Yesterday, Bejosh Farm, the dairy farm of Ed and Carol Gulley, got an unexpected visitor, a Swiss Steer calf instantly named Ice Cube, because he was born in the cold. Ed took the calf into the milking parlor, he and Carol wrapped him up in blankets and gave him some time to get warm and dry. Ed and Carol were bottle feeding him for most of the day.
The friendship of the Gulleys’ is a gift to us, you don’t often get text messages from friends telling you that a 140-lb calf has been born and that an Australian Shepherd acting mother is cleaning him up and drying him off. We rushed over to the farm and me Ice Cube, who has by now been moved to the calving barn.
It is always a moving thing for me to see how much the farmers I know love the animals they live and work with. In my time upstate, I have spent a lot of time with many farmers, taking photos of them, getting to know them. I even wrote a play about them.
They are the world’s greatest animal lovers and beyond that, farmers know animals better than almost anyone. They live with them 24 hours a day, know them as well as one species can know another. Farmers love the lives they give their cows, the chance to graze on pasture, lie in the shade, move freely about.
It is painful for me to hear so many farmers say their worst enemy is the animal rights movement, bribing and badgering elected officials to pass law after law that makes their lives more difficult and expensive. “It would be one thing if they knew what they were talking about,” one dairy farmer in Shushan, N.Y., told me. “They don’t.”
Farmers have never been good at telling their stories, and it never mattered. But as one farm after another closes, and our population shifts increasingly to the coasts, where their children work in bad jobs for people who care nothing about them or the land, it is becoming more important than ever that they learn how to tell their own stories. Farmers everywhere are starting blogs, getting on Facebook, beginning to make some real noise about their plight.
The politicians and economists
When Joshua Rockwood was raided by the local police, who came to his farm, impounded his horses and charged him with having frozen water tanks and an unheated barn, hundreds of farmers used Facebook to gather information, summon people to Joshua’s hearings, and help him defray the staggering legal and other costs associated with his arrest.
This is very new, few farmers are Internet savvy or present on social media. Until now. Cases like Rockwood’s are making them tech and media savvy, they are learning how to support one another. Ed Gulley is charismatic and articulate, he is thinking of starting up his own blog to write about the plight of the farmer. I have offered to help him, to edit his stories and advise him on setting up his blog.
Ed is an artist as well as a hard-working dairy farmer, and he is one of the most passionate and tender animal lovers I have yet met. I hope he gets to tell his story, it is gift to know him and Carol.