Home Pickins
McKee, Kentucky
Growing tobacco was insurance for Beth and Doug Tillery on their 300 acre, 120-head dairy farm in eastern Kentucky. In years when milk prices sunk below the cost of production, the tobacco check would come in and balance the books. Fragile, but it worked for nearly two decades. Then one year hail destroyed 10 acres of the tobacco crop the family was counting on to pay the feed bill. They had no crop loss insurance and no other way to pay the debt. So they sold the herd.
“It was like a death in the family. It was devastating,” said Beth, likening the experience of losing a lifetime’s investment in dairy farming to losing her mother a few years later. “My God, we’ve worked so hard,” she recognized at the time, “and we have nothing to show for it!”
But though they had lost their cows and way of life, the couple refused to let go of their farm. They expanded their tobacco crop (leasing government rationed allotments from other farmers) and skimped on grocery and all other bills. Doug got a factory job, Beth raised pumpkins, festival corn, gourds, and dried and fresh flower arrangements, and their two kids pitched in on a significant load of the farm work. By the end of that year, they had paid off their debts and hatched a new plan.
Beth was taking her crops to the Lexington Farmers’ Market, charging customers what the goods were worth in terms of her time and effort, and finally making a modest profit. She was awestruck by the experience.
“Being able to sell your product and price your product… It felt like
we were sinning,” she said, elaborating that years of accepting low prices had given her the mentality that her hard work wasn’t worth much.
Beth quickly got over that, and had soon expanded into direct-marketing eggs and whole, frozen U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected chicken. She and Doug devised a pasture rotation system to raise 500 fryer chickens per year and about 100 laying hens. They feed hormone- and antibiotic-free grain to the poultry, which also dine on bugs and grass.
She expanded her cut flower production, which now accounts for half the farm income, and sells bouquets at the farmers’ market and to local florists. She planted 350 blackberries, 300 blueberries, a quarter acre of strawberries and a patch of tomatoes. In the hopper are plans to plant asparagus and rhubarb and start a dozen hogs on pasture.
Beth also raises beef cattle, the second largest crop in Kentucky after tobacco, and has become a community leader in helping other beef farmers in her low-income county become more profitable.
She chairs a county council formed to make use of tobacco settlement money by helping tobacco farmers find new economic opportunities. Since many tobacco farmers also raise beef, the council implemented a genetics program to get higher quality bulls into the county. It also built a beef handling facility to enable farmers get higher prices on livestock sales through bypassing the intermediary local stockyard. Encouraging diversification beyond the traditional crops, the council has allocated funding to small, start-up enterprises such as bee-keeping, berries, poultry and rabbit production.
Beth also sits on the board of Community Farm Alliance, a non-profit putting pressure on the state to build local food systems infrastructure so Kentucky farmers can become more profitable through direct-marketing.
She remembers what prices are like in the commodity market. “Somebody’s made a mistake here,” she protested to Doug back in 1978 when the family got its first milk check. “This doesn’t cover the feed bill.” In spite of that disappointment, Beth always expected hard work would pay off and make the dairy farm lucrative.
Now she admits the loss of their dairy operation was a blessing. And having discovered the benefits of direct-marketing, Beth is again thinking dairy.
She lights up when she considers the possibility of buying a small pasteurizer and peddling milk and butter at the farmers’ market. She’s also exploring the legal how-to of selling raw milk. Since the USDA doesn’t allow the sale of raw milk, Beth figures she could sell shares of the cows to customers and then provide them the service of milking their animals. Either way, she can’t wait to get her hands on those udders again.
“My love is livestock and dairy and not all those other things,” she said, explaining she’s also taken a fancy to the berries and hopes one day to be able to focus on just that and livestock.
Back when the Tillerys let go of the herd, they kept 10 of their favorite milkers. The difference this time around will be that instead of shipping milk off by the hundredweight into a vast and faceless national market, she’ll bottle herself and sell it by the gallon.