The Farr Family Farm has been milking cows on the same piece of ground since 1919, when Elias Farr bought the land with a mustering-out check from the Great War and built a barn with his own hands. Today, his grandson Henry milks 35 Holsteins in that same barn, which has been reroofed twice and expanded once and still carries the smell of hay and cattle and hard work.
It is not an easy life. Henry Farr, 60, rises at 4:30 every morning and is in bed by 8:30 every night. His wife, Margaret, teaches at the K-8 school and carries the family’s health insurance. The farm has not turned a profit in seven of the last ten years.
“I keep the books myself,” Farr says, sitting at his kitchen table with a cup of coffee that has gone cold. “And the books say I’m keeping this farm alive out of stubbornness and not much else.”
The economics of small dairy farming in northern Maine are brutal. Milk prices fluctuate with national commodity markets that have no regard for the cost of feed in Aroostook County. Farr sells raw milk and cream direct to a small roster of local customers and to The Dry Dock, which uses his cream in its pastry program.
“The Dry Dock helps,” he says. “Dean pays better than the processor. But it’s a restaurant — he buys what he needs, not what I need to sell.”
Farr has watched the town change around him. The mill closed when he was a young man. The shipbuilding era ended before he was born. The tourist economy that has replaced both seems, to him, like a fragile substitute.
“Tourists don’t buy milk,” he says flatly. “They buy souvenirs and expensive dinners. Then they go home and I’m still here with thirty-five cows that need to be fed.”
Still, he has not given up. The farm’s woodlot supplies maple for Niall O’Flaherty’s tapping operation. An agricultural conservation easement helps with property taxes. And in the equipment shed, restored and polished, sits his grandfather’s milk wagon — Bess’s harness still draped over the seat — a reminder of the route that once served three hundred households.
“It’s not a business anymore,” Farr admits. “It’s a stewardship. I’m taking care of this land until the next person comes along who might want to farm it. I don’t know who that will be. But it won’t be because I let the barn fall down on my watch.”