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Greg Burtt, left, and Kyle Clark
Working together as Women Involved in Farm Economics, Jackie Folsom and friends went past the acronym WIFE to any route that brought attention to dairy farming—including cow suits when necessary. Courtesy Photo
When the Folsom family bought their farm, they discovered they needed to move the cows along Route 2, twice a day, to pasture and back. Courtesy Photo
When your farming roots go back to 1793, you have plenty of entertaining stories like the one sugarmaker Ruth Goodrich narrates, straight-faced, about Gramp Reed and the naked turkeys. Hearing apple orchard co-owner Greg Burtt laugh over “Shnookums” the bull is pretty good, too. Or dairy activist Jackie Folsom grinning about her friends wearing cow outfits at the Vermont Farm Show and the creative actions they took to have their voices heard by those in power.
There’s a lot of fun in farming. Especially when you’re telling it from a comfortable dry chair, during a short break from the work you love.
If you drove Route 2 between, say, 1985 and 1992, you probably found yourself waiting for Jackie and Roy Folsom and their kids to walk a herd of cows down the highway. At 7:30 each morning, the family moved the animals from their dairy barn to the pasture, and at 4 p.m., back they came. It looked beautiful in photos, but the challenges included both the weather (“rain or shine, and we did it a couple of times in a snowstorm,” Jackie recalls) and the commuters.
“People were pretty good about it,” Jackie Folsom says today. VTrans authorized the cow march, for seven years. But in the long wait for the Jersey cows to march along, followed by the slower Guernseys, sometimes someone acted up.
“We had a big old Guernsey named Jenny. This guy [in a waiting car] was playing around, and with a big cigar in his mouth, he leaned out the car window and said to her, ‘Mooo!’ She licked that cigar right out of his face!”
And it wasn’t always easy for the farm’s kids, either. The Folsom youngsters went to Cabot School, and daughter Jen brought a good friend home one day. They tramped up to the barn, to see Jen’s step-dad in action. But he wasn’t milking—he was “breeding” a cow, which required applying a bull’s semen to the interior parts of the would-be mama. The visiting child stepped in, and “there was Roy with his arm straight up the cow. The child’s eyes just popped right out of her head and she ran. That was the end of kids coming to the barn!”
When the Folsom family bought their farm, they discovered they needed to move the cows along Route 2, twice a day, to pasture and back. Courtesy Photo
The Folsoms moved to Cabot from Ohio in 1985, bought the former Therrien farm, and Roy, who’d milked cows before, settled into the work. The family jest says that Jackie is better at talking about it than doing it—which came in handy when they discovered their newly purchased farm not only required twice-a-day herding on the highway but was about to lose 20 of its 100 acres, thanks to the state’s Route 2 rehab project. They reached out to the state office and were told that their business wouldn’t be protected. “Farming’s not a business!” said the state representative. Harnessing her fury and frustration at such treatment, Jackie turned her “talk about farming” gifts to activism on the state level, attending cascading Montpelier meetings with VTrans staff and a bunch of lawyers. Her labors for Cabot Creamery began in 1994, including touring for the creamery as far away as Florida and Georgia. “I called it the Southern Tour, down Thursday, back Tuesday,” she describes it. It included odd side efforts. “I was part of the first attempt at the Guinness Book of World Records for largest grilled cheese sandwich, in Florida!”
The Cabot work led to efforts for Kingdom Creamery and DairyVision Vermont, then managing the Vermont Farm Show for a decade, both guiding and lobbying in the State House, and as of 2017, she became Legislative Director for the Vermont Farm Bureau, speaking up for all kinds of farming.
“Under the Golden Dome, everything touches agriculture,” Jackie has found. This year a hot topic is water issues, which closely affect berry growers; another is the presence of toxic PFAs in compost when mechanical “de-packaging” scoops plastics in with food waste. “I don’t want people eating it. I don’t want farmers getting sick.” So, like her politician father back in Ohio, Jackie’s now a policy geek and activist for farms and farmers.
But her dad never had to deal with being told to wear an apron with the big capital letters WIFE while lobbying! And that’s another story.
Sometimes Ruth Goodrich tells tales from her husband Glenn’s family. Glenn’s father Walter tended the six-generation Molly Brook Jersey Farm up the road, and Ruth says Walt was full of stories. Take the time Walt’s father Wendell rode his horse to the post office. As he stopped, ladies were coming out and his horse bucked, tossing the rider over the animal’s head, to the ground. “Mister Goodrich, are you all right?” asked one concerned woman. “Yup,” Walt answered as he picked himself up. “I always get off that way.”
Old-timers in Cabot may describe part of Cabot’s Danville Hill as the Reed District. Ruth talks about “Gramp Reed,” who lived up there and wouldn’t allow alcohol in his family or on his farm. When a barrel of cider “turned” alcoholic, Gramp Reed angrily dumped it out onto his manure pile, then rode to town with his wife.
When they returned to the farm, all their turkeys were lying around that manure pile. Ruth says, “They couldn’t find where a dog had savaged ‘em, but they were dead. So Gramp hung them up on the barn wall, plucked them, and went in for dinner. When he came back out—the turkeys had woken up!” Just picture that line of hungover turkeys, complaining from the barn wall, as they hung by their feet, naked!
Ruth manages the maple sugaring in Cabot, while Glenn tends their enormous “model maple setup” of cutting-edge technology in Eden. As a child with her parents in northwestern Vermont, Ruth rode around with her great-grandfather in Berkshire and learned about places related to the farm. “I think it’s so important that we take advantage of the seniors and learn the stories,” she points out. “It makes such a rich fabric of existence.” Because many of her relatives were elderly, she heard firsthand tales of World War II on the Normandy beaches and in the Pacific theatre of conflict. Her dad’s injury on Saipan meant he was told he’d never walk again. Instead, Ruth narrates, “He walked out of the hospital, married, bought a farm, and worked construction for 35 years.”
Her dad had a bit of a temper and got to feuding with a neighbor whose scrap pile attracted a steady supply of skunks. Ruth’s father, in a “stroke of genius,” put a live skunk into the neighbor’s mailbox. “That’d be fine and dandy unless you’re the mailman,” Ruth says ruefully.
The size of Goodrich’s Maple Farm calls for all hands to contribute. Ruth is a grandparent; making the most of the next generation’s labor means that Ruth often tag-teams to help take care of her very lively granddaughter Emma, the newest “chief taste tester.” For Ruth, “It’s really important for kids to learn what their parents do. They love to learn and help and experience doing a job until it’s done. All three of my kids have grown up with the business.” Now Emma, age three, loves to cook and do things outside, rides a horse, and even has her own small saddle.
Ruth herself is something of a night owl, managing on just four or five hours of sleep a night, which leaves her time also for quilting and other crafts. Retirement? No thanks. “Old sugarmakers never die; they just evaporate!”
Among Ruth Goodrich’s efforts for Cabot have been a seat on the Select Board, and EMT (emergency medical technician) service with the Walden FAST Squad, Danville Ambulance and Cabot Ambulance. Knowing her skills, Jackie Folsom’s husband Roy didn’t panic when he slashed his arm in the barn one day—he simply headed next door. When Ruth saw her neighbor arriving, dripping blood, she told her group of maple tourists, “Hold it, I have an emergency here!” With the onlookers staring, she bandaged Roy up properly, and back he went, to work.
Ruth also offers suggestions of other farms to visit. It’s another way to support neighbors. So she’s ready with a suggestion: Visit Burtt’s Apple Orchard on Cabot Plains Road, for apples, cherries, pick-your-own pumpkins, and the cider donuts made by Greg Burtt’s mother Johnnye. “Visitors come from all over the place!”
Greg Burtt, left, and Kyle Clark
During a July visit, Burtt’s Apple Orchard was relatively quiet—labor in the guest center, earth-moving on the hill, finishing touches for the new barn, and of course taking care of the trees, where apples were swelling and turning color. Tending to all that was 36-year-old Greg Burtt and two full-time employees, all faced with a very close deadline. Apple picking usually begins around Aug. 16-18, when about 20 people will operate the pick-your-own apple farm and store, including a lively crew of high school students.
“I like getting to taste all the apples and watch ‘em grow” in the quiet season, Greg says with a grin. “In the fall, we get to jumping, and having fun together.” Although teen employees sometimes need a reminder to stop having apple fights, they are hard workers handling apple and donut sales, managing the cider “slushy” machine, and still joking and telling stories. The crew is also involved in making the donuts and cider, with fresh flavors for each cider batch. As many as 600-700 guests arrive on a busy day in the fall.
Greg’s own stories date back to when he was three years old, when his parents Keith and Johnnye moved from their Massachusetts farm, to Cabot, mainly for the sake of maple syrup—which is today’s second side of the orchard business. The Burtt farm also did dairying in its earlier years. By age five or six, Greg could drive a tractor to push the cows in from the pasture at night for milking. But in 2005, when Greg was 19, the family began planting an orchard, for the sake of trying something different. Their 2009 launch sold out in two weeks, so they planted more trees and now have more than 40 varieties.
As a kid, Greg learned, “you definitely needed to work hard, and to work smart, effectively.” Also, “it just was automatically fun to be outside!” Though he played music in high school and went to college for engineering, graduating with part of a master’s degree also done, he mostly planned to come back to the farm.
“Engineering to me is more a way of thinking,” he says. The horticultural components are all one thing—it’s breaking complex problems down to small, solvable ones.” And that’s how he and his wife Stefanie and their team have learned to take care of the trees and retail business.
There’s some relief for Greg in not dairying, although his dad still keeps some beef cows. And his dad has plenty of stories of those earlier dairy days. Greg’s own, once he still laughs at, involves the big ornery Black Angus bull that Greg, as a kid, named Shnookums. As the bull reached 10 years old, “ornery” changed to unmanageable, and the decision was made to bring him back from the pasture in Walden, to the home farm in Cabot where he would eventually be “beefed.”
“He wouldn’t get into the cattle trailer,” Greg recalls now. “He just wasn’t pushable. He skirted the trailer and headed out, up the fenceline, along the road!”
What could the 25-year-old farmer do? The bull left him little choice. He left the fenced pasture behind, with his dad bringing the truck and trailer slowly along. “I ran the bull all the way back from Walden to here. I kind of grew up with him. And we ran that final journey together,” through all the places Greg had known as a kid.
In terms of business, Greg says, “it’s been easier and better to work with trees—they don’t have the kind of personality animals have. On the day we sell the last cow, I’ll be dancing a jig!” Then he shakes his head and contradicts himself: “We’ll never sell them all, my girls love ‘em so much.”
Greg and his wife Stefanie, who manages a lot of the accounting, as well as keeping an eye on the orchard’s small wholesale component, have four children (Molly, 11; Tess, 9; Samantha, 6; Mabel, 3); so does Kyle Clark, one of the full-time employees. Kyle winks as he advises the customers to “hold on and get ready for the ride,” the big adventure of picking their apples and sampling the farm’s other goodies. Kyle’s own younger kids come to pick, and his earliest work at the orchard involved collecting the “drops,” apples that have fallen on the ground. Both men enjoy the way homestead-level farming has become popular now; “Probably ninety percent of our friends do it,” Greg estimates.
But that’s Cabot, and Vermont; as a nation, only 2 percent of Americans are farmers, Greg notes. “We’re losing tons of the huge knowledge base or any connection to the land,” he worries. “That’s too bad—how would that ever come back?” Climate change doesn’t spook him, because apple trees have grown as far south as Virginia, but he treasures the skills of tending the soil and trees and is concerned that those skills become rare. He grieves when he sees a formerly prosperous farm, reduced to a parking lot of machinery.
Working together as Women Involved in Farm Economics, Jackie Folsom and friends went past the acronym WIFE to any route that brought attention to dairy farming—including cow suits when necessary. Courtesy Photo
Jackie Folsom faced threats to Vermont farms early in her career of “speaking up” for them. Often she also had to face the way both small farms and women in agriculture were ignored or downplayed.
With other women dairy farmers like Marion Somers and Mary Jane Choate of Barnet, and Jenny Nelson of Ryegate, Jackie became a member of the Vermont branch of a national organization that linked the women’s farms to each other and the state and national legislatures. It was (and is) called Women Involved in Farm Economics, or WIFE. “We hated the name, but we had some great times, especially at the [annual Vermont] Farm Show!”
They had a rough start. All garbed in signature red jackets, they headed to Montpelier, to meet with Governor Madeleine Kunin, whose term began in 1985 as Vermont’s first (and only) female governor. Excitedly, the group arrived at the governor’s office, only to be told by a secretary that the appointment was canceled. “Didn’t anyone tell you?” she said.
The women sat down, discouraged, to try to figure out the next step. A few minutes later, Governor Kunin walked past, then paused. She happened to be wearing a red jacket herself! When she found out what was going on, she told her secretary, “Schedule this for 15 minutes.”
But red jackets didn’t always open the doors for them. In 1992, Cabot Creamery Cooperative, which hauled (from the farm to the processing plant, called a creamery itself) milk from farms in bulk using big trucks, merged into Agri-Mark, a much larger cooperative covering America’s Northeast. Agri-Mark announced it would no longer send trucks up the back roads to the small farms. Jackie described the group of women fuming over the threat to so many of their farms. What could they do?
Mary Jane Choate said, “Let’s get the CEO of Agri-Mark up to my farm, and we’re going to talk to him.” When the executive arrived, says Jackie, “Mary Jane set him on a bench surrounded by all the women.” They all gave him a piece of their minds and a taste of their anger. “It was really quite funny. I really felt sorry for the guy,” Jackie recalls, and she watched the executive bolt outside for a cigarette break as he tried to recover. The women won an extra year of milk transportation from the meeting—giving them time also to make arrangements with other milk-hauling creameries. Then they applied the same method to have Bernie Sanders hear their concerns.
When Senator Pat Leahy and Congressman Jim Jeffords scored by getting USDA Secretary of Agriculture Clayton Yeutter to attend a hearing at the Vermont State House, Yeutter’s staff said bluntly, “He doesn’t have time for you women.” Problem-solving again, Jackie and her friends considered, “What if we go into woman mode and bake donuts and such, and serve them backstage, so to speak?” They followed through—and, says Jackie, “Every one of those committee members came back to have donuts and coffee, and we had private time with every one of them. So there is one thing we could do for them, and it turned out to be more important than they realized.”
Learning they could be heard, even if they had to go to extremes, even took the women into wearing cow costumes during a Vermont Farm Bureau season—they gathered up empty containers to demonstrate how much dairy food a family eats in a year, and with Marion and Jenny garbed in cow suits, they drew the crowd into their booth to get their message of how much Vermont’s dairy farms matter.
Across Jackie’s Farm Bureau career, Vermont farms changed from mostly dairy to more diverse farming. With over 2,500 Vermont dairy farms when she started, there are now about 550. Jackie represents all kinds of farms in her Farm Bureau slot and points out that diversity is far from new in Vermont farming. “It goes back to the ‘egg money’ that farmer’s wives used to earn. And we used to have a farm stand here for vegetables from our garden.” Jackie also made wreaths and evergreen “roping” for Burr Morse’s Montpelier retail maple operation. “We did it as an add-on; people now are doing it for the main thing.”
More than ever, Jackie urges farmers, especially women, to “Speak up! Do not be afraid to speak up!” She sees her years collaborating with strong women farmers in this region as a luxury she was given, but that doesn’t change what all people in farming need to do. “Educate people about what they do and how they do it, and what a wonderful life it is.”
If that means putting on a red jacket or a cow costume or serving refreshments, Jackie’s willing. Though she’ll retire this year from the Farm Bureau, she recently helped encourage an outspoken audience for a VPR panel on farms. “Out of 100 people in the audience, 70 were dairy farmers, and most of them were women,” Jackie says with elation.
Diversified farmers may come to their commitment with more experience in public speaking than Jackie’s generation of dairy farmers brought in. “They need to speak for the dairy farmers also,” she hopes. She offers the advice she got from Congressman Jeffords: “Always speak from the heart.”
And, of course, be ready with a good story to tell.
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