Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.
Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community.
Member FDIC.
Closed captioning is made possible by Bemidji Regional Airport, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport.
More information available at bemidjiairport.org.
[Music] [Music] Welcome to Common Ground.
I'm producer/director Scott Knudson.
In this episode producer/director Randy Cadwell joins a small family dairy farm that's documenting the culture of vanishing silos.
[Music] [Music] Come boss, come boss, let's go.
Come boss, [Music] come boss, [Music] on [Music] come on let's go.
[Music] I'm Wendy Dornbusch and I live on a farm in Ottertail County.
Music] I married a bachelor dairy farmer and I had two teenage kids, so I think he was brave to take on two teenagers and I was brave to take on a dairy farmer.
I lived in the country but I hadn't done farm work to speak of and so I came at the dairy farming from an artist point of view and a lot of like philosophical "why would you do this" and my husband after we got married, he's like I don't even know why I do this and I'm like well if it takes this much time and effort you should know why you do this because it'd be a whole lot easier to do something else.
They don't come in good for me.
They work better for my husband.
So, we would have conversations about that like some single dairy farmers, they do it for the tradition and really get a lot of family involved in the manpower and some do it for just to kind of keep the teenagers busy I feel like and they have teenagers, they have manpower whereas Randy, it was I, we had teenage kids when we got married but they soon went on to their own life and Randy and I had a child together.
I watched my husband really think through, why do I do this, you know, can do I want to keep doing this?
Am I going to keep milking in stanchions?
What changes do I need to make to just stay on my feet and keep doing what I love doing and he was dedicated to the land.
He really liked the possibility for innovation, that he's, you know, the boss of his own destiny and all those factors really happen when you're on a dairy farm by yourself.
It's your the buck stops here.
You don't have employees.
You don't have a boss.
You don't have off time.
What you see is what you get and what you make of it is up to you.
This farm was bought in 1915.
My grandpa bought this farm.
He ran it till he died in '58.
Dad took it over then and I've been doing the day-to-day operation since 1990.
There's 167 acres on this place, on the original.
So, I'm milking.
This is our swinging parlor.
So, these cows are milking out.
I'll get eight cows in here or seven and prep them and then I just swing the milkers across and get them milking while I release these.
A lot of days it's 18 hour days.
Your minimum is 8 hours a day at any day of the week.
That's your minimum hours just to do your day-to-day chores.
Summers a little bit less in the chore time but you got so many other things to do that makes up for it.
When you get into the fieldwork season, it's crazy cuz it's a timing, everythings got to be done on a timing schedule.
I mean you are so pushed to get done, especially with the weather extremes.
There's no time for naps.
It just hands on, things got to work and the financing is getting so tight you cannot slip up.
I mean there's margin for error is way less than it used to be 30 years ago but I like the the independence.
That somebody can't tell me what to do.
I never like giving orders and I don't like taking orders and that's a big part of it but it's the ability to do multiple different things, you know, I'm not sitting behind the desk doing the same thing at a desk or you know in a factory doing that same thing day after day.
I got that variety of work and it creates a challenge to me.
I like controlling my own destiny.
So, I see other small dairy farms selling out.
The guy's tired, the kids are grown and gone and they sell out and how really these guys however they made their operation work if they're still going or if they've sold out and either retired or got a job in town or whatever, like I feel like they're the unsung heroes.
They've dedicated their career to a small piece of land and a small herd and making it work and when they sell out that possibility for innovation is gone.
Their kids aren't taking over the farm for various reasons and they aren't in town buying parts and fuel and you know that just local community economic contribution is gone and one guy sells out, that's not a big deal.
Most of the guys sell out in that area, the local economy feels it.
There's these quiet heroes and their story needs to be told.
[Music] [Music] Well, kind of all my life I've been fascinated with video.
I wanted to do videos and then my grown-up daughter, she partnered with me and she did still photos and I did video and we had a display in Fergus Falls this last winter.
[Music] My daughter, Analee her photographs were of what we do day to day.
When we're putting up hay, she came over and took some pictures.
She took some pictures just of daily milking and daily chores and so it was really fun to partner with her and so it's more than video.
You've got the still [Music] pictures.
I asked her if she could visit some of the farms in the area and we didn't actually get video interviews done but she went to some farms and various barns and silos because they are being tore down, the old barns and silos, even you know if they haven't been used for years and been standing there, now they're being torn down and a lot of barns and silos aren't even being used anymore.
We have a preschool toy that's the shape of a barn in a silo like it's a classic profile and why were silos made?
Why are they coming down?
Why are these small farms disappearing and the silos aren't being used?
If farms are still operating, why aren't they using silos?
How have farm operations changed and kind of the family involvement has been taken out of the picture in a lot of farms, not all of them.
[Music] As far as I got for a video is to videotape our farm and I videotaped daily operations and I videotaped our daughter who's still at home hauling manure because even though she's 16 now 17, she isn't full-time working on the farm by any means but she is a key player a lot of times and so this little girl with her hair in a bun that likes to do dance is driving a tractor hauling manure.
The video I did was very thrown together.
Actually, the backstory is sort of a true confession that my daughter Analee that does the photography and I, she's like I want to apply for an artist grant and she wanted to do it with me as a team and I'm like, oh I'm busy I don't have time and she finally talked me into it and so in the grant process we had to talk to several places that would display the project we were proposing to do with our grant and we didn't get the grant and so we figured well, oh well move on but then my daughter was getting these emails in August from Fergus Falls.
Well, we got your place, you know, your show booked and tell us more and we hadn't done anything.
So, I told my daughter, I said just tell them, you know, find someone else to display in July and February and or January and February to take our spot and my daughter's like no, no, no let's do it!
Let's do it Mom and so I shopped around.
I haven't run a video camera for lots of years.
Technology has changed.
So, we threw that thing together pretty quick.
So, the video isn't narrated yet but the idea is that the farmer would be narrating the history of his farm and get his wife, children who's ever involved and even a family reunion maybe.
Get people talking about memories of that farm and edit it together with visuals of daily operations of that farm.
That's my vision.
I just haven't got there and when we're putting up the show, I was wondering to myself, how come people that are actively farming don't do more documentation of their farm and it was just so crunched for time and it was such a hassle to keep the chores done and hang the show.
I was like I know why when people farm they just farm.
That's all they do.
[Music] So, this next winter we'd like to get some more video interviews of farmers around the area and have another display of video and still photos and just slowly as we have time in the winters to reach out and tell people's story and it just catches the public interest.
It connects to people's interest in how is the land being cared for?
Where does my food come from?
Like it's a story that connects with everybody.
[Music] [Music] People of all ages really had so many questions and it really resonated with them and some people were like, well, I my grandparents farmed whereas other people didn't have farming in their background but still had lots of questions and some people have maybe a few goats or something they have kind of a hobby farm and they're like well, you know, just full of questions about quality of hay and there's a real interest in returning to rural life but people haven't necessarily had the background and the experience and so there's a whole new generation that is really interested even hands on, you know, how do you keep your chickens alive in the winter and how do you get them to lay or just questions like that.
[Music] [Music] I think it's a unique story, you know, very, very shocking what people go through to make a day-to-day operations work.
I don't think they'll be able to believe it and it's true and even understand it to the depth.
It's so, the drive it takes, I don't think they can comprehend it, I guess.
We walk down the corridor to the new free stall barn.
[Music] [Music] [Music] Well, in the future, we want to do more interviews.
My daughters and I, really get the word out that we're here.
We're doing interviews, documenting generationally the history of your farm and the story and get grandpa and grandma, uncle or whoever it is to talk about what it was like to do this as their career and stories of crises and interventions or when the community pulled together.
They're just fascinating stories that haven't been told and when you pair it with video and photography on the place, there's such a sense of place.
This is our farm.
This is where this happened.
That's where this story happened.
This is a pasture where we found this calf or whatever.
It is that, it's just so emotional and profound and just the family really cherishes that too.
[Music] [Music] [Music] Really want to connect with people and their story and get the people telling their story and identifying that their story is a value.
It's important to the history of our communities and it's just so valuable to think about how you want to tell your story.
[Music] Thank you so much for watching.
Join us again on Common Ground.
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[Music] To order episodes or segments of Common Ground call 218-333-3020.
Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji.
Continuing their second century of service to the community.
Member FDIC.
Closed captioning is made possible by Bemidji Regional Airport, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport.
More information is available at bemidjiairport.org.
Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people November 4, 2008.
If you watch Common Ground online consider becoming a member or making a donation at lptv.org.