I am skeptical of planning. I see it as a
useful tool, don't get me wrong,
and we do lots of it.
But the idea that you you can actually
believe that your plan that supposedly
leads over here to B or C or D or X
that you're actually going to get there
instead of something coming up that ends up
bringing you over here. That I think is
an extreeme self-deception. Also to me
completely uninteresting. I'm Amy Klippenstein
from the class of 1989 and I majored in
English when I was at amherst. A set of
skills that maybe was not great
preparation for being a dairy farmer but,
here I am. I'm Paul Lacinski, also from the class
of 1989 and I majored in American
Studies. Once again I guess not
specifically relevant to dairy farming,
but then I don't really have
any idea how it is exactly that we ended
up dairy farming, so it is relevant is
anything else.
There's no question around the time that
we graduated from Amherst that we both
had some sort of a growing
ecological consciousness I would say. But
that was the better part of 30 years ago
and it wasn't much framework for that
the way there is now. After we graduated
from college we started construction
company together. And so for about 10
years we had a construction company
called greenspace collaborative where we
built houses out of natural materials. I
stepped back from that and went back to
school to study landscape architecture.
I got a master's degree, worked for a
local landscape architect here in
Ashfield, and found that my focus and a lot
of the projects that we're working on
was around agricultural land use
planning and realized after time that I
was kind of walking around the pool
about the agriculture thing. My
grandparents on both sides were
agriculture and so I quit my job and I
started growing vegetables.
At one point we had the idea that, well
we'd kinda like to have a family cow what
if we got a couple cows and started
making yogurt and that was ten years ago.
Four years ago we moved up here to Hawley
this farm was formerly an organic potato
farm. We built everything related to the
dairy new here.Creamery, milking parlor
and barn for winter housing. Right now
we're talking about 40 cows. The whole
herd is about 85 or 90 when you count
all the young stock and heifers and
steers that we raise for beef. Our
thing is not to produce a high-end
boutique product. A lot of people ask us
"How come you don't have cheese? You
"can sell cheese for twenty or thirty"
"dollars pound." But that's not what we're
trying to do. We're trying to produce
food that everybody, your average
middle-class person can afford to eat
every day. It's not a luxury item. And I
feel like everybody who works here is
really behind that mission. As we were
out of school longer and as the
framework for people to be interested in
ecological food and land and animal
welfare and polution. As that became much
more common and acceptable thing to be
concerned about I think we realized that
we had the skills to be able to do this
for other people also. And that was
interesting to be able to provide food
for people in our community. If you think
about the scale of land use to feed
seven billion people it is a pretty
significant impact on how the surface of
our planet is used.
That is in turnned to this very specific
purpose of feeding people. And we could
say the degree to which agricultural
systems make an effort to learn from
natural systems versus learn from
industrial systems has a huge amount to
do with the long-term health of the
planet. We also think a lot to do with
the health of the people who eat food.
We're fully where there's nothing
whatsoever we're going to do about that
in the big gigantic picture, but I also
think that problems of that scale are
solved by thousands and thousands of
people working in their little areas on
little pieces of it. And so we feel that
what we're doing to produce food is
ecologically responsible way as we
possibly can, is our small contribution
to this very large matter that is going
to be a bigger and bigger deal with find
the change and more people as time goes on.