When I was in Virginia last week, I spent one night with Jim and Deb Naylor, who run the 160-acre Willis River Heaven’s Edge Farm in Dillwyn, VA. (Plus there’s another 200 acres they rent on two other farms, mostly for hay.) For this city guy, it was a terrific education about the joys and rigors of farm life in America today, especially the challenges of maintaining a spread-out grass-based operation.
The main farm is set on bucolic pasture that supports 75 cattle, 110 sheep, plus chickens and pigs. Deb also maintains a substantial vegetable garden, bringing produce twice a week to a local farmer’s market. She was first out with tomatoes from a covered area of the garden last week, and I can attest to the fact that they are wonderful.
Jim and Deb are both in their early 60s, and, amazingly, run the entire operation themselves. The farm’s close-to-the-edge cost structure doesn’t allow for much hiring of extra hands. Jim personally built the replica far house (took him five years) they have called home for the last 13 years. In addition, Jim raises more than 100 racing pigeons.
Not surprisingly, they work nearly seven days a week. There is always fencing to be added or repaired and wandering animals to be located. Jim and Deb are extremely frugal people. For example, their newest car is a small Honda from the early 1990s that Jim bought from a neighbor three years ago for $500.
They also have an old (i.e. slow) computer, coupled with a dialup Internet connection. We joked about how you can get a lot of chores done waiting for the email to download, but the reality is that the poor connection makes it nearly impossible for the Naylors to do any significant commerce via the Internet. So they mostly raise the animals from the time they are young, and then sell them to other farmers or area distributors once they get close to being ready for slaughter.
There is always one or another headache. When I was there, the big problem was that rifle shots from a hunter in the woods was freaking out the two guard dogs that protect the sheep from coyotes. (They lost one sheep last year to a coyote.)
Jim is also very outspoken in his concerns about government intrusions into his life, especially the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). He has joined with the Virginia Independent Consumers and Farmers Association (VICFA) to lobby the state legislature against NAIS.
He resents the infringement on his privacy, but objects even more to what he expects will be a significant cost that isn’t fully appreciated by most people. Along with an estimated $3 per animal per tag, he expects additional fees to software companies to maintain and update records. He suspects that’s a major motive behind the program—to enrich the hardware and software companies providing the technology.
He’s a pretty independent guy, and vows, “I’ll get out of farming before I go along with NAIS.”
Vacations are very difficult to arrange. “You can’t have as many animals as we have and get away,” he says.
NAIS and rising property taxes (from $2,000 to an expected $4,000 annually) have Jim thinking seriously about reducing the size of his herd and the acreage he tends. He’d like to raise fewer animals, and raise them longer so he can sell direct to consumers.
As hard as the work is, though, he and Deb seem to love farming. I also have this feeling that farming is changing as rapidly as many industries—with the added baggage of excessive government regulation and the costs that go with such regulation. Farmers who expect to survive will need to be quite agile.
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There’s a pretty amazing story in today’s New York Times about a high-profile family’s struggle over autism. The struggle–really a generational disagreement about the likely causes of autism in a young member of the family–mirrors some of the discussion we’ve had on this blog.
The family discord seems to stem from the older generation’s trust in the medical establishment, and the younger generation’s skepticism about what the establishment is telling us, and inclination to see vaccines as a big problem.
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