学进去

As a kid, I was always around animals and I always enjoyed it. After my senior year of high school, we started renting this farm. Then I went away to Rhode Island School of Design to become an architect. After about two years and a half, I found that was not quite what I wanted to do. I felt I wanted to be an architect and have a hobby farm. But why not just have a farm and make it my career?

It’s an exciting business. I think a lot of people don’t realize what’s involved with dairy farming (奶牛业). We took some trips to some progressive farms out in New York when we first started. And it really changed my attitude of what you can do. You can be a successful businessperson with a lot of challenges. And those challenges are part of what makes it very exciting — it’s not just milking cows. There’s nutrition and finances and a lot of big day-to-day decisions.

Well, land is the biggest obstacle. Securing enough land is important. We don’t just need the land for the animals; we also need it to distribute the manure from the cows. And there’s a real balance, a real recycling. You take the feed; you give it to the cows, and the cows give you milk, but they also give you a lot of manure. And the best thing to do is putting it back on the land. You need 2 acres per cow basically, a cow and its calf.

The land that we rent is beautiful and the land that we own is beautiful. If you get half a mile off the road and looking back at scenery across the valley, it’s impressive. You get the rows of grass and the cows in the distance.