I was not prepared for the silence.

The Dispersal Sale on Saturday, Feb. 24 came and went, like a flash in the pan. On Sunday morning I milked 16 cows. By Sunday evening, we were down to seven. On Monday, several cows were picked up by their respective buyers, and by Tuesday evening, only one cow remained.

Good old faithful Darlene, pushing 15 years of age, and due to calve in a few months. She has stood for photos, selfies, and for countless milking demonstrations, letting our urban visitors try their hand at hand-milking a cow for the first time. Darlene could have her own social media account. No way would Darlene be shipped down the road — she would remain on the farm with the rest of the youngstock, keeping each other company during this transition.

On Tuesday evening I milked my last cow for the last time and dry-treated her, which is farmer-speak for shutting off the spigot until the calf is born. I turned Darlene out to the empty bedding pack. She ambled out of the parlor, her Swiss cowbell singing a clear but unhurried tune. I cleaned the parlor and rinsed the milk house, more out of habit than anything else. I turned the barn lights off, closed the door, and felt it latch for the last time.

This space has defined me for as long as I can remember. My earliest childhood memories include peering over the top of a crib at my parent’s cows while they milked. My sister remembers playing with dolls in the farm maternity pen, and a photo of a cow sniffing her as a baby made the front cover of a dairy publication.

Cows are generally not noisy animals, but removing their presence from the farm created a void that cannot be denied. The silence washed over the farm as if to crush it. The silence crept into my soul and pounded my ears. It was a sensation I did not expect, but am certainly not alone in experiencing:

Above all else, the level of support we have received following Saturday’s dispersal sale is nothing less than transformational. Two complete strangers bought me lunch as I oversaw milking the cows that had just been ran through the sale ring. Every trucker that showed up to load stayed to chat awhile. Farmers reached out, called, or simply texted to offer support. A common thread amongst those who have gone through dispersal sales of their own was a recognition of how quiet the farm is after the cows go.

My story is not unique. Small farms have fallen by the wayside, to the point that the average sized dairy in Wisconsin is now over 200 cows. If you take nothing else from my writing, know this:

Small Farms will always have a lower cost of production than large-scale farming. The main reason small farms have “failed”, is because from an underwriting standpoint, they are easier to liquidate than large-scale farms.

Banks, lending institutions, investors, etc. have too much capital tied up in large-scale agricultural operations to simply cut them loose in the same manner of the small, mom and pop dairy barn. Unfortunately, large-scale farming only drives the cost of production up, so there will never be an end to the “failure” of “small” farms. This just means that we will begin to see larger and larger farms exiting the industry:

Five years ago, it was the dairy operations milking 60 cows that were selling out. Right now, it’s the farms milking 100 to 200 cows. Next year, it’ll be the 200 to 500 cow dairies falling by the wayside, and five years from now, anyone milking less than 1,000 cows will be facing foreclosure.

What we are seeing in American Agriculture right now is the Collectivization of Farming.

Collective Farming has been toyed with throughout history, and a simple Google search lists the tired, worn-out reasons it inevitably fails: Unexpected famine or natural disaster or human conflict and the inability to pivot supply/distribution chains, shortage of parts and supplies for increasingly complex production systems, blah blah blah. 

There is one reason that Collective Farming always fails, and criminally, it is never actually listed: The Dissolution of Personal Ownership.

Throughout history, the onset of Collective Farming is always marked by the seizure — by force or economic coercion — of peasantry holdings. Once you remove the concept of personal ownership in the production of food; once you dissolve the concept of families caring for their holdings because it’s their passion, and replace that soul-identifying passion with black and white economic analytics, well, this is what you get:

A friend of mine delivers commodities. One of his stops is to a quantifiably large-scale factory farm. He is a farm boy himself but describes, “As I was sitting there waiting to offload, maybe 20 or 30 minutes, I watched two payloaders going back and forth. They were carting dead cows out of the freestall barn. I counted more than 30 carcasses when I finally flagged down one of the drivers and asked what was going on. ‘Oh nothing’, he replied, ‘this is just our daily death loss’.”

I was not prepared for the silence. The silence was oppressive and offensive.

But then, a single solitary bell rang out. Darlene stood, stretched, and ambled her way out to the feed bunk. As she ate, her authentic Swiss cowbell melted the silence, bringing a sense of peace to the farm.

With that, the silence dissolved as though it never existed. Our small farm will survive. Dairy will continue, stronger than ever. Through this transition, I am most grateful for Darlene’s bell, and for you.

— Dan Wegmueller is the owner of Wegmueller Farms and his column appears regularly in the Times. His website is https://www.farmforthought.org.