancaster, Pa. stockyards. Another 27 went to the slaughterhouse this past month (March) and Meg may ship out more animals at a later date.

This heavy culling reduced her milking herd to 80 cows–a number she believes will enable her to attain the 27 percent milk reduction, or 701,865 pounds, for which she will be paid $70,186 for her participation in the fifteen month program.

Can’t afford to fail

As far as keeping within the three percent margin of error the program allows, Megs says: “I don’t have any intentions of failing. I can’t afford to fail.”

The oldest of five children of Clarence (Herbie) and Peggy Fife, Meg grew up on the family farm, but other than raking hay and helping to raise calves, “never really got involved (with the farm).” Nevertheless, at age 16, after graduating from Franklin High School a year early, Meg enrolled at Nova Scotia Agricultural College in Truro, Nova Scotia, in the Fall of 1973. But after only one semester, Meg left the classroom for the sunny, climes of California where she waitressed on tables, worked in a sewing factory and “saw how the rest of the world lived.”

After three years out West, she returned to the farm and helped with the milking and began raising heifers. In time, her father decided not to actively do all the work himself and leased out the cows to his longtime herdsman, Ed Greene. But, then, in December of 1980, Ed had the opportunity to buy his own place in Randolph Center, Vt. At this time, Meg’s only brother, Dan, who was finishing up at UNH, took over the operation with his cousin,Tom Fifield.

“I milked for them, too, ” says Meg, laughing. “I milked for everybody. Same cows; different people.”

Dan and his cousin farmed together for eight months but things didn’t work out. In August of 1981, Meg was faced’ with a decision.

“I thought my father would want to sell the animals the next year so I decided I’d rent them until January,” she said.

That was two and a half years ago. Today Meg owns the herd of dairy cows.

Meg’s got a four-stall, side-opening parlor and it takes her about five hours to milk.

“My dairy agent shakes his head everytime he comes in here,” she says, opening an entrance gate to allow another cow into a stall.

“He keeps telling me that the parlor is way too small and out of date for the size of my herd.”

“But I think it’s still an efficient parlor. If things are going smoothly and you haven’t got a lot of fresh cows, you can put 30 cows an hour in through here. With a herringbone you’d probably be putting through 45 or 50, I’m not sure,” Meg says.

Sees whole cow

“But with this parlor you’ve got the whole cow in front of you. If you want to do anything with that cow, you’ve got her. You don’t have to hold up six cows waiting for one.”

Meg does all the evening milking, starting at 3 p.m. and finishing up at 8 — “but it’s just gotten down to that,” she says. “I just dried off another ten cows. We were talking up to 10 p.m. or midnight;”

Bob Loranger, 30, a part time farmer from Franklin who raises pigs and cattle, and who started working for Meg a week after she took over, handles the barn chores, 4 to 9 a.m., six days a week. Meg takes over on Saturday night and does the Sunday milking.

“I used to have two milkers but I never knew what was going on,” says Meg. “I’d come in here and find a problem that was apt to exist two weeks before I ever got to it. I’d rather not milk quite as much, but it’s hard to get in and out and still have control.”

Dressed in bib overalls, a dark blue sweatshirt, and leather farm boots, Meg moves quickly and efficiently through the milking routine– washing udders, attaching milking machines, pausing only occasionally to answer a question for a visitor.

“Look at this,” Meg says, pointing to the swollen teat of a cow she is about to milk.

“We’ve had a lot of trouble with teat lesions. I don’t know if it’s warts or not. The vet took a biopsy and sent it down to Tufts University in Massachusetts. They decided it was a virus of some sort and sent it out to a disease center in Iowa to come up with a vaccine.”

“I’ve been playing with it for a while,” Meg says. “Trying different treatments for fungus and bacteria. I even stopped using my iodine teat dip.”

Meg is an independent woman who likes being her own boss.

“I don’t take orders very well,” she confesses. “So I have to run my own show. Sometimes it’s hard but I like working with the cows, I had a cousin who lived with me for a while and she practically moved out. She couldn’t stand all the death. But along with the death, there’s also life.”

Always changing

“You’ve always got a new calf,” she says. “Something’s always changing.”

The milk cows are fed once a day. After milking, Dan runs out a five ton capacity Swartz mixer wagon which dispenses corn silage and brewers mixture in an 86′ x 5′ cement feed bunk.

“We feed wet brewers as a forage extender. With the brewers, we don’t need so many acres per cow for forage feed,” says Dan.

For bedding in the free-stalls, Meg uses screened sand. “I haven’t run an i.v. on a cow for mastitis since I put the sand in,” she says.

“It used to be that we’d bed with green sawdust and every time we bedded we’d have two to three klebsiella coliform mastitis problems. Sand is more expensive but it’s worth it.”

A trained A.I. technician, Meg says she would like to improve on her 13.6 calving interval.

“My main problem right now is missed heats,” says Meg, who has a 2.5 services per conception rate. “When I first started, my biggest problem was retained placentas. What caused it was a mineral imbalance. So we started giving vitamin A, D and E injections along with cutting back on the silage and giving more hay. Now we’ve got it pretty well contained.”

Meg breeds her cows anywhere from 45 to 60 days after calving, and she uses semen purchased from ABS. “But with this diversion program I won’t be breeding any heifers until July,” she says. ”l don’t want any calving until the program’s over,” says Meg, who breeds more for size than anything else.

Beef operation

All first calf heifers on the farm are bred to a beef bull and Dan raises the crossbred calves for his beef business. “I raise everything,” he says.

“I pick up the calf crop from the area purebred beef breeders, but I also raise bull calves out of Meg’s milk cows.”

“My father’s always raised some beef on the farm, but he really only got into the retail end of it six years ago,” says Dan, who bought out the business last July.

“I’d like to retail all that I finish off, instead of sending them down to the Pennsylvania beef market,” he says. “That really cuts your margin of profit down.”

The farm has a long and interesting history. The property was once owned by Daniel Webster. “Yes, ‘the Daniel Webster,’ says Dan. He was born in nearby Salisbury.” For many years it was a home for orphans. Then, in the ’50’s, it went through a period of disuse. “Before my father bought it in 1959, it was idle,” says Dan.

“Most all of the fields were grown up and had to be brushed out. My father had to do a lot of leveling of land. He brought over a few cows from his folks’ farm in Canterbury, N.H. Basically, he had to build up the whole farm because there wasn’t much there. The house was torn apart and until he got it rebuilt, he lived in a neighboring house. There was a lot of work to do.” Today, Herbie Fife and Peggy, his wife of 29 years, do a lot of traveling between his grain farms in Alabama and Nova Scotia, and he “pops in and helps us out where he can,” says Dan.

Situated on the rich flood plain of the Merrimack River, some 18 miles North of Concord, the farm has some of the best land around for growing top quality forage. Dan devotes 140 acres to corn and he usually plants by May 5, choosing a variety that can be harvested in 90 to 115 days.

“It’s well drained, sandy loam,” says Dan. “We don’t have the problem of a wet Fall. Even after a heavy rain for a week, you can get on within two days,” he says.

The main dairy facility on the farm is a 70′ by 140′ free-stall barn with stalls for 90 mature cows and 70 bred heifers. Dry cows along with calves foour to eight months old are housed in a pole barn, 40′ by 120′, that’s open to the South side. Another identical pole type building is used to house Dan’s beef animals and Meg’s yuearling heifers. An old horse barn has been renovated for housing the calves nine months to one year old.

Meg raises all the calves in group pens in a pole-type barn adjoining her nine-room white farmhouse on Route 3 located a few hundred yards up the road from the farm. “It’s low labor and that’s what I need. I don’t have the time to mess with each one individually like in hutches. I don’t have the space for that anyway.”

“I wean at three months,” she says. “People think it’s insane but I’ve had terrible problems with pneumonia in the past so I’m not worried about feeding milk for a longer period of time. Plus, since I’m on this diversion program, feeding calves this way has worked out well.”

How does Meg answer those who say the pay-not-to-produce program is contrary to the American way of doing things? That it encourages dairy farmers to reduce, rather than expand, their production?

“Well, I just don’t see how farmers can say that when we are being subsidized anyway,” she says.

“If anything, look how much less the plan is costing the taxpayers. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a step in the right direction.”