Milk and popcorn: Eighth-generation Vermont farmer holds promise for the future
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Matthew Angell, 19, is the eighth generation to work his family's Randolph farm, which was established in 1791, the same year Vermont became a state. Photo by Jon Olender |
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By Kevin O'Connor Staff Writer - Published: September 18, 2005
Nineteen-year-old Matthew Angell says his family has farmed the same Randolph fields since Vermont became a state in 1791. So how great a grandson is he to the founding fathers?
"I'm eighth generation — I don't know how many greats that is."
(It's great-great-great-great-great.)
Drive the dull black asphalt of Interstate 89 and you'll find yourself racing numbly to the next milepost, the next moment. But stop at Exit 3 and the blur gives way to blue sky, green fields, a brown dead-end dirt road capped by a white farmhouse and red barn.
You won't hear any cell phones in these signal-stealing hills. Instead, the swallows nesting above Angell's bedroom window pierce his sleep before dawn. Soon more than 40 cows will demand milking, a larger herd of chores will call all day, the brown Jerseys will cry for more attention at sundown.
Some teenagers, seeing no sidewalks to skateboard on or neighboring houses to hang out at, would scream.
"I can go outside and holler at the top of my lungs and nobody will hear me," Angell says.
And that, he says, is a lifesaver.
"I look at it as being privileged to be able to have this space. Why spend all day sitting in front of the TV? There's always something better to do."
Angell, beget from one of the Green Mountains' first statesmen, may seem a holdover from times gone by. But the teenager considers himself the future of Vermont.
Sandbox beginnings
On April 25, 1791, John Gifford signed a deed to farm the rocky slopes of South Randolph. He spent his life working the fields before passing them on — along with the logging chain he used to clear them.
And so began a family tradition.
Angell can show you the chain, if not all the links to how it got here. He starts his story with his mother, Janet, who married Tim, a dairy student from down the road. Matthew was born Nov. 12, 1985. Today he shares the kitchen table with his 16-year-old brother, Joseph, and 15-year-old sister, Amanda.
The family runs one of the oldest of the nearly 1,300 dairy farms in the state. That may sound like a lot, but Vermont had almost 10 times as many farms 60 years ago. Angell understands his 300-acre homestead, flanked by another 300 family-owned acres of hayfield and woodlot, is precious. His feelings sprouted with his first toy tractor.
"Me and my brother used to set up some pretty elaborate farms in the sandbox," he recalls.
Sit on the porch and you can see the pond a boy can dive into each summer, the woods he can hunt each fall, the snowmobile trails he can ride clear to Canada each winter.
To play, all you have to do is walk past the barn. After you work it.
"I've been helping with chores since I was 5," Angell says.
Work and chores sound interchangeable. They're not.
"A chore is anything you do that relates to twice-a-day barn stuff."
The family starts milking at 6 a.m.
"When Dad's about done, us kids go down, we turn the cows out and take them to pasture, clean out the barn, scrape out the pens, put down some more feed. At night we put the cows in, help Dad get started milking, feed the cows again ..."
In between, the herd takes a 12-hour breather. But Angell can't slip on a swimsuit or snowmobile helmet just yet. "Chores" aren't to be confused with "work," which sprouts around the barn like weeds.
"Mowing hay. Fixing tractors. Splitting wood. Sugaring … The way I look at the day, you have chores, and work is what you do in between."
Lunch beckons late in the afternoon.
"If you get doing something out in the field and you don't have a watch, you just get to a good stopping point. It's been pretty near 4 o'clock some days."
Then it's back for more chores before dinner around 7:30.
"Mom usually will make up a meal, except on Sundays and holidays. Sundays and holidays we have the big meal during lunch, then it's get-your-own-supper night."
On the farm, all five members of the family work together.
"Everyone you see at the kitchen table — we don't have any hired help."
But on get-your-own-supper night, "you get your own supper."
"Dad makes popcorn," Angell says. "It's a big tradition."
'Weather the storm'
When Angell reached high school, a guidance counselor asked him about the future. The farm boy thought it only natural to sign up for agricultural mechanics at the nearby Randolph Technical Career Center.
"We were thrown everything from lawnmowers to tractors to cars," as well as woodworking and welding tools.
Angell went on to earn acceptance at the State University of New York College of Agriculture and Technology at Cobleskill. Many teenagers would relish being 175 miles away from family rules and responsibilities. Not Angell. He instead signed up for an agricultural business program that starts at Vermont Technical College four winding miles away and will finish at the University of Vermont in Burlington.
"I guess I was a little shy about leaving home," he says.
It didn't hurt that the Vermont program will pay his tuition if he maintains a 3.0 grade-point average. But this isn't as simple as learning how to plunk down a pail and a three-legged stool. ("I don't know anybody who milks cows by hand anymore.") Instead, a farmer is a biologist, a businessman, a building technician.
"Before I went to school, I thought 'farming's farming,' but you have to do everything from nutrition to finances. You've got to know your soil and plant stuff for putting up good feed. You've got to know about disease and health issues because a cow gets sick, and it's not like you can walk up to her and ask what's wrong."
A decade ago, each of his family's Jerseys produced an average of 13,000 pounds of milk a year. Since his parents changed the feeding system, individual output has increased to more than 16,000 pounds annually.
(Why measure in pounds instead of gallons? "I don't know — it's weird," Angell says.)
Farmers also face the questions of growth hormones and genetic engineering. ("It is controlled by a very few large businesses with agendas that may not be in our best interest," Angell says.) And so much is out of their hands, starting with the fluctuating price of milk. Three years ago, it cost farmers $1.55 to produce a gallon. But they were receiving less than $1 a gallon, the same price they got in the 1970s.
Things are better today. But tomorrow? Angell admits to worrying.
"Oh, yeah, all the time — I'd hate to be the eighth and final generation. My professor from New Jersey always liked to pick on us. He said, 'All Vermont farmers do is complain.' He thinks we ought to think more. I think he's right. You can't sit and worry about the milk price, because you can't change it. You've got to make sure you can weather the storm. You have to find a way to make your money regardless."
Making hay
Angell may enjoy a full-tuition scholarship, but for the past several years, he's also sweated over an after-school job.
His family annually produces 800,000 pounds of milk, 5,000 bales of hay, 300 gallons of maple syrup, 50 cords of firewood and four Jersey heifers to sell to fellow farmers.
But that's just chores and work. For a job, Angell lends his neighbors a hand. One had a knee operation three years ago. Another broke his arm logging two years ago. He's helped them with milking ever since.
Angell thought about making some extra money brush-hogging — that's trading your blade-nibbling lawnmower for a bushwhacking tractor. Then he eyed a neighbor's tall grass.
"I just got sick of looking at that, so I worked out a deal."
Angell rented his parents' haying machine for about 40 cents a bale, bought the grass for 50 cents a bale and sold his harvest for $2.25 a bale. Do the math and you pocket a $2,500 profit.
Shrewd? For Angell, it's just dollars and sense.
"You can't be a dummy in farming and expect to make it. It's like any other business — you have to be sharp, you have to be on top of things, you have to be trying to find ways to keep up and improve your operation."
Angell has two more years of school, but he already worries about the state's decreasing number of feed, seed and equipment dealers and veterinarians for large animals. He's also concerned about what most people consider a given: graduating to work alongside his parents.
"A lot of people have an image of the Vermont farm as 'a few cows.' But if I come back, we're going to have two incomes to support instead of just one. We're going to have to have more cows or do something different to make more money."
The farm has enough land for twice as many cows.
"But then our cows would make a lot of manure and that might stink a little bit. The environmental regulations — a lot of people don't like them, but I know they're coming and there's nothing you can do about them."
The chores, the work, the job — and always one more thing to juggle.
"You have 2 percent of the American population on farms, and we're feeding the other 98 percent, plus we're exporting stuff."
He could complain. He doesn't.
"That's the nice thing about American agriculture. I'm no economist, but it would seem to me if you don't have to make your own food, that allows you to do other stuff that boosts the economy."
Happy ending?
Angell grew up showing 4-H animals each September at the Tunbridge World's Fair.
"You get people who don't know a lot about cows, and they ask you questions. I figure maybe that guy's a brain surgeon. I don't know anything about brain surgery, so I would be asking questions that seem dumb to him, too."
But Angell just passed the age cutoff for 4-H. Last spring he finished two years at the 1,200-student Vermont Technical College, where he was close enough to live at home. This fall he's at UVM, living with more than 10,000 other students in the state's largest city.
"It's different — I really haven't lived away from home."
Even so, he's still focused on farming. The university's dairy barns, he notes, are just south of the Interstate 89 Burlington exit, "look to your left as you head north." He'll move on to a spring semester at the William H. Miner Agricultural Research Institute in Chazy, N.Y., then return to UVM and graduate in 2007.
Cue the homecoming, the happy ending. Now stop. Angell has another idea.
"When I get done school I want to spend three to five years working for somebody else. At school they call it 'making your mistakes on somebody else's dollar.' But I think it would be good just to see how somebody else works. There must be some things we could do better, and it might be hard to see them if I just came back here."
But he'll be back. It's a family tradition.
"We've got work to do around here, but my mom and dad also let me go where I can to make a little money. They've been real fair to me. I guess I haven't really had that big rebellious stage. I don't see any point in trying to throw all this away. I like being able to walk out the door and look around and just see all this we're working and maintaining. I like having cows. I like driving a tractor. I like the idea you do something a little different every day. And you really have to think about it. It's not just a job, it's a lifestyle."
One he wants to preserve.
"I can't stand watching people put houses in the middle of a hayfield. It's my pet peeve. I don't want to see that happening here. There are certainly places that would be easier to farm than this place. It's pretty hilly and pretty rocky. There are quite a few brooks that run through here, which used to be a good thing, but evidently it's a bad thing now. The EPA doesn't want cows in the brooks now — water quality stuff."
He could complain. He doesn't.
"I know this place, and all the tradition that goes with it, like the back of my hand, but it's really hard for me to describe what it is I like …"
It's like the wind. You just feel it.
Contact Kevin O'Connor at kevin.oconnor@rutlandherald.com.
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