New dairyman knows hard times

New dairyman knows hard times

Ayrshires are his choice because of protein count, longevity, good udders and producing ability.

Interview by Joe Adamowicz
March 1984

House and barns at the Old Peabody Farm

FAMILiES get into the business of dairy farming in different ways. Most inherit their farms. But a few make their own breaks. Take the Fred E. Farnham family for example.

A few years ago, Fred never dreamed he would one day be starting off his mornings milking a herd of 42 registered Ayrshire cows. A hired hand on the Old Peabody Farm on the Middle Road in Hancock, N.H., a community of 1,240 in the southwestern corner of the state, Fred was managing a 40-head-a-year purebred Holstein dairy replacement and haying enterprise for Mrs. (John) Mary Peabody.

Back then, by his own account, making a living with his own herd of red and white milking cows never crossed his mind.

But then, when Mrs. Peabody died at the age of 87 in September of 1980, Fred’s plans suddenly changed. Fred was kept on to do the land work and as a caretaker for the family estate, but the dairy replacement business was phased out in January of 1981. The following year, the Peabody family decided to lease out the farm. “The Peabody family wanted some kind of farm activity but they didn’t want to keep the farm themselves,” recalls Fred.

“That July, when they started talking to a young farmer who had a herd of Jerseys, I asked them if they would consider renting it to me.”

In August of 1982, John Peabody Jr., 62, retired after 27 years as a U.S. State Dept. officer. Mary Peabody’s only surviving son who Iives on the 178-acre farm-estate with his two sons, agreed to lease the buildings, land and machinery to Fred for $1,000 a month on a yearly basis; Mrs. Manton Metcalf, John Peabody’s sister, and her husband, who live in New York City and keep a Summer home in nearby Peterborough, but who also wanted to keep the property as a farm, loaned Fred $55,000 at ten percent over twelve years to purchase the herd and the necessary milking equipment.

A happy arrangement

In one months’ time, Fred had gone from being a hired hand to Hillsborough County’s newest dairyman. “The arrangement has worked out well for both of us,” John Peabody said in a recent interview.

“One of the reasons we decided to deal with Fred was because everybody that knew him said he could do it. There isn’t anybody else who could put that amount of work into it.”

The first obstacle the Farnhams faced was getting the old barn back in shape as a dairy operation. Originally a sheep farm, the Peabody Farm was changed into a dairy operation in 1957 wneh Mrs. Peabody moved up from Princeton, Mass. At one time, the farm boasted a herd of 40 registered milk cows, but after fifteen years, Mrs. Peabody found it impractical to keep the dairy operation. For almoist the next ten years, the main barn and 80-food-long addition were used strictly as housing for purebred Holstein replacement heifers.

“Everything happened in August,” says Fred, a medium-sized man, who has muscular arms, clear blue eyes, and dark hair combed in 50’s style.

“We had fo sweep all the cobwebs down and steam clean and paint the entire barn, put in the air line and bulk tank, build the calf pens and stanchions, and finish off the milk house with paneling.

”The whole month we was going until 11 or 12 o’clock at night. My girls stained all the pens with old oil and did the painting and my son Scott and I did all the carpentry work.”

At present, the main dairy facility, a 100 foot by 38 foot red gambrel roofed barn, has ties for 34 mature cows, two rows of 17 stalls with the animals facing in. Fred put in all the water bowls, cemented the feed mangers and curbing that had broken off from many of the stanchions, and after taking out all the old metal pipe water lines that were buried in cement, he replaced it with plastic piping. In the 80 foot long addition for the dry cows and heifers, he built 17 cow stalls, a maternity pen and calf pens for twenty animals after pouring the cement floor and mangers and trowelling it by hand.

“The back addition used to be just an open dirt floor with a bull pen, breeding rack and a few planks along the rafters to separate the animals,” he says. “I put 43 cubic yards of cement in this place.”

Fred also extended the two inch vacuum line to the back of the building, so that he can milk another eight animals, and he’s planning on running it the full length of the seventeen stanchions.

“Speak to the earth”

Another building on the farm, an old, red eighty foot long horse barn, with the biblical verse and farm motto “Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee” inscribed above the door, will eventually be remodeled into housing for all the young stock.

In September of 1982, Fred purchased 37 cows from a farmer in Massachusetts. Unlike most dairymen in New Hampshire, the Farnhams began their dairy operation with Ayrshires. Why?

“Because if the government switches over to an end product yield pricing system Ayrshires are supposed to have the highest protein,” says Fred, who last year had a three-year-old honor cow with a production record of 11,967 pounds of milk and 786 fat in 305 days.

Fred also said he likes the medium sized Scottish cow’s reputation for longevity and good udders and their persistent producing ability.

What about the Ayrshires’ reputation for having the most nervous temperament among the dairy breeds?

“Well, they are a little bit nervous,” Fred admits. “When we first got ours, we had to pull them into the stanchions. But now they all know their holes and are fairly quiet.”

The cows arrived September 3rd and two weeks later Fred had the vet come by to check the herd over. “He discovered that one of the animals was ‘missing a wing in her ovary’ and she couldn’t be bred back,” says Fred. “And another one had a cyst as big as a grapefruit.”

“There were three or four other cows like that.” Fred said. Another problem was that a lot of the cows were supposed to be bred back, but they weren’t. “The first week we got rid of six cows right off and in the past year we’ve sold or traded off another nine,” says Fred.

“We’re just getting straightened out as far as what we can expect for milk. Right now we’re shipping out 3,142 pounds of 4.3 milk every other day (to Turner’s Dairy of Salem, N.H.) and the cows are averaging almost 50 pounds apiece.”

Fred has 42 cows and he’s milking 32. “We’ve been trying to work it out so that we have two or three heifer calves coming in every month,” says the 38 year~old dairyman, who’s had only 16 heifer calves born compared to 32 bulls in the sixteen months he’s been farming. “Eventually, I’d like to get up to 51 milk cows and put in a pipeline system.”

After milking, the milking cows are fed outside at feed bunks, “usually green chop until I’m able to grow more corn.”

“This Summer, we’ll feed green chop too, but next year, I hope to put up enough corn from one Fall to the next so I won’t have to give it to them. But not this year. I only put up enough silage to last ’til Spring.”

Because Fred didn’t know he was going to be a dairyman until the late Summer of 1982, he only had hay in the barn to feed the cows that first Winter and, consequently, had to buy all his corn silage. “It cost me $4000 to feed the cows from October to May that year,” he says. “It was tough for us that first year. We were feeding grain for $1,400 a month.”

Just corn

“Next year, I’m putting up just corn,” he says. “I’m not putting up haylage. Haylage is good feed but my cows realty dropped on test. When I was feedi corn and hay, I was testing 4.1 and 4.2. Then, I started feeding haylage and it went down to 3.8.

”Besides, I can’t raise enough pure alfalfa. I’ve got three or four fields of alfalfa but the rest of the fields are mixed hay, timothy, alfalfa and clover.”

There are 178 acres on the farm. Eighty acres are tillable and all of it is in hay land. Fred says he depends on outside fields for his com cropping program.

“Since I started farming, I’ve gotten six or seven fields in town to plant my corn on. People have let the land run down and they want to keep it up. I’ve had to turn down several requests because the fields were too rocky.

Fred does all the milking himself and uses DeLaval bucket milkers and a dumping station. Up at six a.m., Nancy Farnham, 37, is also in the barn by 6:30 a.m. rinsing the machines in acid water, feeding the calves and dry cows, and getting the hay down, while Fred gets ready to begin the seven a.m. one-hour-forty-five minute milking chore. The Farnham children also have their own areas of responsibility. Sue, 18, Patty, 16, and Audrey, 13, all help with the feeding and cleaning up at night. Scott, 15, who is trained in the milking procedure, also helps out in the evening and assists his father on weekends. in addition, the Farnham children all help to put in the Winter’s supply of firewood Fred uses to heat the former guest house that he helped to remodel into living quarters for his family, and Mr. Peabody’s twelve room, 1840 Victorian farmhouse.

“I’ve got some good fields on the farm, but a lot of the land is in a valley and the beavers have flooded it. There’s a 13-acre section of a large meadow that you could use for corn, but you’re lucky if you can bale it in August. Most farmers don’t have as much land as what’s available on this farm but the beavers are really limiting the area that can be cultivated down there.”

Rough childhood

Born in Colchester, Vt., and raised on a series of farms, the fourth in a family of seven children, Fred’s early years can perhaps best be described as “not the most ideal childhood.” At 14, he was kicked out of his home, and for the next 13 years, he knocked around on “close to 30” different farms in Vermont–earning his room and board, working for several tree service companies in between. He married at age 19, only to divorce eight years later, “but I got my oldest son, Carl,” says Fred.

At age 27, he met his wife Nancy, who was also divorced. A year later, they left Vermont when Fred got a job on the John Shelton dairy farm in Millerton, NY. In the Fall of 1976, the couple came to New Hampshire.

Fred Farnham knows what rough times and hard work are all about–“I only went to the seventh grade, but I’ve been out of work only three weeks in my life”–and he is determined to make it as a dairy farmer. It’s a struggle financially, but one day he hopes to step into farm ownership someplace.

Now that he’s started, is there anything he would have done differently?

I’d start in the Spring, so I could grow my corn all Summer long and shop around for the right cows,” he says. “That and bring a vet with me.

“But I really didn’t have time to plan it out,” he says. “It just kind of happened.”