Gayla Marty

Dairy buyout

Memorial Day is a national observance to remember those fallen in war. It's the unofficial first day of summer. In 1986, it became for me a day of remembering a way of life connected to animals.

I was 28 that year and my daughter was 3. We lived in Minneapolis and drove an hour north, to the century farm where I grew up, to witness the cows' last day.

My Swiss great-grandfather learned dairy when he came to the United States in 1880, working for his uncle east of town before buying land of his own, three miles north. The herd he established was improved by his sons from 1912 to 1957 and by his grandsons from 1957 to 1986. Some of the Holsteins in the photos that I took that day are certainly descended from cows I knew as a girl on the farm in the 1960s and '70s. Most of them were stanchioned in the barn built in 1963.

In the 1980s, the U.S. economy put a lot of farms out of business. The conventional wisdom was that a farmer had to get big or get out. The movie Country was released in 1984, and the first Farm Aid benefit was played in 1985. The Food Security Act (or Farm Bill) of 1985 signed that December authorized, among other things, a dairy termination program or whole-herd dairy buyout. After a bleak assessment of many factors, my dad and uncle entered a bid and it was accepted. A date was set and appointment made with a trucker to arrive on that holiday Monday in May.

Dad and Uncle Gaylon were happy that morning. It was impossible not to be affected by that or reflect on what their lives had been to that point. Almost every one of their days had been defined by the necessity of milking a herd of cows twice, roughly 12 hours apart. They knew how lucky they were to milk with electricity and running water—and how lucky to milk in partnership, with the possibility of giving each other days off for vacation or illness. How lucky they were to have hard-working wives, sons, and daughters. But their children had other opportunities now. Dad and Uncle didn't want the hard life of dairy farming for us.

I took photos of the cows, of Dad milking for the last time, of my daughter next to the stainless steel bulk tank, of Uncle Gaylon and her next to the big tractor. I took a few photos after the truckers arrived, but I was too sickened and sad and had to stop and take my daughter away from the barn. After dark, loaded with our cows and heifers and calves, the trailer labored out the driveway and the barns were silent. 

A condition of the buyout program was that the facilities and land on a participating farm could not be used for any dairy operation for five years. One goal was to reduce the milk supply and help raise the price of milk for the remaining, mostly bigger dairy farmers. Another was to help small farmers make the transition out of farming and into another line of work. 

As with so many things, there were unexpected consequences, some that—even then—didn't seem so unexpected. Beef farmers put up a fuss because their prices went down when the meat of a million slaughtered dairy cows and more than half a million heifers and calves hit the market. Also hitting the market about that time was bovine growth hormone, which increased the milk output per animal, so the dip in national milk supply was brief. The average size of U.S. farms went up.

During those five transitional years, Dad and Uncle pastured a small herd of beef cattle, which was easy compared to dairy. Dad took classes. got a boilerman's license, and worked in a series of maintenance jobs at local schools and nursing homes until he landed a job with weekends off. Even being on call 24/7 seemed easy. Uncle drove a paper route and tried some other things, but five years after the buyout, when a neighbor bought the Marty farm, he went to work for him on that much bigger dairy farm.

On Memorial Day 1986, Dad and Uncle didn't know what would happen in a year or five years. They just knew they didn't have to get up the next day or the next or the next to milk cows. Their faces were filled with relief. That was the saving grace of that day.

Every spring, at the First Lutheran Cemetery east of town, we plant flowers on the family plot before Memorial Day. My great-grandfather bought a plot there because, he said, he wanted to be buried in the earth where he first herded cows when he came to America, learning the dairy trade. It's a pretty spot, high above Rush Creek, where he dreamed of the life he wanted to create for his descendants. I'm glad I was one of them.

Photos by Gayla Marty. Kodacolor. May 1986. Top: Cows on the southeast quadrant. Middle: Gordon Marty holding a pipeline milker. Bottom: Gaylon and Gordon Marty.

The last team

John Marty with Tom and Jerry, 1957 or '58. Kodachrome. Photo by Gaylon Marty, used with permission. 

I was only three months old when Grampa Marty sold his last team of horses, and not even two years old when Grampa died. But the story of the day the horses were sold was repeated so vividly and consistently by my dad, mother, uncle, and grandmother that it became part of my story.

My parents had been married a year, and Uncle Gaylon was home from the army and courting Auntie Lou. Plenty of hands for field work, and they all drove tractors. But the horses needed to work for the season, so Grampa found them a home that spring, and one morning he put them in the harness for the last time and, standing on a hayrack, he drove them to a neighboring farm. It was only in retrospect that the rest of the family realized Grampa knew how sick he was. He refused hospitals and died at home of stomach cancer in the fall of 1959, two months before my mother had twin boys.

In 1993, I first wrote down the story of the morning the horses left as it had been passed down to me and made flesh in my imagination. In 2008, while I was finishing my book about the farm, Auntie Lou and I opened an old accounts book in her house and there was a record of the sale—a team of horses in the spring of 1958.

But I didn't see this photo from Uncle Gaylon's collection until 2009. The team has come from the big barn and turned to pass the chicken coop, left. The pig house is in the background on the right. I can tell it's morning by the shadows, but the leaves are very full for May. Uncle may have taken this photo sometime in the summer of 1957 after he came home from the army, or it may have been that day in late spring 1958 when Tom and Jerry left. 

May wedding, 1957

My parents were married in a candlelight ceremony at our little country church on a Friday night in May. Best man and maid of honor were Dad's big brother and Mom's little sister.  

It was 8 p.m. and pouring rain outside. The cows had been milked early, and Dad and Uncle dressed at home before driving the gravel roads to church. Mom and Auntie dressed at the parsonage next to the church, and the pastor carried Mom across the yard to keep her dress from getting muddy. They wore bouquets and boutonnieres from the florist, and Great-aunt Effie decorated the church with apple blossoms. After the ceremony, the guests who filled the twelve pews, six on each side of the aisle, were greeted in a receiving line by the bride and groom and their parents as they went downstairs for supper. Photographs were taken, supper was served, and cake was cut. Gifts were opened and viewed by the guests as the serving committee cleaned up.

Long past dark, Mom and Dad got into the Plymouth and headed for the Black Hills. They spent their wedding night in Cambridge, just 20 miles west of home.

Three years later on the same week in May, Uncle and Auntie got married in the same church, and my parents stood up for them. They took off for Niagara Falls.

Kodachrome. Photo from the slide collection of Gordon and Margaret Marty.

Traveling mothers

Four generations of women. This photo was taken about 30 years after my great-grandmother, Susanna Truempler, came to Minnesota from Switzerland and married Jacob Marty in 1881. She's on the left. 

Standing in the back is the oldest of Susanna's five children, Elizabeth, born in 1884, married and resettled in Cannon Falls in 1903. Sitting in front of Elizabeth is her own daughter, Suzanne.

The woman in the hat on the right is Salome Phillip, Susanna's mother. Salome followed her two daughters to America, apparently remarried after Casper Truempler's death and then widowed again. When Salome came to stay at the Marty farm, she could stand north of the barn and call the cows home from the woods with a yodel. 

Salome died in 1923 at the age of 85. Susanna died in 1929, age 69. Lizzie died in 1937, age 53, the year my dad was born, so he never knew these women—and his cousin Suzanne only slightly.

The only one I felt I knew was Susanna. She helped to build the farm that was my home. The trunk that traveled with her from Zurich to Rock Creek is still in the house she and Jacob built. This Mothers Day, I salute her—seamstress, immigrant, maker of home. A fellow traveler, I salute them all.

Photo ca. 1915 from the Marty family album owned by Viola Hendrickson Marty.

Tree of life

May Day celebration at Powderhorn Park, Minneapolis, 2001. Kodacolor. Photo by Gayla Marty.

On the first Sunday in May, thousands of people gather on the  hillside on the west side of a little lake in Powderhorn Park in south Minneapolis. Along with the giant puppets Earth, Prairie, River, and Sky, everybody cheers as the sun puppet is carried across the water in canoes. On windy days, it seems like the paddlers won't make it and we cheer harder. Here the yellow sun—near the middle of the photograph—has made it to the bank, and to the right, at this moment, the giant white Tree of Life puppet has risen up, arms open wide, birds in the branches that circle its head.

The May Day parade and tree celebration started in 1975. Our family started going in the late 1980s when the kids were little, and some years, we have been in the parade. Each year the theme is planned by children and adults of all ages, who gather for weeks at In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre to make their masks and costumes. But it always ends with the Tree of Life, and even though it's so familiar, it still is a miracle and sometimes I still cry.

Happy May Day!