The Farmer's Cooperative

Years ago, in this tiny central New Hampshire town, men kept dairy cattle. Slowly, surely as the demise of the passenger pigeon, the dairy farms eroded away to extinction. Barns tilted and then collapsed to be bulldozed under new housing developments. An era ended and another arose, the continuum of monetary acquisition, the time of the tourist.

We shifted from an agrarian economy to one based upon the gratification of pleasure seekers. Motels and restaurants mushroomed on the verdant soil that once bore fruit to corn and beans. Idle visitors during off-season speculate what a town of merely 2,000 inhabitants does with eleven restaurants and five motels, a phenomenon unexplained by proximity to an interstate more than 20 miles distant.

The breathtaking beauty of mountain and lake draws them like iron filings to a magnet, causing vacationers to circle and hover in simmering expectation, longing to own a piece of paradise. Boats on trailers thunder past puritanical 200-year-old houses the founding families can no longer afford to keep, having long since moved to modern modulars on barren acre lots.

A couple hardy individuals, blessed with fertile flatlands, eked out a summer living by growing vegetables and selling them to lakefront owning tourists at exorbitant prices the locals refused to pay. The rest of the year the growers taught school, but their successes gave the others hope. With the rapidity of a retreating glacier, farming returned to the town, albeit with a different face.

Men began to keep cattle again - not the expensive time-consuming milkers of yesterday. Beef cattle, dollars on the hoof. Breed them, calve them, turn them out to pasture and forget them for weeks at a time. The bovine wealth that made Texas great. However, beef farmers here endure a problem the Texans never worried about - feeding those little dogies through six long months of barren snow-covered ground. Each of these neonatal cattle barons sets aside at least one field for hay.

Every man in this town who keeps beeves holds down a full time job. Fickle New England weather dictates a lancet window of opportunity for haying. Rain will ruin cut hay, turning it into a potential conflagration of spontaneously combusted fuel hot enough to decimate any barn. The men must literally make hay while the sun shines, but they haven't the leisure their grandfathers did to take all of a sunny day to mow and bail. They have to scramble to get in this precious winter feed in the stolen hours between the workday and dusk.

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