Springfield farmer one of many selling out

BY NANCY SHARER, Review Correspondent
Published: April 10, 2011

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Photo: Review Photo/NANCY SHARER, License: N/A, Created: 2007:01:31 08:54:34

Matt Carlsen and his son, Greg, center, stand with friend and helper Mason Weed outside their Springfield Township barn. Following a trend of farms going out of business, Matt will be selling his dairy cows and equipment at auction this Friday.

 

The little calf glows in the afternoon light. Sunshine brushes her fuzzy, light brown coat as she stands on slender, knobby-kneed legs. She gazes at the world around her. With lashes as long as a movie star’s, her eyes are big, dark. Innocent.
Inside the nearby barn her family — black-and-white Holsteins, Jerseys and mixed breeds — waits for milking time and food from the hand of their owner, Matt Carlsen. They can trust Matt. A hard worker, he always provides. He loves them.
Matt’s busy. He stops a moment, though, to pet No. 427, Candy. It’s hard for the farmer to single out a favorite, but if he had to it would “probably have to be her,” he says. Candy’s a Holstein with a white triangle on her forehead and bristly hairs on her nose. She looks around with big, bugged-out eyes, as if wondering what it’s all about. Candy, Matt explains, will eat chocolate and potato chips. He pats her face and rubs her. You “can still walk up here and feed her a treat,” he says. She’s a nice girl.
Soon Candy will be gone. And so will the little Jersey outside. And all the cows in Matt’s Springfield Township barn.
There will be an auction next Friday. People will drive along a dirt road to the farm, where little gray hills seem to leap along the skyline like barn kittens playing in the sun and ponds are putting on their blue spring coats. The people will buy the cows, big and small, and the tractors and machines and haul it away, the things Matt’s worked with day after day and year after year. They’ll haul away his life.
Another farm’s story will end.
 
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It’s not really about money ... yet, that’s part of it. It’s a lot of things.
“Enough factors added up ... it’s probably the best decision,” Matt says.
Matt’s put in a lot of years with his cows, and produced a lot of milk. He’s fed a lot of people out there ... he feels he’s serving his country. He’s made a life for himself.
Getting out was a hard decision. He started thinking about it six months ago, “and I’ve been thinking about it every single day since then,” he says. Last month, he finally got in touch with the auctioneer. “I agonized over the thought of even calling him,” he says. But he signed the paper. “It was difficult.”
His decision to sell is about renting and owning, time, family, staying out of debt ... and those aches and pains that, at only 39 years old, he’s started feeling in his hip, knee, ankle, wrist. They’re things most farmers probably know about.
“Done got worn out!” Matt declares.
This afternoon, he sweeps up leftover hay. The building’s long and straight, the walls white. Pipes and fans hang overhead. A broom, a shovel, a pitchfork lean against a wall, a couple of round hay bales sit way down at one end. Light streams in windows. A black cat darts over to one side of the barn, and a tiger one follows.
Just days old, two brown calves stand at one end while more eat down at the other. Their mamas stand, or lie, in two long rows of iron stanchions. They wait for Matt — their “daddy,” you could say — to feed them.
A radio plays. Garth Brooks sings about following dreams: “I’ll sail my vessel ‘til the river runs dry.”
Matt’s river is running dry.
 
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He spent part of his childhood on the family farm in Spencer, N.Y. When his parents divorced he and his mom moved to Big Pond, where he helped his uncle and aunt, Ray and Joanne Hoppaugh, on their farm.
As soon as he was old enough, he worked. He did “pretty much anything,” he remembers, helping with the calves, then milking and running equipment. They owned and rented 300 hilly acres and had 85 cows, a few more later.
It was great. Matt liked country life, and he and his cousin Dan were like brothers.
“We used to hunt ... ride four-wheeler ... stuff like that,” Matt remembers. “Go spotlight for deer.” And, yes — sometimes go to McDonald’s and chase girls.
Matt enjoyed “just the open spaces.” He could hear the birds chirp and the crickets squeal ... or whatever it is crickets do on a hot August day when the creeks run low and the dust flies high.
He graduated from Troy High School in 1989 and joined the Army.
“I went in the Army because the Army was ... the first recruiter that called me. I figured, ‘What the heck! We’ll give it a try.’”
Remembering the yesteryears, Matt sits on his sofa today before chore time. He’s trim with dark hair and a mustache and wears a sweatshirt showing a sleek, proud wolf. Neither shy nor loud, he’s not afraid to talk and simply say it like it is.
Beside him lies Grover, his big brown dog, his head on an armrest and a paw curled under him. A 50-pound bag of calves’ milk replacer stands out in the kitchen, and giant boots rest by the front door, waiting to stomp off to the barn again. Boxes of red model tractors set beside the sofa. Another box, almost in the middle of the floor, holds clothes, probably waiting to move to a new home.
The phone rings. Matt answers. “No, we’re moving from here. We are buying a house,” he tells a woman. He gives her directions to the farm. People are interested in the home.
He hangs up.
“I went in the Army because I wanted to learn how to be a mechanic.” That way, he could work on tractors later.
Matt ended up in the Gulf War. He was four hours behind the front lines in a forward-line maintenance crew.
“We were close enough to know what was going on,” he says.
But Matt spent most of his stint in Oklahoma, in the city. “It was fun because there was a lot of different stuff to do,” he says.
When his four years ended, though, he came home. “The scenery wasn’t the greatest,” he says. The West was flat and boring. And he had no family there. He “just was homesick,” Matt admits — “was used to what I was used to.”
 
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He got a job at Warner Tractor and Equipment, in East Troy, where he would stay 13 years. Much of that time, he also worked with his uncle and aunt.
He started his own herd. “Lib,” from near Dushore, was his first cow and lived to be almost 12. “She was good,” Matt recalls — gave good milk and had seven calves. Matt eventually built the herd to 50.
In the meantime, something bad happened. Something bad that was good.
“I rolled my truck one day going to the grocery store,” Matt says. A rescue truck came to help, and one of the emergency people was a pretty young woman named Ann.
Later, he talked with Ann again. Then they went on a double date. Then ...
Well, Matt and Ann have been married 17 years. Their son Greg is 13. (Their other son, Spencer, passed away as a baby.)
Finally, tired of a “split life” on the farm and at Warner’s, Matt rented the farm here. He added to the herd and today uses more than 80 acres and owns 104 cows.
He built up his equipment the same way — buying one here, one there. He was “content to sit and wait ‘til the right thing come along,” he says. Many machines needed repairs.
 He knew how to give them. He’d “limp them home,” get out the wrenches and screwdrivers, crank up the shed radio ... and have at it. Soon they were rolling along as happy as bees.
A good tractor might cost $21,000, he says. He paid just $1,400 for one then did surgery on it. “I’ve done a mountain of work with that thing,” he says. If he’d paid for someone else to fix the equipment he never would have made it.
Today, Matt has six tractors, two balers, three manure spreaders, a backhoe, a blower, a chopper ... “Probably almost 20 things,” he reports.
His herd’s a combination of Holsteins, Jerseys, mixes and some I’m-not-sure-what-they-ares. Jerseys produce less milk than Holsteins, but what they do give has more butterfat and protein. All together, his herd gives 2,700-2,800 pounds of milk a day.
Matt’s cows spend a lot of time in the pasture, as opposed to the barn. “I think it’s probably healthier,” he says. They don’t stand on concrete as much and they get more exercise and more grass, he explains. Jerseys handle heat better, too.
He enjoys the animals and the tractors. And he enjoys the golden moments of farm life, too.
Like the night he and Greg were tossing a football around. “Hey, look at that!” someone cried ... up above was a shooting star. And like the time he and Greg hit a turkey with a tractor, and took it to a chicken coop and nursed it back to health. And like all the times he’s nursed tractors back to health. And like the time he saw a bald eagle.
Some things you don’t forget.
 
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And Matt won’t forget Casey. The cow with the white face is “just like a couch,” gentle enough to let kids lie on her, Matt says later during chores.
They’re different. Some are nice, some aren’t, some want you to scratch their heads.
There’s the curious, let-me-sniff-you SS Malibu. Malibu’s father was Sassy Sam. And there’s the rest of the family: No. 413, black in front and back, with a big white band around her tummy. The Jersey-Ayrshire mix down near the end. “She’s really sweet,” Matt says. And Cookie and Starburst. And No. 392, snorting steam out her nose. And No. 387, just standing there, chewing and waiting for whatever’s going to happen ... to happen.
How can you forget when you help them deliver calves? When you sit up nights with a sick cow? When you get down and do CPR on a baby born dead?
“That’s the worst part right there,” Matt says. Saying goodbye to them.
 
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“I don’t want to be renter guy,” not forever, he says. There’s no more land nearby to rent so he can expand, and he’s even lost some of what he had to construction and a conservation program. He’s sort of landlocked.
“I don’t think I’m going to get any further ahead,” he says.
And with natural gas leases, the future of the land’s uncertain.
He hasn’t been able to buy land either. If only he could, maybe he’d put up a heifer barn, or milk more cows, or hire help, or keep the farm going for Greg someday.
If only.
He’s not in debt. But he would be if he hired a full-time helper, so he does most of the work himself.
And that means ...
The alarm goes off at 3:15 in the morning. Matt’s in the barn by 3:45 to feed and milk. After a few hours, he eats breakfast and gets Greg on the bus by 7:45. (Ann leaves early for her job at the Bradford County Manor.)
Then, “back down the hill we go,” he says. He cleans, mixes feed, maybe gives shots or makes phone calls. He breaks for lunch at noon, then goes back out at 1 p.m. He might spend the next couple of hours fixing machines, out in the fields or even mowing lawn. By 3 p.m., he’s back in the barn cleaning mangers, feeding, then milking.
“If I didn’t have my radio, I’d have been in a straitjacket years ago!” he declares.
In the evening he might do paperwork or breeding. If he’s lucky, he can finish by 7:30 or 8 p.m., some 15 hours after he started — unless a cow needs help calving. If Ann and Greg are away ... heck, he might as well stay down until 9 p.m. or so.
He’s been so tired he had to sit down and rest before he walked back up the hill.
“It’s that way for everybody,” he points out. But many farmers have more than one worker. At the Carlsens’, Greg and Ann and a friend Greg’s age, Mason Weed, help a little when they can — but overall, Matt’s going it alone.
So he misses weddings, funerals, Christmas, the Fourth of July, most of his son’s basketball games. Greg wishes his dad could go to the Carlisle car show. Matt can’t. Ann and Greg went to Hersheypark. Matt couldn’t.
“You can’t tell the cows to take the day off,” Matt says. “You miss everything ... that’s probably my biggest complaint.”
He wants to be a husband, and he wants to be a father. He needs a life again.
“I’m only going to be a dad one time.”
Matt knows he’s made the right decision.
 
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Later in the barn, Matt drives the grain feeder around. Greg, Mason and Ann are here now.
A tall, serious boy, Greg talks about the cows. “Pretty much all of them in here I’d keep if I could,” he says.
He chats about their colors, their names, one that died after giving birth — and one he could hug if he’d had a bad day.
 “My dad picked a good time to sell.” Milk and cow prices are up now, he notes. “I think it’s going to be better.”
Still ... “it’s not going to make me very happy the day that they get sold.”
 
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Greg will probably get a mechanical-type job. Maybe he’ll work for a gas company. “Maybe I’ll go work at McDonald’s for a while!” he declares.
“I can sit around for a couple days,” but that’s it. “I just always have been a mover.”
But first, Friday will come. An auctioneer will chant. A hammer will bang.
Matt will watch people buy the tractors and balers and spreaders he fixed and greased and drove.
And he’ll say goodbye to Candy and Malibu and Casey. The little Jersey, too. He’ll say goodbye to all the cows he fed and milked and loved, and they’ll clop-clop onto trucks and trailers and ride away. They’ll go on to new lives, he’ll go on to his.
A farm story will end.
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