This blog is part of our series of Wolfe’s Neck Center Stories, focusing on the people and the programs that drive our work for farmer viability, thriving ecosystems, and vibrant communities.
Fall 2022. It was the first iteration of a course titled “Ecotopian Visions” and I was writing found poems from the screenplay of James Cameron’s Avatar. Our professor prompted the class to take 5 minutes and imagine our own individual ecotopias. I earnestly tried to wind back the anthropocene clock while keeping myself present, and stalled out. It was when my professor offered that we could forget practicality (in his ecotopia he could breathe underwater) that I started to write.
My vision: to live by the ocean with a small herd of cows, preferably in Scotland or Portugal. The girl next to me, Sara, wanted to have sheep for fiber and live off of commissions from sweaters and blankets. She didn’t yet know how to knit.
This same semester I was enrolled in an agriculture class to scrounge up my required lab credits. I sat at a combo desk with a notebook and laptop poorly balanced on the fold-down table while Andy, owner of a local dairy farm, presented slideshow pictures of pigs on pasture, calves on milk bars, and a tractor tilling a bedded pack which steamed as the sole source of heat in the barn through winter. This was when I first heard about the Dairy Grazing Apprenticeship (DGA) program. At the time, my plan after graduation was to find any job that allowed me to work outside. Though I had proclaimed working with livestock as my personal ecotopia a few weeks prior, I didn’t see a way into the industry without a background in science or any related training. But after class I made a DGA profile and perused potential farms, arranging an interview at Wolfe’s Neck Center after a few days.
For the interview I shadowed a morning milking shift with Elizabeth Tarantino, who was then the assistant dairy manager. She milked a cow directly into her mug of coffee and talked about her preparation for the upcoming lambing season, which would potentially include cohabitation in her home on cold nights. I was so charmed by how these decisions had everything to do with practicality and nothing to do with pastoral novelty. I was sold, and returned to the farm as an apprentice a week after graduation. Within the first ten minutes of my first day I learned how to repair a waterline. To casually be given a blowtorch – to need one, be trusted with one, and be able to fix something with one, was foreign to me and felt really good. I wasn’t practiced in technical skill development, and was worried I wouldn’t retain active instruction. Luckily the immersive nature of training makes certain lessons, like how to avoid trailer flips and baler fires, easily memorable.
Though dairy work is marked by repetition, the inevitable blood and guts ensure appreciation for the mundane. For the past two grazing seasons I’ve taken weekly pasture inventories — in other words, observing fields of grass. The information gathered from inventory informs where the cows are sent to graze twice a day. This strategy is called intensive rotational grazing, which maintains the health of the herd, grasses, and soil for years to come. There is so much potential energy when it comes to grazing. The short and long term are in a constant push and pull, and I’m glad to have an awareness of this tension ingrained in my psyche. Current dairy manager Kate Sabino recently said that one thing she appreciates about this work is how it tethers you to space and time. I agree, and feel these tethers will serve me well beyond Burnett Road.
Entering Maine’s dairy industry through apprenticeship at a nonprofit has granted me access to events like producer meetings and grazing conferences. Given the daily commands of a farm operation, it is rare for farmers to be able to leave for extended periods of time and convene in one shared space. To have the lessons of generations of work distilled and shared with me, while I sit in a thoroughly air-conditioned hotel ballroom, is a stroke of luck that underscores my trust in regenerative practices and the people who hone them. I used to hold the understanding that farming can be isolating in a remote, physical sense. I’ve learned it is also isolating to have a job that is outwardly underrepresented. Before DGA I didn’t know any dairy farmers under the age of 65. Not only do farmer training programs like DGA create pathways for transfer of critical knowledge, but they offer the formation of a community with the shared intention of practicing what is best for their land, animals, and workers.
Pursuing a career dependent on hard skills is particularly meaningful at a point in time when technology and the way we use it threatens our basic capacity for creativity. Maybe in your ecotopia there are robots and mylks. Maybe there are ruminants and bobolinks and bumblebees. If your vision aligns more with the latter, the continuation of farmer training programs is essential. The apprenticeship at Wolfe’s Neck showed me that a career I considered to be idyllic was in fact attainable and worth working toward. Now my seasons are assigned a milk profile, each backview of an udder corresponds to the face of the cow herself, each sunrise marks the start or end of a milking. I’ve been launched closer to my ecotopia than I could’ve foreseen, and it didn’t take crossing the Atlantic. Instead, just a single-lane wooden bridge.
Annabelle Williams is graduating from the Dairy Grazing Apprenticeship on June 25th. Visit our website to learn more about the Wolfe’s Neck Center Farmer Training program area, our DGA program (which is accepting applications for new apprentices!), and our work with regional networks of graziers.
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