Bob, wearing his neon-orange neckerchief, met me outside and gave me an affectionate nuzzle before he went on to see what the boss was up to. His trust and goodwill made me feel a little better, but back at my little chicken-coop apartment I kept replaying Brassard’s narrative in my head, ambivalent. He was probably right about the deer, the visitor. Cat and I had walked through any woods or fields we came to without thinking twice about whose property it was. In any case, it would be six months before I started sleeping out there again.
But I still felt a deep unease. What had I been thinking? That Vermont was a postcard utopia without crime, poverty, violence, dysfunctional families, genetic disorders, and all the rest of humanity’s woes? All the trailers and houses I’d passed on the back roads, with debris-covered lawns and torn plastic over the windows: The lives lived there were probably a lot like the Goslants’. This was just a different kind of desolation from what I’d been accustomed to in the city. In the context of lush forest and verdant fields, it had taken me longer to fully recognize what I was seeing.
Chapter 23
When the cows moved indoors, the nature of the job changed radically.
The cowshed is a long, airy thing built mainly of steel beams, with a corrugated sheet steel roof and wooden end walls. The sidewalls are mostly just open to the outdoors—the cows’ collective body heat keeps it comfortably warm (for them)—unless the cold gets truly vicious, and then we roll down tarp curtains along the sidewalls. The open structure means it’s well lit during the day; it’s lit less pleasantly by overhead fluorescents after sunset. The cows spend most of their time standing or reclining in two long rows of stalls, their back ends hanging out a bit into the center alley so their manure falls onto the concrete floor.
This was a “free stall” shed, meaning that cows are not restrained by stanchions but are free to move around. When the urge strikes them, they wander down the central aisle to take a drink from the water tanks or to stick their heads into a separate alley where we put out foodstuffs. Actually, they don’t move around much; after milking, they’ll grab a bite at the buffet and then are generally content to return to their regular stalls to chew their cud and drowse.
Manure: I thought I knew the basics, but until the cows moved inside I didn’t know that a single cow produces about 110 pounds of it a day. That’s about as much as the entirety of me, defecated by each cow, every day. Brassard had eighty cows milking at any given time, producing six tons of manure, daily, that in winter ended up on the shed floor. Six tons that it was my job to remove.
Every day, I’d come along the central alley with the Bobcat skid-steer. This was a small yellow tractorish thing to which Earnest had attached a cut quarter-section of some huge construction vehicle’s tire. I lowered the bucket with this scooper-squeegee attachment on it and pushed the soup of manure the whole length of the shed. At the far end, it flowed into a long floor grate and got pumped into the manure “lagoon” outside. After several passes, the aisle was still wet but reasonably clean.
Manure and urine also ended up in the stalls. Brassard kept his cows comfortable—happy cows give more milk and stay healthier—flooring their stalls with rubber mats as well as something soft to cushion their bony bodies when they reclined, mainly sawdust but sometimes ground hay or sand. I had to rake out the wet bedding and replace it every day, in every stall.
Having cows inside also required that we put out feed for them at frequent intervals. One of us would drive a tractor loaded with silage and grain through the feed alley as a second person shoveled the stuff to the floor. A fence kept the cows out of that alley, but they put their heads through rails to get at the goodies, munching happily. And depositing more manure that I had to remove.
All this was in addition to the care of around sixty other cows that lived in their own shed nearby. These were heifers—young cows that hadn’t yet been bred—and mature cows that were “drying off,” that is, getting their annual two-month vacation from milking. Fortunately, their manure management required far less of me: Their floor was covered with thick straw that stayed there, composting, until warmer weather. I simply had to scoop out the wettest spots and spread a new layer of clean straw on top.
With the added work, I was walking around in a haze of fatigue by early December. I had been putting in longer hours and more days because Diz’s lower back was “acting up” more than usual, to the point that her chiropractor told her to stop lifting and stooping, at least for a while. That she would admit to the pain, that she’d take his advice, told me how much it must have hurt.
Twelve to fourteen hours, six or seven days a week: By the time my workday was done, I would fall down on my bed and could barely get up to cook myself dinner. Even so, I couldn’t accomplish a fraction of what Diz did. The farm faced a severe shortage of human-power.
Ultimately, Brassard had to hire one of the “hippie” organic farmers from down the road to help fill in for Diz. Lynn and her husband, Theo, grew organic greens that they sold at farmers markets, kept a few chickens, and raised a small herd of goats that they milked to make soap. Their winters were not as busy as those of dairy farmers, so Lynn had time to help with Brassard’s cows. Taking on a
