This story by Liberty Darr was first published by Shelburne News on Sept. 28.
Jan. 11, 2023, was a bittersweet day for the Guillemette family. It was the last day they would milk a cow on their 75-year-old dairy farm.
Bernie Guillemette sat on the back of his old pickup truck wiping the tractor grease off his hands, as he cast a reminiscent gaze over the house his 101-year-old mother still resides in and the farm where he has spent his entire life.
“I didn’t think this was going to bother me,” he said as he clasped his calloused hands together, tears welling in his eyes. “One thing you have to realize is, unless you’re in this business, you don’t understand what people are going through. So, even though the farm is still here, it still hurts me to talk about because it’s quite a legacy.”
The farm that sits at the corner of Pond Road and Vermont Route 116 in Shelburne has been a working dairy since the farm’s origin in 1948 when it was bought by Bernie’s parents, Ludger and Cecile Guillemette.
“My dad ends up back at the house one day and he tells my mom, ‘Well, I bought a farm,’” he laughed, a wide smile spreading across his weathered face. “My mom is right out of Montreal, so to take somebody out of the city and bring her down here, that’s pretty gutsy.”
Nearly every building seen standing on the farm today has been built by the Guillemettes and holds generations of blood, sweat and tears, and at one point was just one of nearly 15 dairy farms on Route 116 from Williston Road, and just one of the nearly 4,000 dairy farms throughout the state.
“I can still name all those farms by name,” Guillemette said, counting off 10 with his fingers.
The reasons for their closures, he said, is unique to each farm, but common threads like children not being interested in taking over the business or the farms simply not being big enough to sustain themselves in today’s dairy market are the main reasons why nearly 3,500 of those farms have vanished in recent years.
“It wouldn’t have been very many years ago, you could have asked me, and I would have told you that I don’t think I will ever not see milk cows here,” he said. “And I’m not talking a long time ago, either, but there’s just been so many changes.”
Bernie officially took over the farm from his parents in 1981, but now, after four decades, he said the story is beginning to change.
“I’ve got a 43-year-old son, Kyle. He’s got three daughters and I’d been tiptoeing the idea for a while and I told him, ‘Kyle, you probably ought to think about getting a nice job that pays really well and doesn’t work you very hard,’” he said, noting that a farmer works eight days a week.
“I have seen the writing on the wall that nothing’s going to get better for younger farmers.”
The decision to stop milking was not an easy one since the whole operation was the bread and butter of the farm.
“Seven days a week, night and morning,” he said. “That was our main source of income.”
Times are changing, though, as social and economic forces are making it more difficult for small family farms to stay afloat, particularly since the price of milk is government controlled. Costs like farm upkeep and repairing old machinery have gone up tremendously while the demand for milk and its byproducts has simultaneously decreased.
“There’s so many alternative beverages, so people aren’t drinking as much milk,” he said. “We didn’t have that maybe when I was a kid. You’ve got to remember, in this area, every town had their own creamery.”
The farm was part of the dairy cooperative Dairy Farmers of America, which is owned and governed by nearly 14,000 members across the United States, including nearly 130 dairy farmers in Vermont, and markets almost one-quarter of the milk produced in the state.
Guillemette has served on the board since joining the co-op, but since he no longer ships milk, the farm is no longer part of the co-op, which he says is also a difficult hardship to overcome for different reasons.
“We used to have a meeting once a month,” he said. “So, you rub elbows with people from different states, but you got all the same things in common, so that becomes another little family. I’ve never done Boy Scouts or anything, but I guess that’s what you could call it for me now. I’ll miss that part of it, the community.”
After selling nearly 120 milkers, he still has some bred heifers and calves for beef, but the milking system has been shut down completely since January.
“I’ve got some friends even that have said, ‘Why didn’t you just get rid of everything?’ Well, I could have, but I told them I could never cut both my arms off the same day,” he said. “I miss my cows. I’ll miss them till the day I die.”
To sustain some business, his daughter-in-law-law, Janna, and his wife, Joanne, developed a self-serve farmstand two years ago with local and homegrown produce, cut flowers, honey, beef, pick-your-own sunflowers and pumpkins.
On a larger scale, in addition to renting some of his 400 acres of property and selling machinery he no longer uses, Guillemette said that he was planning on selling hay this year, but with all of the rain “that’s not working quite as well as I thought it was going to.”
Although the future of the farm remains slightly uncertain, Guillemette said things could be a lot worse, and just because milking has stopped doesn’t mean other farm chores stop too. So, every day, like clockwork, he will get up with the sun and do what needs to get done to keep the wheels turning.
“This could be a falling out between Kyle and myself and that’s not the case. It could also be that he or I was injured, so that’s thankfully not the case,” he said. “Some people said, ‘you’ve always been a survivor, so I don’t think you’re gonna stop now.’ We’ll figure something out. I’m not really worried about that.”
