Part VIII: Back to the Conference

I love this picture. Everyone in Nepal wears these "flip flops". It was easy to tell when the conference was in session because the doorway to the conference room was jambed with them where they had been kicked off the feet of the participants in this haphazard manner. It meant everyone was inside and hard a work.

In my presentations to the conference I usually shared real stories that illustrated what the sustainability movement in the US looked like and what directions it was taking as a way of dramatizing the ground that had been covered. I explained about transitioning and how sustainability was a unifying principal and how some people thought of it like a virtue, something that could only exist as an action, like kindness or honesty.

One story I shared at the Nepal conference was one I had also told at the G-9 Global Conference in Denver, Colorado when President Clinton was in office. It's a lovely story about sustainable agriculture in action particularly the complex issues involved in changing the status quo. I played no part in the story. I'm just passing it on but the story belongs to a friend, a dairy farmer in Indiana in the Midwestern US, who I'll call Dan.

Dan had a large dairy farm with lots of land, lots of barns and other buildings, lots of expensive equipment, lots of expensive top-of-the-line dairy cows and a huge amount of debt. The two seemed to go hand in hand. He watched for two or three years recently while his profitability plummeted. He saw his "Profit Per Cow "margin get sliced in half in a year. Even though he was fully mechanized he needed to hire someone to help with the daily operation. For a while his son and daughter-in-law lived on the farm and worked with him. But as money dried up they got jobs in town to help pay the bills on the farm. The bank was beginning to hint that he was falling behind and that they were worried about him.

Just before Thanksgiving in 1996 Dan was just at the point of calling it quits. He had booked the auctioner and set a date to sell off all the equipment and cows and find a real estate agent to help sell the farm. Dan and his wife had made the decision together. They were devastated by the idea but the stress had become overwhelming. Then Dan read an add (Surya's story a little further down in the blog will remind you of Dan's story.) in a diary magazine about a Grass Growers' Conference in Wisconsin that was a week away. He had no idea what it was about but he decided to go to the conference on a whim. He threw a sleeping bag and air mattress into his pickup, got his son to milk the cows for a few days while he took the time off, said goodbye to his wife, and made the long drive to upstate Wisconsin.

He wandered around the midway at the conference looking at what all the vendors were hawking in the form of new farming methods, new breeds, new versions of old ideas, and then he ran into Charlie Opitz, a dairy farmer from Wisconsin. They began a conversation about something or other but it showed that the two men were a lot alike and thought alike. Dan and Charlie went for a coffee and started to really talk. They talked for hours. Dan told Charlie every detail of his dairy operation and Charlie listened carefully. Then Charlie told him every detail about his operation. Dan listened. They talked most of that first night. Dan attended the presentation part of the conference the next day and heard Charlie and other members of the Grass Growers Association talk about how they were changing the way they farmed and were putting the emphasis on the grass and the soil. Dan was fascinated. Still, he had made a decision to sell his operation. The conference ended and Charlie and Dan said goodbye. Charlie gave Dan his business card and told him if he changed his mind to call him. He said it didn't matter what time of the day or night it was, just call him and then Dan drove home.

He pulled up in his yard in the middle of the night and was still wide awake from all the coffee he drank during the long drive. He made one more cup while he sat at the kitchen table listening to the wind and the clock tick. He took out Charlie's card and called him. He began to say, "I don't know....." and Charlie interrupted him. "Don't say another word. Me and some of the other boys are coming down to see you. We'll leave in an hour or so and be there tonight. In the meantime don't spend a cent. Don't by any Christmas presents, don't make any long distance calls, turn the lights off that you're not using. Try not to spend any money you don't need to" and he hung up. Dan went to bed. In the morning he told his wife he was having second thoughts about selling the farm.

Charlie and his entourage of Wisconsin Grass Growers took a walk with Dan around his farm the first morning they were there. They looked at everything. They looked at the tractors, the fencing, each cow, the milking parlor, the machines in there, and they looked at the house and everything in it. Then they bought some food, cooked a huge dinner and got Dan and his whole family seated in the dinning room and began a discussion that went on into the early morning.

They helped Dan see the box he was in. He owed the bank a lot of money that he could only pay back with his milk receipts. His milk receipts were falling in value quickly. He was behind. He owed the veterinarian thousands of dollars because he had super breed, high production Holsteins that were sensitive to the cold, had all kinds of udder problems, and produced a designer milk low in butter fat. He owed the nutrionist a lot of money for all the fancy soy and corn supplements he fed his cows, the local Extension Service out of the state university was also charging him money for consulting fees, and lastly, he couldn't afford any help, not even his own son, and he was stressed to the max.

What Charlie told him to do was keep the date of the auction and get rid of all his high priced tractors and hay bailers, plows, seeders, manure spreaders, all the gas guzzlers. Then he told Dan to sell all his cows. Then he told Dan to take the money from those sales and pay off the bank everything he owed and with the money left over buy two ATV (All Terrain Vehicles) machines that are sort of like motorcycles except they have four wheels and more power. He told Dad to start buying a replacment herd only this time buy sturdier cows, older breeds, that gave less milk per milking but were rugged enough to gaze outside in Indiana all winter so they could be kept on grass. Grass was the key to all of this if you haven't figured that out yet.

Dan did everything that Charlie recommended and two years later at Christmas, after Dan came back from telling his story at the Wisconsin Grass Grower's Conference to a standing ovation his old banker showed up at the farm with a big basket of fruits and cheeses and told Dan, "We really miss you down at the bank." Dan was now making enough profit per cow per year to pay his bill and to pay his son and daughter-in-law enough money so they could be back on the farm. In fact the farm was making enough money now that they were planning to take it over when Dan retired or died. We're talking about profit, I reminded the people at the conference, and it underlines the fact that if it isn't profitable it isn't sustainable. If it isn't profitable in some way for some one no one will want to do it.

Dan and Charlie's measuring tool for success is the grass they grow. If they are farming sustainably they're making money but their soil and grass are optimally healthy. One way Charlie had of measuring soil health was the number of earth worms in a given measure of soil. He had so many that they often migrated across his farm to less populated pastures.

Dan was selling his milk locally to a strong market. He sold "value added"milk products: butter, yoghurt, ice cream, cream and sold fresh eggs because he was running chickens through the cow pasture to help keep the grass healthy and free of parasites. He grazes his cows in a line across the pasture with their heads just a little back of a two strand electric fence that he stretchs across the pasture and moves a few yards up the pasture everyday. The cows eat and then drop their manure across the field close to the fence as they graze. Dan can manage the fertility of his pastures by moving the electric fence faster or slower up the field and back down again in a rotation. This is good for the grass and soil. He feeds the cows hay in the winter laid out in a "ribbon" in front of the same, solar-powered electric fence. He supplements the hay with protein in the form of thumb-sized nuggets of his own corn that he spreads out of a bucket on top of the hay. He still has one tractor with a cutter for hay. He lays up the hay in round bales that he can easily put on the back of one of the small ATVs and pull it out, like cotton candy, in a wide ribbon across the pasture. Dan has been able to climb out of the box he was in pretty quickly with Charlie's help. He helped start an Indiana Grass Growers Association and he usually comes to the annual Vermont Grass Growers Association each winter so I'm able to stay in touch with him.