As I read this NYTimes article, tears mixed with my coffee in an unexpected merger of the reality of economic hard times and vague memories of my family's story. In a nutshell, the story documents the selling of a Butter Ridge Farm on the NYS Pennsylvania border after four generations, as costs have exceeded any economic value in maintaining the farm. It had endured since before the Civil War and the family had great hopes in a pro-farmer president; however, tariffs destroyed the export market while gas and fertilizer were up 70%. So, they auctioned off every last Jersey. They didn't choose to leave, they were forced to do so.
My dad chose to leave the small family farm where he was raised in Montgomery, NY, in the days after his own father passed. My dad was the tenth and last child raised on that farm that, based on stories passed around, did OK even during the Great Depression by selling sweet milk from alfalfa fed-cows to clients in NYC. The older brothers and sisters had long left the farm for lives in the big city and beyond by the time my dad maintained the farm during his dad's cancer fight. I suspect the farm was his IF he wanted to farm, which was not his dream.
My Dad was fueled with ideas from his older siblings and a childhood friend who summered in nearby but planted visions of changing the world through engineering a better future. I suspect it was my dad who made the call to the auctioneer way back in August '45 days after the funeral; by September, his mom had relocated to Brooklyn and he was enrolled in Columbia.
I sometimes wonder how my own life would have been so different growing up on an isolated farm in a rural upstate community, and then I remember I would not exist as there is no way my mother would have chosen life on a farm, even with my father whose world was broadened by theater, opera, baseball, and expansive lifelong learning opportunities. My father made a wise, even if hard, choice for him.
The difference is choice. Those who lost Butter Ridge Farm did not have a choice. What so many people are losing right now is a choice.
