The Milk Run

How dairy farming has changed during the lives of four generations of an Accord Family

A schoolbus full of kids pulls into the driveway of Kelder Farms in Accord. These third or fourth graders from an elementary school as close as Onteora or as far away as Poughkeepsie or Ellenville are here to visit a working farm on this narrow, winding country road off Route 209.

Nearly a thousand grade schoolers came here last fall, and a thousand more this past spring, largely through Jackie Kelder's work with local teachers to show kids what a real farm is like - to give them first-hand acquaintance with one part of the local economy.

In the Scandinavian countries, such activities are called "life-seeing tours", guided programs designed to show the best of their way of life to foreign visitors. Tours include stops at a state-run daycare center, city dwellers' garden plots, a senior citizens' home, and a lot else in between.

It may seem odd for schools in Ulster County to be arranging visits to places like Kelder Farms, for regardless of where a family lives around here they are never more than a few miles away from farms that grow apples, raise vegetables, milk cows or raise horses. Why build a field trip around something kids know about already?

This question would make Jackie Kelder's grandfather-in-law smile. Franklin Kelder was born in 1914 - the year the Great War began in Europe - and we know from surviving film footage that the early years of the 1900s were very different from recent times. It was during World War I, for example, that the Gatling machine gun was first widely used, and although it was then thought to be the ultimate weapon, changes in warfare and weaponry have been considerable since then.

As Franklin Kelder explains it, changes in farming since he was a boy have been almost as revolutionary. Today, there are still farms in Ulster County, but people's direct experience with those farms is almost non-existent, to the point that farm life-seeing tours for school kids are as important as trips to the Bronx Zoo, the State Capitol in Albany, and Ellis Island.

What was Accord like when Franklin Kelder was growing up? Small farms were the dominant feature of the local landscape during and after the First World War.

"Most people had a family cow then," he remembered. "A few had a small herd, up to 10 or 15 cows each. Some of these farms grew a little, to where the biggest had up to 20 cows. The others gradually eased out of dairy farming and started buying milk from those farmers who had more cows."

There are still barns in Accord that were built only large enough to house these small herds. Though in the 1920s and 1930s nobody could imagine dairy herds of 100 or more milk cows, for some farms, including Kelder's, that day would come.

It is hard to imagine a time when the people who lived in Accord were mostly farmers, but that was the case early in this centry. Even then, however, there were those with other occupations. Franklin Kelder's father was not a farmer, but rather an electrician and engineer in charge of the electrical plant at the Mohonk Mountain House. He was instrumental in bringing electricity to Accord.

Many of those who quit farming remained on the farm, and even took on other farm-related work to produce income. A few built bungalows to house paying summer guests from New York City, and provided a "summer kitchen" where guests could cook their own meals.

Sixty years ago, the typical arrangement for summer boarders in Accord was this: Men moved their families upstate when the kids got out of school. They would work in the city during the week, then come to Accord to be with their families in the country on weekends.

Bungalow living provided city people with some experience of living on a farm. In some cases, however, these bungalows were no longer owned and operated by farmers. Numbers of farms with bungalows ended up being owned by city people, bought sometimes with everything included, even the cows. At that point, a hired man was brought on to handle the milking and other farm work. Some of the bungalow operations got big -- big enough to be called hotels. The best representative locally is the Granit Hotel, five miles from Kelder Farms.

Commonly, farmers took on other work, both on and off the farm. They raised chickens and sold the eggs. They cut firewood, both to heat their own places and to sell. They fattened pigs, and butchered them for meat when they matured. Franklin Kelder's grandfather, who lived until the 1940's, raised buckwheat and sold the flour. "Diversification" sounds like a modern direction in farming, but it was actually a key feature of farming in Accord all through the century.

Franklin Kelder's son Wayne was born in 1941. Wayne, retired from farming, is the highway superintendent of the Town of Rochester. Even more than his father, Wayne Kelder remembers local farm workers' shifts to non-farm jobs. "When IBM came here in the 1950s, it employed a lot of people," Wayne said. Many of these early IBM workers came off the farms. This was not the only way IBM changed farming in Accord, however. "IBM paid high wages," Wayne Kelder said. Not only did this pull the local labor force in the direction of Kingston; it also meant that the farmers who remained had to pay higher hourly wages for the local laborers they hired.

Wayne Kelder believes that the Vietnam War also had a big impact on local labor, and he makes a compelling case for his view. During the Vietnam War, agricultural workers did not have the exemptions from the military draft they had during World War II. A lot of local farm boys went off to the jungles of Southeast Asia between 1962 and 1972.

There is a strong thread of continuity that runs through all this change: While farmers continue to leave farming, they often do not leave the farm. Both Wayne and his wife Elizabeth, who has been a nurse at a local school for 15 years, have non-farm jobs, and yet they remain an important part of the farm family.

Wayne's son Chris, born in 1965, farms 500 acres - 100 acres owned and the remaining 400 acres rented. In three generations of farmers, the Kelders have come a long way from the typical small family farm in Accord in the 1920s and 1930s.

Chris milks 80 cows twice a day, a number that has remained stable for 25 years. The Kelders did go as high as 120 head of milkers between 1968 and 1970.

I asked Chris Kelder what he figured for the future of Ulster County's dairy industry. He didn't hesitate to answer. "It's probably going to be limited," he said. "Farmers will have to milk more cows or do other things to get the same income. But there won't be thousand-cow herds like there are in Cayuga, Genessee and Wyoming counties." There's even one of these mega-herds in Orange County, Kelder said, but there isn't sufficient farmland in Ulster County to support a herd of this size.

Going beyond the size of individual herds to the total numbers of cows in milk production, the differences between Ulster County and Cayuga, Genessee and Wyoming counties are major. New York State's Department of Agriculture and Markets counted 900 milk cows in Ulster County in 1996. By contrast, Cayuga had 26,500, Genessee 19,000, and Wyoming 45,000. (The other two top dairying counties in New York are St. Lawrence with 38,500 milk cows and Jefferson with 31,000.)

Bigger herds like these can help profits, but they also increase labor costs. Franklin Kelder remembers: "I had nine cows in 1935, when I was 21. When Wayne took over, there were 60. We went from two to three doing the milking."

The New York dairy industry is more than farm-by-farm or even county-by-county headcounts of cows in milk production. It continues to be a very big deal in the state's economy. Annual sales of New York milk and other dairy products total $1.6 billion, half the total farm income in the state. But there is also the matter of milk price structure and how it is arrived at. Dairying is a price-supported industry in the United States, and in this it is unlike any other cash crop grown in Ulster County during this century.

The federal government began putting price supports under dairy products in the 1930s, before Wayne Kelder was born, but he has watched the program's growth and also its subsequent decline. "Since FDR, price supports have been aimed at providing cheap food for consumers, not at making the farmers rich. In our business, the aim was a cheap supply of milk for everybody." This, Wayne Kelder argues, remains the government's goal, even in the face of declining price supports.

With the dairy price support system, the federal government puts a floor under prices that keeps them from falling below a certain level. This provides baseline income that keeps dairy farmers in business, so long as they continue to produce milk at a certain level. It is largely these stable levels of production that guarantee price stability.

Of course, there is no unseen hand that guarantees that there will be a good matchup between production and consumption. In fact, Chris Kelder said, "the Northeast is a milk-deficit area." This means that people in the region consume more milk than is produced there. This is remarkable, considering that New York is the third biggest milk producer in the United States, behind Wisconsin and California. As a result, milk comes into the region from outside. This "imported" milk guarantees that Northeast milk producers will not make a killing when they sell their raw milk.

Chris Kelder pointed out that milk price supports work differently in different regions. "They help more in the Western region," he said. "Their costs of production are lower than ours, but they don't have the market. This means they have to ship their milk, and this increases their costs."

Chris's father Wayne put his finger on the biggest problem with farm price supports since they were put in place by New Deal Congresses in the 1930s: "They created a false sense of demand." Though the Kelders agree that backing away from price supports will cause more fluctuation in the market price of milk, they point out that the total absence of government price supports has not hurt apple production or the production of vegetable crops, including sweet corn.

It is almost 60 years since the federal government embraced the farm price support system. Now, as Washington tries to end the embrace, Chris Kelder's earlier comment needs to be kept in mind: Farmers will have to milk more cows or do other things to get the same income.

In the last 60 to 80 years, the Kelders and other farmers in the Accord area have done both. What will they do in the future?

Some clues come from looking at the men from three generations of this one Accord farm family. There are marked differences between them. Franklin Kelder, who grew up during the Great Depression, is more conservative than either his son or grandson.

"Credit is much too easy," he said, and he means it. He feels that it is way too easy for young people, who haven't had the experience and generally don't have the income to cope with serious indebtedness.

"Conservatives weren't hit so hard by the Depression," he said, but it is clear that his family's ability to cope involved healthy suspicions about the country's financial system in the 1920s and 1930s. The Kelders also had the ability to adapt to changing conditions. "My father was an electrical contractor," Franklin Kelder said. "And he also cut firewood and raised calves for meat."

Looking at our current economic system, his son Wayne has more than his share of suspicions about the stock markets. "Stocks are being bid up like it's a church auction, where people figure the money's going to a good cause."

By contrast, Chris, now in charge of Kelder farming operations, takes a view which is at the same time cautious and aggressive. "There have been times during these 80 years where we've probably had more debt than we've wanted, and times when we've had less. Debt's not bad if it's going to turn a profit." His father adds: "Debt's not bad if you have the ability to repay."

Of course, one way to help pay down debt is to generate additional income. Chris's father Wayne pointed out that as his family grew, he needed more off-farm income "so I could keep the cows." Chris is diversifying on-farm, taking advantage of the fact that some of the same equipment he uses to produce forage for the cows can also be used to plow the fields and put in new pick-your-own crops.

Don Rogers works for First Pioneer Farm Credit, the Northeast's largest farmer-owned financial cooperative. Farm Credit makes loans to farmers and advises them on a number of other farm-related matters. Farm transfers from generation to generation are Don Rogers' specialty. Since 1977, Rogers has advised more than 2000 farm families, at a rate of about 100 a year.

Through hard experience, Rogers has found that the most difficult matter for farm families to confront is the passing of the torch to the next generation. A tight cluster of attitudes - from unwillingness to admit advancing age, to unwillingness to give up control, to reluctance to accept the growing competence fo the younger farmers - work against peaceful transfers. In some cases, these are so effective a stumbling block that transfer does not take place until the older farmer has died.

The Kelders - from grandfather to son to grandson - are a model of peaceful transfer. Indeed, their rules and practices would be useful in any family, farmers or not.

Their first rule is that the older generation must be prepared to sacrifice for the generation coming up. Franklin Kelder milked more cows so he could afford to send his son Wayne off to Cornell. In turn, Wayne sold his much-loved airplane so Chris could go up to Ithaca and study.

Their second rule is to recognize that the most attractive financial path may not be the best one in the long run. The senior Kelders could have sold off their farmland for subdivisions, but both chose to keep it in production. A sale of the land would have netted more cash in the short run, but it would have put an end to a way of life that is important to the family. Chris, the youngest, puts the case best: "Each generation owes this farm to the generations before."

Their third rule, and maybe the toughest for any older, active farmer to follow, is to be willing to help without interfering. As Wayne describes it, "When you've been calling the shots for 30 years, it's hard to step back." By any standard, this is a learned skill, and there's good evidence that the Kelders have learned it well.

Now, with his father and grandfather offering encouragement, Chris Kelder is taking steps to diversify his operation, just as generations of Accord farmers have done before him. His particular direction, however, isn't toward boarding houses or off-farm work, but rather toward pick-your-own fruit and vegetable crops.

Kelder started with pick-your-own strawberries in 1988, added peas in 1990, raspberries in 1992, and pumpkins (along with school tours) in 1994. He plans to install pick-your-own blueberries soon.

Chris and Jackie Kelder advertise these mainly through hand-stencilled signs along Route 209, but they get a lot of other business through word of mouth. They run display ads in the Daily Freeman, and have advertised on an Ellenville radio station. (Kelder Farms is 12 miles from Ellenville and 18 miles from Kingston).

John Kelder is five, Kaitlyn Kelder is three. Like their parents Chris and Jackie, they are bright and energetic. They are the fourth generation living on Kelder Farms. It's a great life, but as Chris says, "but will they want it when they grow up?"

It is here that Wayne Kelder offers a perspective not often heard outside farm families: More than one member of the family is going to have to want it. Put another way, it takes the efforts of more than one member of the farm family to stay in farming.

Increasingly, wanting to stay in farming means taking on at least some work outside the farm. Both highway superintendent Wayne Kelder and his wife Elizabeth, a nurse for the past 15 years, bring in non-farm income. "We have two other kids, Bryan and Debbie," Wayne explains. "Debbie teaches in the Kingston Middle Schools. Both kids worked for us while they were growing up and helped us keep the farm. Debbie's going to have an acre of cut flowers this year, and she rents the land from Chris."

I met Chris Kelder several years ago when I gave a talk to the annual meeting of the Ulster County Farm Bureau, the organization through which farmers express their political views through local, state and national units. Chris has been president of the Ulster County group since the early 1990s, and on that particular day he had exercised sound presidential judgement by letting me speak and get over my jitters before the dinner was served. Now, in his and Jackie's backyard, I asked him about political action for the farmer.

"We're trying to get the costs of doing business in New York State reduced," he said. "Until this happens, we won't be on a level playing field with the rest of the Northeast." On his list are land taxes, regulatory policy and insurance, including workmen's compensation insurance.

Chris Kelder realizes that some changes won't come in either of our lifetimes, and that his son and daughter may still be looking forward to the day when they will. But he also thinks it's essential that farmers be organized politically.

"The Farm Bureau has a paid staff to look out for our interests in Albany," Chris said. "No individual farmer has time to do this."

New York farmers' political interests have not been hurt by having a governor who grew up in a farm family. George Pataki has already pushed for and signed one measure that provides school-tax relief to individual farmers, and another that reduces worker's compensation premiums by an average of 20 to 25 per cent.

But as any farmer will tell you, joint action is useful for more than political agitation. For example, the Kelders and other area farmers are involved with a cooperative to sell their milk. Since the late 1970s, the Kelders have sold their milk through Agri-Mark, based in Lawrence, Massachusetts and one of the three major milk cooperatives in the Northeast. Where does the Kelder milk go? Ironically, it is pooled with other milk in the area and goes directly to Boice Brothers Dairy in Kingston. Despite the long arm of Agri-Mark, this local milk stays local.

I asked the Kelders whether diversification would ever reach back into the past and add a type of operation which was successful back then, the boarding houses. Wayne Kelder was quick to answer.

"It'll never happen," he said. "Today, for $2.50 a night, you can hook up a camper in any campground around here, and you don't have to mow the lawn."

And what about the cows? Will we ever bring them back to the point where every rural family has its own cow? However appealing this idea might seem at first glance, it's unlikely to happen. A cow needs to be fed, watered, pastured and milked every morning and evening, whether you feel like it or not. How many modern lifestyles would put up with this arrangement? Better yet, how many zoning ordinances would allow it?

Take a long look at the cow on the cover of this issue. Stare into her eyes. As time goes by, you will see less and less of her in Ulster County, just as you will see fewer farmers here.

What about the Kelders? For the foreseeable future, the Kelders will still be working farmers. They'll be dairymen and whatever else it takes to keep the farm - and their way of life - intact. It won't be easy. As any farmer will tell you, it never is.

Author Jon Fackler and his wife Sue own Morning Calm Farm, a horse farm on Springtown Road in New Paltz.