Home-Made Food: A Farmer's Tale

A 32-ounce, white plastic yogurt container featuring an old-fashioned drawing of a jersey cow is a staple in our refrigerator.  On the container under the cow is written “Jersey Milk, Organic Whole Yogurt.”  Also on the container are a few facts:  The yogurt is made right on the farm in Westfield, Vermont.  It is the Butterwork’s Dairy, not far from our house.  The farm is self-sufficient and organic, growing everything the cows eat.  And the cows eat well: grains and alfalfa, corn and oats and barley.  The herd is closed.  This means the cows are all from the herd.  No outsiders.

The yogurt these cows make is so good it could become the Ben and Jerry’s of yogurt.  Right on the package, though, the family writes “we want to remain a small one-farm operation.”  A successful, organic, closed herd, single farm, family run dairy with the stated goal of not becoming too big.  I had to visit this farm.

I parked my car near the barn just beyond an abandoned old split-windshield truck.  Jersey calves roamed about in the tall grass hemming in the old red Ford.  I meandered around the farm and found Jack Lazor in a small, crowded room near a loading dock.  Backed up to the dock sat a used-up white refrigerator truck, hand lettered with the name of the farm.  Stacks of yogurt containers sat in boxes on pallets to be loaded into the big white beast.

After Jack apologized for being tired, “I was haying until midnight last night,” we walked together to a field, where it was time to stake out new pasture for the milk cows.  We talked as we walked.  Jack and Anne Lazor met in the early 70’s.  Jack was farming at Old Sturbridge Village, where he was practicing some of what he had studied in college – agricultural history.  Jack graduated from college in 1972 and was not interested in the political ragings around him.  He was interested in a deceptively simple question – how did the original colonists feed themselves? – and the ‘back to the land’ movement.  These interests turned into a life.

We walked into a field of grass.  Jack described what was growing under my feet, a mix of five or six different grasses and clovers, and we began to pull thin fiberglass fence posts from the ground.  As I pulled the posts, Jack twirled the electric fence wire onto its spool and poured a tsunami of knowledge over me: land management; treatment for sick cows without use of antibiotics; how to grow grain corn and strip the kernels from the husks; impact on the milk of different feeds; new grasses now growing on certain fields; organic composting; milling grain; using wind to make electricity; the goal of a steam plant, among other topics.  We finished moving the posts and stringing wire to create a new area for the cows to graze.

“I move the cows every twelve hours, so they eat all of the grass in an area and don’t just pick and choose, leaving a monoculture of weeds behind.  They eat and fertilize an area, and then we move them a bit and they do the same again.  The grasses grow up again behind the cows and the fields remain complex and healthy.” 

Behind us two work horses grazed.  A tall tower hosted the wind mill.  The barn, granary and milk shed spread out near the field.  Trucks and tractors were tossed around the landscape. 

Jack and Anne began farming their land over twenty-five years ago.  The idea of making great yogurt wasn’t a careful plan.  The original small herd made too much milk; the kitchen became a laboratory, and the products made sold briskly at markets nearby.  The farm grew, well, organically.

We finished staking the field and Jack struggled with his new cell phone and called the barn: “send the cows.”  The cows walked past us to the pasture, knowing what to do and where to go.  I could see the personality in each lady as she waddled by.  Jack had a comment for each cow.  The herd closed in 1981, so each member of this herd was born and raised right here on the farm.  When the milkers were all in, we stopped talking.  The only sounds were cows eating grass and church bells in the distance.  Not bad sounds to work around.

We toured the rest of the operation.  I saw where the herd spends its winter, a large modern shed with a train-barn fabric roof, letting in a sky’s amount of light.  We walked to the house for lunch.  The house is not reached by a road.  It is reached by a path from the barn.  A garden and more fields dominate the view. 

Inside the house papers and notes and reports and whatnot are piled high; a true farm house.  Jack offered me some bread and butter – all ingredients from the farm – and I could not help but ask for more.  The butter was a deep yellow and sweet as pie.  “How do you make it?” I asked.  “Put cream in a jug and shake it,” Jack replied.  He told me someone who buys their butter once called to ask what went in it to make it yellow.  ‘You’d have to ask the cows,’ was the answer.

Anne joined us and we ate, interrupted by orders coming in over the phone, scribbled on scraps of paper to be brought to the barn.  Everything we ate, except some olive oil for our salad, the Lazor’s made on the farm.  Anne guesses they make eighty-five percent of what they eat.  Jack walked me back to the barn, where we talked to the people loading the truck.  Someone joked about the radio – it was tuned to a Quebec station – and I asked if it was a good station.  “It’s the only one, so I guess so” was the reply.

Jack told me their number one selling product is the fat-free Jersey milk yogurt, which made me laugh.  Jersey cows are known for their cream.  If you take away the fat, it’s not really the cows that distinguish the yogurt.  My theory is people are trying to buy something other than yogurt in that 32-ounce container.




David Rocchio works, writes and lives in Stowe, Vermont.  (c) 2010 David Rocchio  This post started its life as a column in The Stowe Reporter.