Month: November 2014

I met Carol Gulley while walking on a treadmill in cardiac rehab, she leaned over and told me that my swiss steer Elvis, an animal I unwisely acquired at the first Bedlam Farm, had come from her farm. We became instant friends, and Maria and I were eager to get over to her farm and meet her husband Ed and the goat Sadie, and the cow Sweetpea that she was always talking about. Carol is a pretty shy and quiet person until you mention one of her animals, and then she lights up. Turns out her husband Ed is the same way.

They are one of those couples that complete one another, that define connection and love and loyalty in marriage. They represent something that has become important to me in recent years, as a writer and as a human being: they live in the real world, the real world of life, of animals. They are open and honest and direct. They represent a precious and vanishing way of life, as a culture we are forgetting what a life of independence and individuality is like, what it takes, how important it is to support it.

Farmers are beset these days, encircled. The farmer and author Wendell Berry writes that we have forgotten what people are for, the economists and politicians have decided that the small family farm is no longer efficient or feasible in the new global economy, small farmers are beset by government bureaucrats, unfair and outdated regulations, arrogant and unknowing people who claim to speak for the rights of animals, and they have been abandoned by the rest of us, most of whom are happy to stuff their shopping carts with food without knowing or caring where it comes from.

We get what we deserve, and we will all be the worse for it when these farms finally disappear and give way to the factory farms who represent nothing but mass production and profit. Carol and Ed Gully birthed most of their cows, and know every one by name. They work brutally hard, beyond the imagination of both of us. A few months after her open heart surgery, Carol was on her tractor helping Ed harvest the corn sileage for their cows.

I have a rule at my farm that people eat until the animals do, and Ed and Carol have lived that way for years. I was reminded yet again that people who work with animals are especially blessed, and so are their animals, who have great care, purpose and need in their partnership with people, in the joys and travails of life. Carol and Ed Gulley do not need a wiser and more mystical understanding of animals, they have that already.

This is what people are for, we owe them more than this, we forget it at our peril.

The Gulleys have six Australian Shepherd dogs at Bejosh Farm and Minnie, one of them, likes to find large rocks and stones and show them off to everyone. She was especially found of this stone, found near the barn, she carried it around for a good while, made sure we all saw it and applauded her.

I often think that everyone who eats food or drinks milk ought to be required to spend a few  hours on a small family or dairy farm. This is an endangered way of life, smothered by corporate competition, government regulation, and the by now familiar unknowing ignorance of the animal rights movement. It appears that only the big corporate farms, where the cows spend their lives on concrete, where lawyers navigate the maze of government regulations, and where most of the labor is done by cheap immigrant labor, can survive in the global economy.

Like most small farmers, the Gulley’s kids chose other, saner kinds of work, they do the chores and milking and repairs and maintenance themselves. They represent a way of life, freedom and individuality and a life with animals that is becoming more rare and difficult. I am happy to have friends like this, honored to be able to take their photographs and record their remarkable lives while it is still possible. I am grateful to Carol for reading my play, “Last Day Of A Dairy Barn,” and making sure it is accurate and relevant. New friends are always a miracle to me, and these are good ones.

Steers love to be scratched below the chin, Maria was happy to oblige. She was right at home with the animals at Bejosh Farm, and with Carol and Ed, two passionate lovers of animals. Animals do well at Bejosh, it is a classic New York state farm – or farm anywhere – old tractors, tilting outbuildings, drafty barns, animals in every corner. There was even an eight-year-old hen in her own fenced-in enclosure because she is sick and the other healthy chickens might peck at her and harm or kill her.

Maria and the big cows bonded right away.

You can live in New York or Chicago or most suburbs your whole life and never meet people like the Gulley’s, which is why we love where we live. Sadie has been on the farm she she was a baby, she pretty much runs the place, she hangs around the barns, the pastures and the milking barns, follows Ed and Carol around, they both are crazy about her. She is never fenced in or locked-up, she generally sleeps out with the cows at night on a pile of straw. She tried to eat the handkerchief out of my pocket and was nibbling at Maria’s dress, she came up to Ed looking for a cookie, and got some nuzzling as well.

Bejosh is a small dairy farm, the kind that is going under all across the country, Ed and Carol love the place but are tiring, they are thinking of selling part of the property and scaling back, hoping to get somewhere warm in January and February.