The farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything at retail, sells everything at wholesale, and pays the freight both ways.” - John F. Kennedy
Its wild right? The other day, I ran into a lady at the store who told me that farmer’s must be doing very well since her gallon of milk cost a dollar more than it normally does. I told her we are doing okay, but it doesn’t quite work that way. Paying the transport, testing, and processing fees for the milk while feeding the cows and growing the heifers leaves little room for profit. Some years you’re just working to break even.
When I went off to college my dad told me to go chase something other than farming and to get a degree in something not focused on dairy. “This life isn’t for everyone,” he said, “it’s stressful and hard work. Sometimes it makes you feel like all you do is put in the time and sweat and in return you don’t make much money.” What he failed to tell me was that this way of life runs in our blood. It wasn’t too long after I started school that I realized there wasn’t anything else I wanted to do, so I changed my major to diversified agriculture to better prepare myself for coming back home to the family farm. Not many people get to say their job or career runs in their blood. I’m not quite sure if that’s a good or a bad thing. My heart and my mind are both aligned in the fact that this is what I was born to do, and nothing was going to stop me.
The fact is the majority of American family-owned farms are all this way. It doesn’t matter if you’re a beef, dairy, or crop farmer. The spike in prices at the grocery store are actually felt by the farmers but not in a positive way. This usually means input costs such as seed, feed, and fuel have gone up, in turn making the cost of production higher, too.
So why choose this life? As farmers we may not make a lot of money, we may even think we are gluten for punishment (not really). But when I say it runs in your blood, it’s the truth. There’s nothing else we could ever imagine doing that would fill our cup such as this. As for this family farm, we thank God for what we have, and that He might give us another day on the farm.
Mark and Caitlin Rodgers are dairy farmers in Dearing, Georgia. The Rodgers have a 400-cow dairy that averages 32,000 pounds of milk. Follow their family farm on Facebook at Hillcrest Farms Inc.
