Country Life

I often find myself deeply conflicted by my semi-working class upbringing 👪

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I often find myself deeply conflicted by my semi-working class upbringing 👪

I am the child of two college educated parents, but they were homesteaders, and I grew up in a very working class rural neighborhood – and my parents had very working class jobs at the Center for Disability Services.

Having college educated parents that grew up in the suburbs always put me in a different social class then most of the more working class folks who parents graduated high school if even that. My parents had a professional mindset that really wasn’t even in the vocabulary of the hillbillies who lived in trailers down the street.

I was and still am super jealous of them. They always had four wheelers, lots of guns, and livestock. Pigs and cattle. Big bonfires. I’m well aware of what pig manure smells like or for that the distinctively pungent smell of kerosene used to keep their mobile homes warm in the winter – besides the woodstoves they had jerry rigged up. To say nothing of those slurry trucks from Stanton’s Dairy in Coeymans that would traverse the road a few times a year to fertilize the field up the road.

But at the same time, I found it difficult to find connections with them as they were so culturally different in their upbringings and beliefs – the hillbilly way of looking at the world was so foreign to the world I knew with post graduate educated parents. At the same time, despite my college education and professional career I find it difficult to connect with the more professional and educated types with my redneck and small town upbringing.

I want to go back to the country and not just for a weekend trip. Do real hillbilly shit, although I know damn well it will take money, as I don’t have the skills or even the grit and family connections to make it alone in the country. Now I don’t want to live in a fancy house – I’d rather have livestock and junk in my front yard and a garbage burner out back – I just know how important having money is to survive out in the country when you lack so much else that true country boys and girls have to survive and make a life off the land.

Upstate Dairy Farms Are Facing an Uncertain Future – The River

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Upstate Dairy Farms Are Facing an Uncertain Future – The River

Jay Sharkey, owner of The Farm at the End of the Lane in Greene County, was among more than 100 small dairy farmers in the Northeast to receive notice this summer that his creamery, Maple Hill, would no longer pick up his milk next year. That will leave Sharkey with nowhere to send the 1,000 pounds, or about 116 gallons, of milk his farm yields per day.

Sharkey searched for other places to send his milk—“I contacted Horizon and they’re not taking any milk; I contacted Organic Valley, they’re not taking any milk”—but had no luck. Horizon Organic, which is owned by the multinational conglomerate Danone, announced at the end of August that 89 farms across the Northeast will be losing their contracts in August 2022.

Sharkey says Maple Hill let go of 30 farms, but official details remain scarce. The Kinderhook-based creamery did not respond to requests for comment. But Sharkey says there are three reasons Maple Hill is dropping farms: not enough milk, poor quality milk, or the farm is too far away from other Maple Hill-contracted farms. That third reason was the one Sharkey was given in his letter.