01/08/01

Orange County is certainly not East Coast Wisconsin anymore. There’s not much of a farm community left to dick around in anymore outside onion country in the Black Dirt. In the hills east of Goshen there’s nothing but a handful of dairy farmers left on the land, and they seem just as bankrupt and as desperate as the next one. You’re certainly not getting paid any better for your milk than you did a generation ago, and of course your taxes and expenses are probably three times what they were. Your best effort nowadays might result in you breaking even or being able to pay half your bills. You better have a wife who can work as a nurse or a school teacher or something. Otherwise you have to resort to some form of hustling just to keep going.

Much as I hate to admit it, if Phebe didn’t have her career at the Newburgh Hospital, we would have probably folded long ago. She calls herself my patron and chronic enabler. That’s surely what she was to Rocky. Me? I don’t know. For a time Starvin Marvin resorted to growing Marijuana between his corn, or so says Stash Skim. Honest man has to know dairying now is like a cruel vice, unhealthy, hardly wholesome to the soul. Shit, I see more farm folk now at the probation office on reporting day than I do at Agway (well, just about all the Agway stores around here went out of business last year).You couldn’t really say they’re family farms that are left unless you counted the dogs and cats on the places. A lot of these guys left prefer to be loners, or women won’t have them. Call it husbandry without actual husbands. If you found more than a handful of farms in the area still in the business of actually producing milk you’d be lucky. That’s all they ever did in these parts years ago. Our milk products were once the gold standard for the country at large. Goshen butter was famous. But you wouldn’t know it today from the look of the place with all these fucking McMansions going up on every knoll and hillside. The milk industry has been abandoned, just like the iron industry, railroad industry, trotter horse industry, knife industry and any other good thing we once had. You know what we have now? Fucking warehouses. We got fucking large square buildings the size of farms plopped down anywhere they can put ‘em. They can park all those Chinese widgets and doo-dads there for a spell before they get sent out to all the retail stores--- which we also have in abundance.

What kills me are these guys like Taciturn Vern or even Stash Skimington who have no equity left to fall back on. Both have little more left on the deed than a rundown farmhouse and an old barn or two. In reality they’re working their asses off for mere beans. Meanwhile these faceless real estate holding companies they’re in partnership with, they’re just waiting for the right day to cash in, and are using the farmers rental of their land to save a fortune in taxes every year. If you could find a more feudalistic arrangement, I’ve never heard it. . .

All those years getting to this point though of retiring. . . boy, I guess you could say it was like being enslaved or something. I can’t get over now how much wondrous shit there is in the world to wrap your mind around when you don’t have to spend your every waking hour concerned about the many and varied needs of 3 dozen lactating bovines. Maybe that’s why people are so quick to judge farmers as an ignorant lot---because smart or not, it’s so damn apparent they can’t afford to put their minds to fucking anything beyond the rigorous demands of their business. Farming’s got to be one of the loneliest, most isolating occupations there is, and I’d say it’s the same here in the shadow of New York City as on the plains of Nebraska. If anything it’s worse in the suburban areas like this one if you go on the idea that the farmer becomes more and more at odds with the neighbors as the farm culture dwindles from existence.