Howard’s Farm from Ivan Cash on Vimeo.
A small Hudson Valley fruit farm is very different than a large Midwest commodity farm.
—
Take 86-year-old Howard Quimby for example. Still active, he grows Concord grapes, raises goats and boards horses on his 70-acre Marlboro farm. He’s been doing so for eight decades. Some of Howard’s grapes help supply a local vintner and they’ve named a wine variety for him, Quimby Rose. He reports the current winery owners are very good farmers and keep their vineyards well-tended.
His farm harkens back to the bygone days when animals and farmers worked together to sow, mow, cultivate, harrow
and accomplish numerous other tasks.
Quimby used to hitch up Noah and Omar, his two 1,500 pound mules, to mow a field and occasionally give demonstrations of their use to school children.
With a gentle twinkle in his eye, Quimby remembers using those mules to pull phone lines and poles up and over a nearby mountain because they were the only ones who could get through the tough terrain. That was in the 1980s.
Now he prefers using his tractor.
He talks about when farmers maintained the roads– so they could have lower taxes. The roads, Quimby also recalls, were terrible.
Quimby, like other farm kids, walked 2 ½ miles to get to the school, one time in a “miserable cold only to be told by the principal to warm up and then go home. No school that day because of the bitter temperature.” He adds that he never did ride
a school bus.
“Mailman delivered with a horse and buggy. You could set your watch by him. Gus Cotant. He’d stop and feed his horse and eat his own lunch– in winter, people on his route would invite him inside to eat,” Howard recalls.
One of Quimby’s neighbors, the Pizzo’s, had a farm and a shack large enough to house a cow and a horse. One night the Pizzos forgot to turn the heater down and it started a fire that destroyed the shed. A calf and all the chicks were lost. More important to the small family, its cow and horse were unhurt.
Losing the shed, however, was still a huge blow to the struggling young family. “Guiseppe was despondent,” Quimby said.
A family friend asked Guiseppe, “Do you like it here?” Guiseppe said he did.
“Then we’ll have a barn-raising,” his friend declared.
And they did just that. The friend had saved enough old beams from a dismantled barn to put up the framework for the structure and Quimby and the neighbors showed up to do the work. The result was a suitable home for the horse and cow, Quimby recalled.
Intertwined around crops, shipping, animal husbandry, the weather, and helping one another, long time Hudson Valley farmers– like Quimby– are a vanishing breed.
Quimby doesn’t know who will care for his farm after he is gone. He’s not sure if his four daughters will want to carry on the traditional burden of hard work and responsibility farm life requires in the modern age.
But with another twinkle of gentle patience in his eye, Quimby has adopted an air of understanding and acceptance, a letting go, knowing the decision of what will ultimately happen is out of his hands once his final day of farming is done.
by Skippy Massey
This post originally appeared at the Humboldt Sentinel. Reprinted with permission.
—