Farmhands: heads / tails
Top: A Mexican worker milks highly productive breeding stock. Some of the cows in the herd she cares for will sell at auction for tens of thousands of dollars. Having worked for several year in the US and saved money to help her family, this undocumented woman returned to Mexico.
Below: A local Vermonter at an organic dairy farm rests on a cow after a long shift. He and other farmhands maintain equipment and fields, and milk a few hundred head twice a day, every day, regardless of extremes of summer heat and winter cold.
How I admire farmers; it’s such a hard life, but one that has the calling or doesn’t.
I live in an odd no man’s land of small farms, sandwiched between the urban areas of DC and Baltimore. Agriculture remains the primary industry in this county but probably not for long. Most of the farms are family owned and operated small businesses with one or both household adults working other jobs to make ends meet. It’s far more a labor of love and usually handed down from generation to generation. Kids growing up on these farms are tougher in every respect. They know hard labor in school, home and sports. When there’s no one to inherit the family farm they get sold off in parcels to become modern day homesteads or suburban fortresses. Our road is a gravel road and the ppl across from us have a small herd of cattle in one pasture and sheep further down in another. They’re old now and their kids scattered to other states so when they hang up their farming “hats” I think it’ll be the end of that. I think Michelle Obama was right in that you can grow at least some of your own food in a very small space and you’d be healthier for it.