Field Trip Report
Our family is sometimes noted for thinking that it can do anything, and for doing it. But today Jon and I saw a farm operation that showed us a whole new level of bold effort and accomplishment. We are onlookers, compared to Sam and Katie Fisher.
We got an invitation to an Open House of a dairy farm. This was interesting to us because this is the farm that produces the raw milk that is delivered every week to refrigerators at our stand. We have been providing a way for people in fancy Northern Virginia to get raw milk for several years now, and just in the last six months the dairy has changed hands. I was never very impressed by the people who owned the cows before, mostly because I only saw this part of their system (delivering) and because they made huge assumptions about what we would be willing to provide for them. When we learned they were selling their business, it seemed like an opportunity to be in a new relationship with some new farmers.
These new farmers bought the dairy in January. They moved from their home in Lancaster PA and started milking as soon as they arrived. They currently have 29 cows to milk every day and they send their milk out to about 25 drop locations every week. It seems like that is the least of their worries.
In the six months since they arrived, they have built a new milking parlor, constructed a two story barn that is 108 feet wide and 54 feet deep, put an addition on the house, torn down the old house, moved tons of trash and debris, built a big cooler. They have logged and milled all the wood for their buildings right on the farm. They have two little boys and a new baby. They left a tight community of farmers and friends and came to central Virginia to start a new farm. Sam, with a beard but no mustache and curly hair sticking out from underneath a straw hat, appears to be in his early 30s but maybe even in his late 20s. Katie has a strong handshake and clearly does at least half the work in addition to all the home tasks. They both speak with the lilt that we hear all over Lancaster County when we go up there for supplies. It is amazing that the Pennsylvania Dutch accent and language has persisted for so many generations.
These farmers are Amish, so they live by a set of rules that sets them apart in all sorts of ways. They don't use electricity that comes from off the farm. They don't drive vehicles with rubber tires. They don't wear clothes with zippers or buttons. Horses provide the power to do farm work, diesel engines keep the cooler running and the milk tank at about 34 degrees. A big wood-burning furnace provides all the hot water for the farm.
They do all of this work matter-of-factly because they know how to do it so well. It is hard to imagine how they get it all done. The garden is immaculate. The milking parlor is a cinderblock building with a concrete floor, carefully planned to accommodate eight cows at a time, four who are waiting to be milked and four who are hooked up to the milking machine. Sam talked for some time about the mineral mix that he devised up in PA (that's what he calls his old home state: P A) -- it's a combination of alfalfa pellets, minerals, organic sugar. The sugar makes the cows love it, and the salt keeps them from eating too much. He had a mineral supplements business back in PA but he sold it when he left. Now he has to buy it from that company because no one else has that product. I asked him if it is hard to get agricultural supplies down in Cumberland County and he said it is a problem (I knew to ask that because we also have to go to Lancaster for our supplies.). When Amish folks want to go somewhere further than a buggy ride, other people drive them. One of his employees who is also his office manager spends many days a week "driving Amish."
It was raining when we got there, to our complete surprise since it was sunny and warm at home, 167 miles north. People were milling around in the open area of the barn, drinking chocolate milk and eating muffins. The Fishers had invited all their milk customers from all 25 drop locations, and some of them had come from as far as we did. It's not often you get invited to an Amish farm. It's a rare opportunity. They were welcoming and friendly and they had set the day aside to be hosts, but Sam did say he wondered when they would get the milk bottled since Saturdays is usually the day they do that job. Sunday is for church, and Monday is a delivery day. He said they might get up at 3:00 on Monday and just get it all bottled before the truck rolled out.
It was muddy everywhere, partly because he was still in the middle of construction and deconstruction projects. Under the playground was a tightly stretched layer of landscape cloth. Same under the outdoor table. A farmer answer to mud.
We stood in the milk parlor and heard about the cows and the milk and the machines. Then we went outside and heard about the bee hive that he constructed to house the bees that used to be in the old house -- local bees are much more likely to survive than swarms that are brought in from elsewhere, he said. Then some people went down to see the pigs, but I gave up on walking in the mud since I hadn't worn the proper rubber boots.
Katie and some neighbor girls had set out a big spread for lunch. They called it a "haystack" -- start with corn chips and keep loading stuff on, ending with a cheese sauce and/or a spoonful of gravy. They are clearly accustomed to feeding big crowds. The tables and benches were the ones that travel from one house to the next in the "bench wagon" -- for church and for gatherings.
When the Amish build a barn, they do it as a big group. The owner assembles all the wood, gets everything ready, and then a big group comes to get it done. Just last week Jon went to Southern Maryland to order some wood from one of the sawmills (you can't call them because they don't have phones in their houses, but they can have a phone booth 250 feet from their house, so they can call you if you figure out how to give them your number). When he got to the sawmill, it was closed. Some kid came around the corner and told him the owner was up the road and Jon could go find him. He found him at a barn raising. All the sawmills on that road were closed because everyone was at the barn raising. Jon said there were about 40 men working at the same time, measuring and cutting and hammering. That's how Sam and Katie got their barn built, once they got all the wood milled.
At lunch, I was sitting next to a woman who turns out to be a loyal customer of ours at the Falls Church market. So she had made the same long trip we did today. Her name was Lani, so we had a whole conversation about our names and where they came from.
If you have never met an Amish farm family, you might not know that they really do wear plain clothes that look just like all the other Amish. Black trousers on the boys, straw hats, suspenders, no patterns on any of the fabrics, long blue or purple cotton dresses on the girls, long black apron from the waist down, bonnets, heavy shoes.
I remember from high school when I did my big research paper on the Amish: their highest calling is to be farmers. Many are carpenters and buggy makers and sawmill operators, but they really want to be farmers. Every few generations, their community gets too crowded and there isn't enough farm land to be divided up anymore, and some people leave and start a new community. We learned today that 60 new families have moved into the area from Lancaster and they are building new elementary schools every year. It is really nice to think about a new farming community starting up in Virginia. They keep moving, so there are lots of Amish in Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana. I hadn't known that they were settling in Virginia.
There is no way to imagine how hard these people have been working to establish themselves. They seem calm and healthy and proud. Sam says it is nice to live somewhere that you can't see right into your neighbor's house and no one can tell when you turn the lights out. It was a treat to see this family on its own farm, pursuing the dream, keeping the cows healthy, and running a business in the 21st century while maintaining the practices of a very old tradition. Not the same as the Orthodox Jews because Jews don't think of farming as their highest calling, but there are similarities in the value they place on distancing themselves from the rest of us. I don't know if the Amish still call the rest of us "English" but that's what we used to be called.
One of the reasons we made that trip was so I could see how I feel about providing all the equipment and access for their milk customers, and now I don't mind it. We will maintain the refrigerators and know that we are supporting a young, competent, hard working family. It was worth the trip just to feel better about our part in that enterprise. And their milk is delicious. We can barely drink any other milk anymore, it tastes so pale.
We got an invitation to an Open House of a dairy farm. This was interesting to us because this is the farm that produces the raw milk that is delivered every week to refrigerators at our stand. We have been providing a way for people in fancy Northern Virginia to get raw milk for several years now, and just in the last six months the dairy has changed hands. I was never very impressed by the people who owned the cows before, mostly because I only saw this part of their system (delivering) and because they made huge assumptions about what we would be willing to provide for them. When we learned they were selling their business, it seemed like an opportunity to be in a new relationship with some new farmers.
These new farmers bought the dairy in January. They moved from their home in Lancaster PA and started milking as soon as they arrived. They currently have 29 cows to milk every day and they send their milk out to about 25 drop locations every week. It seems like that is the least of their worries.
In the six months since they arrived, they have built a new milking parlor, constructed a two story barn that is 108 feet wide and 54 feet deep, put an addition on the house, torn down the old house, moved tons of trash and debris, built a big cooler. They have logged and milled all the wood for their buildings right on the farm. They have two little boys and a new baby. They left a tight community of farmers and friends and came to central Virginia to start a new farm. Sam, with a beard but no mustache and curly hair sticking out from underneath a straw hat, appears to be in his early 30s but maybe even in his late 20s. Katie has a strong handshake and clearly does at least half the work in addition to all the home tasks. They both speak with the lilt that we hear all over Lancaster County when we go up there for supplies. It is amazing that the Pennsylvania Dutch accent and language has persisted for so many generations.
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| Newly built, and the second floor only has half the flooring, but plenty of room for horses, carriages, tools and supplies, dining hall, and walk-in coolers. |
These farmers are Amish, so they live by a set of rules that sets them apart in all sorts of ways. They don't use electricity that comes from off the farm. They don't drive vehicles with rubber tires. They don't wear clothes with zippers or buttons. Horses provide the power to do farm work, diesel engines keep the cooler running and the milk tank at about 34 degrees. A big wood-burning furnace provides all the hot water for the farm.
They do all of this work matter-of-factly because they know how to do it so well. It is hard to imagine how they get it all done. The garden is immaculate. The milking parlor is a cinderblock building with a concrete floor, carefully planned to accommodate eight cows at a time, four who are waiting to be milked and four who are hooked up to the milking machine. Sam talked for some time about the mineral mix that he devised up in PA (that's what he calls his old home state: P A) -- it's a combination of alfalfa pellets, minerals, organic sugar. The sugar makes the cows love it, and the salt keeps them from eating too much. He had a mineral supplements business back in PA but he sold it when he left. Now he has to buy it from that company because no one else has that product. I asked him if it is hard to get agricultural supplies down in Cumberland County and he said it is a problem (I knew to ask that because we also have to go to Lancaster for our supplies.). When Amish folks want to go somewhere further than a buggy ride, other people drive them. One of his employees who is also his office manager spends many days a week "driving Amish."
It was raining when we got there, to our complete surprise since it was sunny and warm at home, 167 miles north. People were milling around in the open area of the barn, drinking chocolate milk and eating muffins. The Fishers had invited all their milk customers from all 25 drop locations, and some of them had come from as far as we did. It's not often you get invited to an Amish farm. It's a rare opportunity. They were welcoming and friendly and they had set the day aside to be hosts, but Sam did say he wondered when they would get the milk bottled since Saturdays is usually the day they do that job. Sunday is for church, and Monday is a delivery day. He said they might get up at 3:00 on Monday and just get it all bottled before the truck rolled out.
It was muddy everywhere, partly because he was still in the middle of construction and deconstruction projects. Under the playground was a tightly stretched layer of landscape cloth. Same under the outdoor table. A farmer answer to mud.
We stood in the milk parlor and heard about the cows and the milk and the machines. Then we went outside and heard about the bee hive that he constructed to house the bees that used to be in the old house -- local bees are much more likely to survive than swarms that are brought in from elsewhere, he said. Then some people went down to see the pigs, but I gave up on walking in the mud since I hadn't worn the proper rubber boots.
Katie and some neighbor girls had set out a big spread for lunch. They called it a "haystack" -- start with corn chips and keep loading stuff on, ending with a cheese sauce and/or a spoonful of gravy. They are clearly accustomed to feeding big crowds. The tables and benches were the ones that travel from one house to the next in the "bench wagon" -- for church and for gatherings.
When the Amish build a barn, they do it as a big group. The owner assembles all the wood, gets everything ready, and then a big group comes to get it done. Just last week Jon went to Southern Maryland to order some wood from one of the sawmills (you can't call them because they don't have phones in their houses, but they can have a phone booth 250 feet from their house, so they can call you if you figure out how to give them your number). When he got to the sawmill, it was closed. Some kid came around the corner and told him the owner was up the road and Jon could go find him. He found him at a barn raising. All the sawmills on that road were closed because everyone was at the barn raising. Jon said there were about 40 men working at the same time, measuring and cutting and hammering. That's how Sam and Katie got their barn built, once they got all the wood milled.
At lunch, I was sitting next to a woman who turns out to be a loyal customer of ours at the Falls Church market. So she had made the same long trip we did today. Her name was Lani, so we had a whole conversation about our names and where they came from.
If you have never met an Amish farm family, you might not know that they really do wear plain clothes that look just like all the other Amish. Black trousers on the boys, straw hats, suspenders, no patterns on any of the fabrics, long blue or purple cotton dresses on the girls, long black apron from the waist down, bonnets, heavy shoes.
I remember from high school when I did my big research paper on the Amish: their highest calling is to be farmers. Many are carpenters and buggy makers and sawmill operators, but they really want to be farmers. Every few generations, their community gets too crowded and there isn't enough farm land to be divided up anymore, and some people leave and start a new community. We learned today that 60 new families have moved into the area from Lancaster and they are building new elementary schools every year. It is really nice to think about a new farming community starting up in Virginia. They keep moving, so there are lots of Amish in Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana. I hadn't known that they were settling in Virginia.
There is no way to imagine how hard these people have been working to establish themselves. They seem calm and healthy and proud. Sam says it is nice to live somewhere that you can't see right into your neighbor's house and no one can tell when you turn the lights out. It was a treat to see this family on its own farm, pursuing the dream, keeping the cows healthy, and running a business in the 21st century while maintaining the practices of a very old tradition. Not the same as the Orthodox Jews because Jews don't think of farming as their highest calling, but there are similarities in the value they place on distancing themselves from the rest of us. I don't know if the Amish still call the rest of us "English" but that's what we used to be called.
One of the reasons we made that trip was so I could see how I feel about providing all the equipment and access for their milk customers, and now I don't mind it. We will maintain the refrigerators and know that we are supporting a young, competent, hard working family. It was worth the trip just to feel better about our part in that enterprise. And their milk is delicious. We can barely drink any other milk anymore, it tastes so pale.
Is that Lani sitting next to you in the photo? I remember visiting an Amish farm in Maryland with you and Tony, stopping off on the way between MD and VA farms to drop off boots the Amish couple were fixing. I think you and I just stayed in the truck but I remember the dark solid colored shirts and black pants of the men and boys and little girls in long dresses. Some of us were mail ordering Amish pants around that time too!
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