Raising a Farmer

At kitchen tables and in barns across Minnesota, kids are making plans for their own county fairs to begin this summer. Fair kids are beginning to think of projects they will be working on. They are celebrating the birth of their fair animals. They are navigating disappointing emotions when their plans for their animals don’t work out this winter. Everett began making plans last fall to hatch his own baby chicks for the fair this year.

Last spring, Everett purchased his first baby chicks from a local hatchery. The winter before, he was making plans for what kind of breeds of chickens he would like to raise. He was saving and looking forward to raising chickens. In the end, he decided on a variety of chicken breeds.

As his baby chicks grew, we all fell in love with his cochins. Cochins have a lot of feathers. They have feathers all the way down their legs and feet. They are a pile of soft fluffy feathers. I even started making earrings out of their soft feathers.

Cochins come in a variety of different colors. Everett’s favorite are blue cochins. At our county fair last summer, Everett showed a breeding pen of cochins, one rooster and two hens. After the county fair, Everett had begun to make plans for this year. He had decided he was going to hatch his own chicks from his breeding pen. For Christmas, there was an incubator waiting for Everett under the tree.

We were patiently waiting for his cochins to start laying eggs. Cochins take a much longer time to mature than other breeds. This is because of all their feathers they have to grow. It is definitely worth the wait. When Everett found their first egg it was a happy day.

All of Everett’s plans have currently made our dining room into his own little personal hatchery. There are eggs waiting to be placed in the incubator. There are eggs in the incubator. There are baby chicks in boxes on the floor.

Everett is in heaven. Every morning before he goes to school, he checks on his incubator if there is any sign of chicks making their way out of their shell. When he comes home from school, he checks again. Before he goes to bed he checks.

When we see a chick making its way out of its shell, we all gather around the incubator to watch. It is amazing. Sometimes we don’t even see them hatch and they are out of their shell part of life before we even know it.

For me, watching Everett make plans and take pride in his process of learning and growing with chickens is worth the chirping throughout the house.

The number of dairy farms exiting the industry is heartbreaking. Many of these farm families are not exiting the industry by their own choosing but by an axe. Many of them are feeling like they are being pushed out.

The feelings of being pushed out not by one but by a number of reasons. According to Minnesota Department of Agriculture, in January 2018 there were 3,076 dairy farms in Minnesota. In January 2020, there are 2,601. There were 475 dairy farms that sold their milk cows, their livelihood, their lifestyle, their everything in a two-year period. Their hard work, their hopes, their faith, the many tears all for nothing: gone.

To break these numbers down, the state of Minnesota has lost an average of 20 dairy farms a month in the last two years. Twenty dairy farms a month left the industry. Twenty families every month made difficult decisions in silence across rural Minnesota. Twenty families a month had to figure out, what now? Twenty farms a month have left in silence, fading into the background. Some of those families needed to move away from the life they were building. Many of them had to walk away with nothing left but guilt, shame and the feelings of letting generations before them down. Many of these families are going over and over in their head, what could they have done differently? Where did they go wrong?

There is nothing they could have done differently. When pay price is $13, $14, $15 per hundredweight and cost of production is $17, $18, $19 per hundredweight, no matter how you do the math, you are always short, no matter what. Within my own home of Morrison County, we had 219 dairy farms only two short years ago. Today there are 177 dairy farms in Morrison County. Almost two farms a month left the dairy industry in Morrison County. Our family farm was one of them for the month of September.

How is the landscape of rural Minnesota going to look in the very near future?

We talk about how we want our rural communities to thrive. I ask, are we doing anything to change it? We talk about mental health and what we need to do once we reach a breaking point, but we don’t talk about what is causing it: The financial burden dairy farms have been in the last five years. We don’t want to talk about where we really are because it is so “Debbie Downer.”

I don’t see the dairy industry “bouncing back.” I see a way of life dying. I see rural communities hurting. I see lost looks on farmers not knowing who they are anymore. I see farmers once proud of the hard work they did and that was enough. Now I see broken and defeated faces.

I wonder what rural Minnesota will look like in the next two years.