Once a Journalist – My WordPress

Once a Journalist … Now Commissioner

NEW ENGLAND FARMER’S loss,
New Hampshire’s gain.

by Charlie Calley
February 1983

Diversification into other crops besides milk, and a serious effort to market all crops — especially milk — are two ideas on Steve Taylor’s mind as he becomes New Hampshire Commissioner of Agriculture.

“The new farming enterprises coming in today are looking at marketing first,” says Taylor. “The future is with small-scale, diversified farms that pay as much attention to marketing their crops as they do producing them.”

The new Commissioner (with help from his wife, Gretchen, and their three teenage sons) manages such a farm near the village of Meriden in Plainfield, N.H. Steve Taylor personifies a trend toward small-scale diversified farming that has been occurring not only in New Hampshire but throughout the Northeast. Or at least that’s what New Hampshire’s late Governor, Hugh Gallen, thought of Taylor. Steering Taylor’s nomination successfully through the Executive Council was Gallen’s last political battle before he died.

*Left to right: Steve, Gretchen, Robert, William and James*

Politically, Steve Taylor’s appointment as Agriculture Commissioner signals a decline in the influence of the state’s largest dairy farms and a new place in the sun for the small, diversified farm.

”There was a lot of opposition to my appointment from the well-established dairy farmers,” said Taylor. “They felt the Commissioner should be an old-guard dairy person — a 40 year veteran — but Governor Gallen didn ‘t think that way.”

The new Commissioner believes building markets for local crops will draw more people back to the farm, and increase the value of farm land enough so it can defend itself from development pressure. “If we can show that there are markets and that there is an opportunity to make a recognizable profit,” Taylor said, “then there won’t be any trouble getting more people into farming.”

On the matter of farm land being lost to developers, Taylor said he opposes asking the state to purchase farm development rights. ”lt would cost $4 billion to do the job right,” he said. “And if we can’t even save a Weights and Measures truck from a budget cut, then I doubt we can persuade the Legislature to buy development rights. The only thing we can do is make it economically profitable to farm.”

Commissioner Taylor said he plans to concentrate on two areas during his five year tenure as head of the state agriculture depattment. ”There’s the stuff l’ve got to do and the stuff I want to do. First, I’ve got to hold the department together so it can carry out its statutory responsibilities”. Second, l want to try to expand the mission of the department to promote agriculture in New Hampshire.

“In the first area,” he said, “the budget problems are incredible. The department has been cut, cut, and cut again over the past ten years to the point where it is extreme!y difficult to carry out its statutory mandate”. The latest cuts will require taking two large Weights and Measures Bureau trucks off the road until July.

Then there is the problem of defending the department against the Sunset Review Board, and certain politicians who want to downgrade the Agriculture Department to a bureau within a department of natural resources. “The farmers I’ve talked to about this are appalled at the idea,” said Taylor.

In Taylor, New Hampshire farmers have a leader who is experienced in the ways of government as well as a powerful public speaker and a skilled writer. He served as selectman of Plainfield for 12 years, is presently town moderator, and has served on numerous statewide boards and councils of both a government and agricultural nature.

Commis:stoner Taylor sees the problem of surplus milk that is costing dairy farmers money as being caused by a lack of attention to marketing. “Some farmers just don’t believe in advertising,” he says. “A lot of them won’t contribute to the dairy industry advertising programs. I think that attitude is a thing of the past. Farmers can t think like that anymore if they want to survive:”

Taylor believe dairy farmers should put the same kind of advertising program behind milk as the soda pop companies put behind Coca Cola and Pepsi. ”With that kind of an effort we wouldn’t have to worry about surplus milk.

“We have to put more money into advertising” he said. “‘Why not put the 50 cent deduct (the new per hundred weight fee being charged diairy farmers by the U.S. Agriculture Department) into advertising and promoting milk, and see what they would do to the surplus.’

Taylor is also supportive of new ideas being thought up by New Hampshire farmers for marketing milk products. “There’s a man down in Weare, Lowell Rheinheimer, who is starting a commercial cheese production. This is the first New Hampshire cheese in 50 years. Another farmer in the southern part of the state is trying to start a yogurt business. These are encouraging signs.”

The comrnissioner said he expects to be working with producers, processors and wholesalers to build markets for New Hampshire crops. “The eastern part of the state is real good blueberry country,” he says. “Low bush blueberries have good potential over there, but a co-op is needed to process and market the berries.

“We need a lamb slaughtering plant, but we need lots of lambs to make it feasible. But where do we get that block if people don’t have confidence they can sell them. It takes confidence for people to buy ewes that won’t be bringing in money until two years down the line. It will take committed producers to bring a slaughter plant through its darkest hours. .

“We’re in a chicken and egg situation now in regard to markets,” he said. “There’s no production because there are no markets. There are no markets because there’s no production.”

Taylor wants to work with New Hampshire farmers to break that barrier. “Take strawberries, for instance. A lot of people are growing strawberries and selling them fresh, or pick your own. What would ihappen if a market was developed for frozen berries? We can freeze and can fruits and vegetables around here.”

Taylor sees much “creative marketing” going on in New Hampshire and intends to support it all he can. ”There’s a guy near here building up a business making Christmas wreaths and marketing them through the mail.”

“The growth in farming is coming from a lot of people who have the desire to farm but are also school teachers, or factory workers, or young people who can survive on little money while building up a business growing crops for direct sale, or farm markets or other innovative ideas.

Those 470 dairy farms in the state, along with the big apple orchards and turkey operations will survive by means of diversification,” says the Commissioner. “They’ll branch out to other crops, or a family member will take an off-farm job to bring in cash.”

In this area, the new commissioner is a master at combining farming with cash-producing part time jobs. In fact he is a second-generation small-scale, diversified farmer. His father, Lawrence Taylor, who died last year, was a high school English teacher –but also a serious farmer in Plainfield. He kept a few cows, and other livestock and grew berries and vegetables for local markets he developed. He was also a noted beekeeper and was well-known locally as a story teller.

This last skill rubbed off on his son Steve, who over the last few years has become one of the more prolific and successful free-lance writers in northern New England. His articles have appeared in the NEW ENGLAND FARMER, the. New Hampshire Times, Country Journal, and he has done writing for the Control Data Corp.’s rural development projects. Then there are all the part-time jobs he’s had, some of them seasonal, some of them requiring an evening or two a week: Director of the New Hampshire Council for the Humanities, head of the News Election Service in the stare ( an election eve vote counting service), and the N.H. Health and Welfare Advisory Commission, among others. And if a newspaper in the area needs temporary help in the editorial department, Steve is likely to get a call.

Commissioner Taylor spent nearly ten vears in the newspaper business before he became a full-time farmer with a steady income from part-time jobs he could do out of the house.

After high school, Taylor attended the University of New Hampshire where he majored in government, played football and lacrosse, and was editor of the college newspaper. He received a B.A. degree in 1962 and the next year married a classmate, Gretchen Schnare. Gretchen, several years ago, was appointed a trustee of UNH and now Steve, by virtue of being commissioner of agriculture, is a university trustee.

In 1963 Steve landed a job as a reporter for the Portsmouth Herald. They moved back to his hometown of Plainfield, in the Connecticut River Valley, in 1965 as Steve took a job as managing editor of the Valley News in nearby West Lebanon. He became editor of the paper in 1970, the same year be and Gretchen and their growing family, began building their farm.

“We started farming from scratch,” says the Commissioner. “l had learned a little from my father while growing up, and I picked up the rest myself.” They decided to concentrate on raising cows and sheep. Demand for milk was more favorable in the early ’70s, and sheep had been raised quite successfully in Plainfield during the 19th century.

“The experts told us there was no way we could get into milking cows with the amount of money we had to invest,” says Taylor, “but after we got started, the dairy extension agent has come around to show this farm as an example of an efficient, low-budget operation.”

The heart of the farm is a cluster of three red, home-made, one story barns. Logs were drawn from the Taylor woodlot and the family and neighbors sawed out the lumber on a portable saw rig and built the barns. One barn is divided in half to house 50 sheep on one side and 45 dry cows and young stock on the other side. Both sides are a free-stall design.

A second structure is the free-stall barn that houses the Taylor’s 37 milking cows, some of which are grade Holsteins and some registered Shorthorns which represent the Taylor boys’ 4-H projects. This barn has two additions . One contains the milking parlor, milk room, storage, and calf pens. The second addition is a roofed over feed pen for the milkers that was built last Summer.

“Originally, we were going to have a stanchion barn,” Steve said, “but we decided against it to keep costs down. With a free stall you don’t have to have an expensive gutter cleaner. I’m glad we did it this way.”

In between the two stock barns, with easy access to both, is the hay barn, another pole-type structure. The milk cows are fed a hay and grain ration supplemented with ground ear corn Steve buys from a neighbor. The Taylors grow no corn and put up neither corn nor hay silage. This system has resulted in a tank test of 3.67 on a Rolling Herd Average of 12,000 to 13,000 pounds. The Taylor home farm consists of 118 acres of field and woods and they lease 150 acres of cropland, including a 60-acre alfalfa piece near the Connecticut River. The Taylors make standard baled hay using a New Holland mower-conditioner, and an NH baler, with a bale buncher. Power is supplied by a Massey-Ferguson 175 tractor and a Case 1290.

“We operate our equipment on a lat of hilly land,” Steve said. “We use family labor plus a lot of neighborhood kids. We put up 17,000 to 18,000 bales.” A bucket loader is used to clean out the free stall barns and carry the manure to a manure pit–an above ground enclosure with a cement floor and sides of treated lumber. “It’s a Soil Conservation Service design, and it has really helped our hay program by conserving nutrients,” says the Commissioner.

Manure is spread over all the farm’s hayfields, with the exception of the alfalfa piece, where chemical fertilizers are applied.

Sawdust is used as the primary bedding in the cow barn, but with the shortage of sawdust in the area, the Taylors are buying more and more manufactured sand from a nearby commercial pit.

The milking parlor is what Steve calls a “flat parlor.” It has a one-level cement floor with three stalls on one side of the room and three on the other. While three cows· are milked on one side, three more are led in to the other stalls and prepared for milking. Milk from the DeLaval pails is dumped into a bulk cooler to await pickup by an AgriMark truck.

The Taylors began building their herd of Dorset and Columbia sheep in 1974 after Steve did an oral history project that involved interviewing several older townspeople. “I talked with one old-timer who could remember back to 1888,” Taylor recalls·. “He could remember going to the top of a hill–the town was all open then–and seeing sheep everywhere. There was a very prosperous agricultural economy in Plainfield at that time-more than 15,000 sheep. There were several sheep washes on the brook out here and all the sheep in town would be dipped at the same time.”

By 1977 the Taylors had built their flock to more than 300 sheep, but then the coyote invasion began. “We lost 35 sheep in six weeks,” Steve remembers. “Our sheep pasture was three miles away. We’d go down there with deer rifles, but the coyotes wouldn’t come around when people were there.”

*Some of the grade Holsteins and registered Shorthorns at the Taylor farm.*

That was before Hungarian guard dogs and Australian-type electric fence, so Steve and Gretchen decided to reduce their flock to 50 hear and keep them penned year-round in a free stall barn open to the South.

The Taylors have had success marketing their wool. Some of it is spun into yarn at the woolen mill in Harmony, Maine and Gretchen sells it out of the house for $3 for a four-ounce skein.

The remainder goes to a marketing venture called New Hampshire Blanket, which the Taylors helped establish in 1975 with four other wool producers. “It’s a native New Hampshire product,” says Steve. “It takes high quality New Hampshire wool and has it processed and woven into luxury blankets, which are marketed through ads in various magazines. The spinning is done in Harrisville and.the weaving at Homestead Woolen Mill in Swanzey.”

“The blanket designs are copies of old designs authenticated by the Merrimack Valley Textile Museum,” said Gretchen. “The designs change about every two years.”

Marketing lambs for slaughter has been a more difficult problem over the years, with the usual difficulty of coming up with a huge enough block of lambs at the right time. For several years they raised lambs for the Spring ethnic market, but now sell most of their lambs locally as feeder lambs buyers fatten over the summer for Fall butchering.

Trying to build more markets for lamb and wool will be on Steve Taylor’s priority list as New Hampshire Commissioner of Agriculture. And while he is in Concord, Gretchen and boys (James 17, William 16 and Robert 11) will have their hands full.

“I’ve been promoted to farm manager,” Gretchen says. “The boys will have some outside chores in the mornings before school, and we’ll have a hired hand to help me with the morning milking. I can do just about all the jobs except lift the milk pails. The boys will do the evening chores.”

“The boys will head the haying crew next Spring,” she said. “Haying will be hard without Steve here full time, but the neighbors will help and we’ll get it all in somehow.”

Once a Journalist … Now Commissioner

NEW ENGLAND FARMER’S loss,New Hampshire’s gain.

NEW ENGLAND FARMER’S loss,
New Hampshire’s gain.