ROCKINGHAM — Justin and May Lillie have taken over running Lillie Brook Farm and are learning the hard way the challenges and joys of running a 178 acre working small farm in Vermont, as four generations before them have done.
Nearby, aptly named Hardscrabble Corner gives a hint of what others have experienced. Yet Justin, 33, and May, 36, are committed to raising two healthy children.
Their challenges began immediately.
Justin was not raised a farmer in spite of the farm having been in the family for all but 40 years of its existence.
He also does everything without assistance. “I usually have help haying,” he said, “but I do everything else myself.”
“My great-great-great-grandfather started the farm sometime in the 1700s,” Justin said. “But after my grandfather came back from World War I and was offered a job, he knew that's what he wanted to do, so he sold the farm. I think seeing how hard his father worked on the farm, he knew it just wasn't for him. He wanted a job.”
Justin said the farm went through a couple of owners from the 1930s, and at least one family raised a generation working the farm.
His father stopped for a yard sale one day and discovered the farm was for sale again after 40 years in 2004.
“We talked, and I said I would farm it,” said Justin, who agreed to lease the farm.
“I wanted to practice what I was learning about how simple food can be really healthy. I see the farm as a system, and a part of the ecosystem,” he said.
With a background in business and psychology, Justin admits that his idealism “tended to set me up for a harder time” than it needed to be.
“May has helped me get more sane about what we can realistically expect to do here,” he said of his wife, originally from Sweden. The couple met as students at the University of New Hampshire.
“I was a bit extreme in the degree of sustainability I was trying to achieve,” Justin said. “May's idea of having a less combative relationship with nature makes more sense.”
Justin has had to adjust his vision over the last seven years, he said. Practically speaking, “I'm just one person and there is only so much one man can do,” he said.
Extreme sustainability
In addition to the old farmhouse and barns, the farm came equipped with traditional equipment (“the newest was bought in the 1960s”), which all ran on petroleum fuel.
Citing the farm equipment as an example of his extreme sustainability ideas, “when I first saw the fields of hay, immediately I wanted to run all our equipment on biodiesel fuel from the hay,” Justin recalled. He retrofit the equipment to run on biodiesel fuel that he produced himself.
“But one day, I was out haying and ran out of fuel. I had to go to town to get enough [petroleum-based] diesel at the gas station to get the haying done,” he said.
“That was the peak of understanding of what was practical to make the farm work. I had to adjust my thinking to being less extreme,” Justin said.
May moved onto the farm in 2005, three years before they got married, and May's car uses gas.
“It was a huge bone of contention between us,” she recalled, laughing.
“It really upset him in the beginning. But it just wasn't practical to try to run all our vehicles on biodiesel. That's a lot of biofuel to make,” she said. “It was taking Justin a lot of time and energy to create fuel for the equipment to cut the hay to make the fuel to run the equipment to cut the hay. If we really wanted to have a farm, we had to decide where his energy was best used.”
Finding a degree of sustainability took Justin going to extremes for a few years, but he began to see, with May's help, that what was practical could be balanced with good ecological practices and sustainability, and things started moving along more smoothly.
“I had to get out of my own way,” Justin said.
Finding what made sense to raise on the farm continues to be an evolving process, Justin admitted.
“To do what I do, one farmer farming, I realized the esoteric aspect is bogging me down,” he said.
Part of the evolution has been realizing that diversity, as well as sustainability, is necessary for the ecology of the farm in the big picture.
“We started by raising salad greens and sold them at farmers' markets in Springfield, Brattleboro, Lebanon, and Walpole, [among others],” Justin said.
“We were traveling a lot to sell the product,” and that did not seem to fit in with their idea of sustainable farming.
Then Justin had the idea that let the farm evolve.
From salad to beef
In 2005, after considering his farmland and what he could practically expect from himself, Justin and May decided to let the two large terraced beds of salad greens go back to field, and they focused on raising organic beef.
Justin settled on raising Scottish Highland cattle.
“They are a product of the land and suitable for the care that I can give,” he said. The breed fits his requirements that his cattle “be genetically solid and able to take care of themselves.”
He was turned off by the more “modernized” food breeds and had to take into consideration food health and food safety to raise anything organically.
Justin did a lot of reading and online research, and he said that he talked to neighbors as well as to the people who had worked the farm for 40 years.
“I learned that it's different for each farm, each piece of land. What one farmer says works on his farm might not work on my farm,” he said.
“Even haying. It may be the week to hay up the road, but here it may not be until next week.”
He said he had to learn and adapt as he went along. He and May would get up each morning, talk, and decide jointly what to do that day.
Justin said that he also had to change his thinking on how to use the fields.
“I looked at a field and saw how I could make the best use of it by fencing [the cattle] off in quadrants to graze every part of the field, making them eat everything,” he said.
“But force-grazing cows is a lot of work to move them, and it takes a lot of fencing,” he said, pointing to one field, showing the problem.
“Unless a cow is starving or in a big herd where there's lots of competition for food, cows eat what they want to eat and leave the rest,” he said.
And what's left does not necessarily make the best hay field unless it's mowed regularly, he said.
“I just have to accept this is how the fields are going to be used,” Justin said, shrugging and shaking his head ruefully.
And May realizes that hers is a support role, and that Justin relies heavily on her realistic, practical approach.
“The Swedish approach to land is more of a 'Let's establish a pleasant working relationship with the planet,' so I listen to her,” he said. “She brings a global perspective to the farm.”
May said her focus is to “try to set a healthy example by raising healthy children.”
In addition to the farm and their full-time parenting duties, the couple also have part-time jobs. Justin coaches ski racing during the winter months, and May works part-time as a nurse.
Three properties
In addition to the farm, the Lillie family owns two other properties: the haying fields, and forested acreage on Parker Hill.
“I like to think of them as linked,” Justin said, folding his hands together. “The hay feeds the cattle. The wood cut to make deer browse, we can burn.”
And this year, Justin said, “We've started using the logs to grow shiitake mushrooms,” Justin said.
The logs that have been cut are plugged with shiitake spores, and some lie near the pond below the house for the Lillies' own use.
“We'll see. They're both experiments,” Justin said of the mushrooms, which should start fruiting next summer. The Lillies hope to sell them.
From the woods around the farm, May collects reishi mushrooms, known to have positive effects on liver function, immune systems, and improve general health.
“I dry them, grind them up, and use them in soups,” said May, adding that she has not considered the commercial aspects seriously at this point.
A decidedly commercial undertaking is selling Lillie Brook Farm Scottish Highland beef, which the Lillies describe as “ecologically grown from pastures of grasses, herbs, and woody forage.” The Lillies perceive this aspect of their enterprise as an evolving and sane balance of the practical and ecologically sustainable techniques.
And the simple challenge of charging $5 a pound for their Highland beef might seem high to many folks, but “people need to realize that they should be paying twice that because they know where the beef is from - it's raised locally,” Justin said.
That per-pound price includes the processing fee of $3.50 per pound and, of course, the costs of raising the cow. After that, “there's not much left over to sustain the farm,” Justin said.
The Lillies compete with large beef producers whose operations are federally subsidized and thus can sell their product for $2.50 per pound.
“How can you compete with that?” Justin asked.
But the Lillies' commitment to their herd of 15 highlanders is long-term, they say. “We have to consider what our next step is, if we want to step it up,” May said.
“Once you get started, you can't just quit,” she added.
But if the Lillies sell to more distant markets that are willing to pay for their organically raised beef, they also must consider the consequences of that strategy - consequences that include the ecological costs of getting the food to those markets.
“And we don't know if we want to go that way,” May said.
“I think we'd like to be completely organic one day,” Justin said, harking back to using biodiesel and producing everything they use on the farm. “Things are changing.”
The Lillies' commitment to evolving is key.
“What we're trying to do here may play a more and more important role for our communities in the future,” Justin said.
“When my great-grandfather had the farm through the Depression, he kept a lot of people going with it,” he said. “It was a family run farm. Everyone around helped in one way or another.”
And, Justin said, “We may see that role of the farm return.”