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Farm Visit in PA-13

“My family put the herd together in 1928.”

As my eyes swept across the milking barn, Ayrshire, Jersey, and Holstein cows looked at me, chewed their cud, then put their heads through the bars to eat more feed.

I picked some up off the floor, smelled it, and rolled the moist mixture between my fingers. This wasn’t some kind of grain, but…woody.

“What’s this feed made of?” I asked the farmer, who had generously invited me to tour his dairy farm on this beautiful Thursday afternoon. This farm had originated in neighboring counties, then moved decades later to its current location in our 13th Congressional District where I am running for the office of U.S. Representative. 

Forthright with his answers and always incredibly knowledgeable, he answered, “corn silage – fermented, hay/grass – fermented, ground corn (high moisture),” and the one that surprised me a little, “Purina pellets.” The exact combination was privileged information that came from a man I had briefly glimpsed earlier- the itinerant nutritionist – who obviously knew his stuff. Oh sure, this “suburbanite” (the farmer’s name for us nonfarm folks) had absolutely no real knowledge of a healthy cow, but once, years ago, I had correctly picked out which ones would win a blue ribbon at a State Fair. The bossies in front of me were clear-eyed, lowed harmoniously, and swished their tails in that casual, “there’s a fly around here somewheres” way that belied a contented lifestyle. 

With 60-70 head of cattle on average, whose milk yields a butterfat content of 4.2%, well over the whole milk standard of 3.25%, this was the kind of farm straight out of the James Herriot book, “All Creatures Great and Small” that I had read voraciously as a child. 

Did he name his cows, or were they just a number to him?

“Well, we got Blossom,” but then he added that his daughter had named some after the Princess Family.

“The Princess Family? What’s that?” I asked, ready to be charmed by some quaint royal lineage.

“Oh, you know, Ariel, Belle, and them.” I chuckled at the Disney reference.

But of course these cows had American names. We were in the heart of the Mid-Atlantic region, smack dab in the middle of South Central Pennsylvania. And where did his milk go? “Milk only flows East,” he explained. Some goes to Carlisle (charmingly pronounced “Car-lalle”) to turn into butter, however a good amount goes straight into some of the greatest Americana this country has ever known – Hershey’s chocolate.

I had been on the free Chocolate World ride at Hershey Park with my husband and children so many times, I could almost recite the script of production. At a critical point in the process, Hershey adds milk to the product. The script had always bragged the milk had been local and in a barn nestled among the hills of Appalachia, I was finding it truly was.

Unfortunately, this local farmer, like so many others, was suffering. When asked what the federal government could do for him, he was quick with his answer, “Milk pricing overhaul” and his wife who accompanied us on the tour, in addition to my campaign volunteer, Eileen Roberts, agreed wholeheartedly. Currently, the price runs $19/hundredweight. Hundredweight for us suburbanites is around 11.6 gallons. 

A better price would be $28/hundredweight, like they had roughly “two years ago”, (when Biden was President, I thought quietly), but at least he added, “it’s not down to $14 like it was 3 years ago,” uh, also when Biden was President, I remembered. 

Did the January passage of the federal “Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act” help him?

Well, he hadn’t seen it yet, but he was sure it would help his bottom line. Caught between low milk prices, high fertilizer costs – about $23,000/month -, and high diesel prices that emblazoned every gas station marquee in startling numbers, the farmer has to keep balancing how much grain he’ll sell from his farmed over 150 acres of corn versus how much he’ll turn into silage that feeds his cows from those same fields. Even though he’s done it for years, and his only employees are his family, it’s a struggle to break even. According to Stoltzfus Grain website, Pennsylvania corn is trading at $5.10/bushel, but a better price according to the farmer would be $7/bushel. Specifically for corn, a bushel is 56 pounds. Sometimes, after paying his family, the farmer has no money left for himself or to upgrade his equipment. Maybe if there was some federal milk pricing, that might help, he hinted. 

Would he sell his property to get out of this difficulty?

The farmer looked wistfully across his hillside farm and said it could get a person, “a satchel full of money, nothing else, a recipe to die,” and his wife nodded in agreement. I too nodded not knowing what to add, just sort of a politician’s yearning to do something for this fellow American whose job is to “feed America” as the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau so often reminds us. As yet, the Farm Bill hasn’t passed, so I could offer to vote to pass it, along with H.R. 9474 – Local Foods for Healthy Schools Act of 2026, when elected, but it just doesn’t seem immediate enough. Of course, I would vote to withdraw hostilities in Iran so the Strait of Hormuz could be opened, oil could be exported properly, and the prices of diesel and fertilizer would come down, but that is still months away.

We moved on to pet some baby goats who had come up to us, then we walked over to the manure pit – a concrete tub that stretched over 100 feet in diameter and had a depth of 10 feet. I peered through the chain link fence that surrounded it and looked at the brown muck. He pointed out the handy crust on top that kept the worst of the smells from putrefying the air and noted that it was about five feet high. “We give back to the ground” he said.

While the limit is 6000 gallons of manure an acre, the nitrogen from it doesn’t just infuse the ground. You have to have a “ground cover” he explained. Sweet clover was the original ground cover back in the 1970s, but legumes work pretty well too to convert the nitrogen in the manure into nitrogen in the soil.

All of a sudden, I thought back to my education in Maryland where all things led to the Chesapeake Bay. In my seventh grade year, I learned about the nitrogens coming off of the Pennsylvania farms, getting into the Bay, clouding up the water, preventing the bay grasses from growing which led to the worst possible outcome for any Marylander – a reduction of crabs to crack in the summer. 

Was the farmer affected by those regulations at all? 

“Too many regulations for the Chesapeake Bay,” he told me, and to make the point of overregulation, this registered Republican explained that the Army Corps of Engineers, in their infinite wisdom, had stretched the definition of “navigable water” to include his farmland. 

“Does this look like navigable water to you?” he asked bluntly with a sweeping gesture of his arm. I could only shake my head vigorously. More importantly, he wasn’t losing dirt like had happened decades ago. In the 1970s his farm lost 30-40 tons of ground a year, now it was down to 3 tons, but the regulations didn’t recognize the improvement. This modern farmer doesn’t plow anymore – he uses sod. The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) measures how much his runoff is reduced and pays him based on his percentage through a cover crop program which requires planting multiple species by a deadline. Talking about those cover crops and runoff reminded him of something the federal government wasn’t getting right – he noted that the Federal Loan Rate hasn’t updated the base acreage of farms in years. So maybe, there was something more I could do for him.

After a jouncy ride through steeply-pitched fields that the farmer had acquired over the years and a brief hello a family member, who had been baling hay in a field, he reached the pinnacle of one field and turned the truck around. The view was utterly stunning. As the sun dazzled the valley spilling out below us, it was clear, the farmer doesn’t leave because there simply isn’t anywhere as beautiful.

(Note: the farmer is among many in the 13th Congressional District who are suffering the current administration’s follies, so he’s not named in order not to single him out.)

(Animal photo credit: Eileen Roberts)

Charity of the Week!

Even though charitable donations will not meet the overwhelming need of food assistance and healthcare for lower income Americans, these charities are a stopgap until I am elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and can legislate helpful federal programs as well as prevent a rapacious president from illegally impounding the congressionally-approved funds for those programs.

Please donate to the Shippensburg Produce and Outreach, if you can.

“Shippensburg Produce and Outreach (SPO) is a warm-hearted nonprofit organization that provides fresh vegetables, fruits, eggs, milk, and other healthy items to those in the Shippensburg community who qualify, with a dedication to creating a welcoming environment and making a positive impact on the lives of individuals and families in the community.”

Their donation page is here: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/shippensburg-produce-outreach-inc

Comparing and Contrasting Votes on Legislation

Check out how Joyce recently voted, how I would have voted in comparison, and why!

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