The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
FARMING DYNASTY
Greenbackers, whose original land was deeded to them by King George of Great Britain, have raised dairy cows since 1720s
DURHAM >> Like a confident midwife, Melissa Greenbacker Dziurgot checks on her 90-minuteold Holstein calf as it falls to its knees, legs and hooves splayed out underneath it.
The calf is so young it doesn’t even have a name.
His mother, 1,200-pound heifer Unique Look, stands nearby, watching as Greenbacker Dziurgot’s father Joe Greenbacker hands her a bucket of warm colostrum, or first milk. She enters the pen with the cow and baby bull and offers the udder-sized nozzle so the calf, unsteady on his feet, can suckle.
Greenbacker Dziurgot has been up all night at Greenbacker’s Brookfield Farm monitoring Unique Look’s labor, which, she said, can be discerned when the cow begins to appear uncomfortable and stops eating. Once the animal lies down, full labor begins.
A woman farmer is a minority in agriculture. According to the state Department of Agriculture, the 3,734 female farmers in Connecticut, who now represent 39 percent of farmers, work a total of 216,916 acres and have an economic impact of $43 million.
On the day Unique Look was in labor, her task was a very important one.
“Most of the time they calve on their own unless, for instance, she’s not pushing as she should. Usually if it’s her first, she’ll give birth right away. Ninety percent of the time it’s unassisted,” Greenbacker Dziurgot said.
Each baby is then fed the colostrum — frozen and thawed or reconstituted from power — for the first two days, by hand if the cow, like this new mother, hasn’t given birth before. “It’s called liquid gold: high in natural antibodies that the calves need.”
Powdered cow milk isn’t cheap, Greenbacker Dziurgot said, running about $30 per two-pound serving. When manual feeding is done, it assures a farmer that the calf has consumed the colostrum it needs.
It’s necessary, she said. “Sometimes a mother is like, ‘oh my gosh, what’s happening?’”
“She’s being grabbed in a place she’s never been grabbed before,” husband Matt Dziurgot said, referring to a nursing calf latching on.
One of the reasons a calf would be hand fed is the cow “won’t let the calf nurse or head butt or kick it because she doesn’t know what’s going on. … Some animals are not good mothers, some don’t want anything to do with their calf and just lie down,” Greenbacker Dziurgot said.
Milking, whether by hand or machine, take place twice a day — at 2:30 a.m. and 2 p.m.
This bull will be sold for $50, which is market price. That’s because at Greenbacker’s, bulls can be very dangerous, she said.
“Bulls are very aggressive — it’s like in the movies, they’ll paw the ground and charge, they have horns. It’s not worth the risk.”
Greenbacker Dziurgot buys frozen bull sperm, 10 units at a time. She’ll get, on average, five successful pregnancies out of the batch because typically each cow is bred two times.
Unique Look, like all the farm’s heifers who will become fist time mothers, was bred at 9 months but not all cows are inseminated at that age, Greenbacker Dziurgot said. She gauges their ability to bear calves by the cows’ height — not measured with a yardstick or tape rule but by how tall they appear to her when standing against the fence rails.
Farming is in her blood, said Greenbacker Dziurgot, 42, who graduated from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., in 1996 with a degree in dairy science. She runs the 411-acre farm with her father, her uncle David, mother Lois (who’s laid up with bronchitis now) and husband, who also works a part-time job.
These are long days. In fact, Greenbacker Dziurgot spends just about all her waking time with the herd — she begins her day milking at 2 a.m., then feeds and checks on the animals until about 8 a.m. when she eats breakfast and lies down for a nap until 10 a.m.
Then it’s time to check on a calf if one has been newly born, do chores, milk the herd, do paperwork and update the calves’ computer records. Her day typically ends at 5:30 or 6 p.m. and she rises every other day at 2 a.m. to do the milking, alternating with her father.
On the Sunday she’s not working, one of two Middletown High School VoAg students help out. They earn credit through the department and are paid for their labor.
It’s still a male-dominated field. “Every once in a while, a consultant will come out and ask, ‘where are the boys?’” and want to speak to her father, “even though I know they want to talk to me,” Greenbacker Dziurgot said.
The old-timers, she knows, are used to that paradigm and mostly that tradition doesn’t bother her. “One guy kind of irritated me. He was kind of disrespectful to me as a manager,” by not realizing she was in charge of the herd.
Her family originally farmed in Meriden in the 1720s, after it was deeded the land by King George of Great Britain, and stayed there until the mid-1980s.
“When I-91 was built and the Research Parkway, they got squeezed out. As development increased, people got impatient on the road with the tractor moving slowly,” Greenbacker Dziurgot said.
Her herd consists of 330 cows, mostly Holsteins, and Jerseys, Brown Swiss and Milking Shorthorns.
Most farmers have an interesting way of naming their herd. She has cows in the pasta family: Penne, Rotini, Ziti and Linguini. The Greenbackers have a Fudge family (so named for the mother: Fudge Caramel, Hot Fudge, Fudge Bar) and a Cookie family (Amaretto, Milano and so forth). Some use Biblical names like Babylon, Ninera, Atarsis and Antioch.
“I wanted to be a vet when I was young so after I graduated, I really wanted to stay and work on the farm. It’s hard work, long hours, and does take dedication. It’s a passion not everyone has,” she said. Traditionally the son takes over the family farm, she said, and her family took some convincing when she told them she wanted to manage it.
In 2012, women farmers who were the principal operator of a farm represented almost 14 percent of the total farming population — a decrease of 17,945 farmers compared with 2007, according to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, based on that year’s Census. “It’s unclear why fewer women have entered agriculture over the past five years, however, since on average women farmers are older than their male counterparts, it’s possible that a greater percentage of women retired from agriculture than men in 2012.”
Some women farmers have set up a network such as the Dairy Girl Network, Greenbacker Dziurgot said, “for women to share ideas — a lot are raising families and farming at the same time so they get a lot of support from other women who can relate to them.”
She doesn’t have children, Greenbacker Dziurgot said, “because these are my babies,” as she gestures to calves in individual huts out back. Several are wearing blankets secured around the middle because they get cold.
For information on the farm, see the Greenbacker’s Brookfield Farm page on Facebook.