Farmers’ offspring inherit the earth

Andy Creswell changed his mind which animals he wanted to tend.

MOUNT GILEAD, Ohio (AP) — Andy Creswell didn’t always like cows.

He grew up on a dairy farm, and that meant he would help his father and grandfather with the daily milking. But Andy preferred to spend much of his childhood off in other barns, tending to purebred hogs with his brother, Aaron.

Instead of giving him an allowance, his parents bought him corn to feed the hogs and gas to run the pickups and tractors.

There are no hogs left on the farm now, because Andy decided he didn’t want to make a career out of “messing with pigs.”

He thought cows would be a better choice.

Andy, 25, is taking over Spring Valley Farm from his father. The operation is spread over 500 acres in rural Morrow County. He inherits a legacy that, despite the odds, has lasted four generations and more than 100 years.

He and his wife, Sarah, are raising their 1-year-old daughter in the white farmhouse that Andy’s great-grandfather built in 1914.

They also will take over the commitment and the troubles. Andy must make sure the cows are milked three times a day, every day of the year. Family gatherings could be canceled because of a sick animal. When milk prices drop, there will be sleepless nights.

Andy is determined to live up to his family’s expectations.

“I guess I’m big on tradition,” he said. “I like the idea of the family farm.”

Young farmers who learn their trade from relatives have a tremendous advantage starting out, said Joe Cornely of the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation.

“For those that are fortunate enough to have it continue on through three, four and five generations, that may be the biggest reason that they’re able to get into agriculture,” Cornely said. “You grow up around it and it gets in your blood.”

On any given day, the young farmer has so many chores to tackle that the only way he keeps them all straight is by jotting them down.

He keeps a running to-do list in a notebook in the back pocket of his Carhartt jeans: Mix feed, feed the heifers up the road at mom and dad’s, scrape the footpaths, breeding, mow hay, haul fresh grains.

Andy wakes up at 6 a.m., eats a bowl of cereal and is at work in the cattle barn by 6:30. He and his herdsman rotate the early-morning milking duty, which takes up to three hours. A crew of paid part-timers helps with the 2:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. shifts.

Inside the milking parlor one muggy morning, the only available radio station blared country music from a portable radio. The cows shuffled into milking stalls, one by one, backing their rear ends to face the automatic suctions that pump their milk out and into a metal holding tank.

The herd is made up of Holsteins, a few Jerseys and some Holstein-Jersey crossbreds.

Between milkings, the cows lazily graze on feed inside the free-stall barn, and the smell of fresh hay and manure hangs in the air.

Andy leases the farm land from his 60-year-old father, Bill, who helps keep the operation running.

In 2002, the father and son drew up a five-year plan that would allow Bill to ease into retirement and gradually give Andy more responsibility. The five years is up this month.

Andy never felt pressured into a career in farming, he said.

His brother, Aaron, five years older than Andy, had wanted to get away from the farm. Andy didn’t understand why.

“I always enjoyed it,” he said. “It’s the only thing I ever did.” He was about 14 when he and his father first talked of expanding their herd and building a bigger, modern barn in Andy’s name.

After high school, he studied dairy-farm production at the Ohio State University Agricultural Technical Institute in Wooster for two years, joined the Air National Guard and married his high-school sweetheart.

“I had a pretty good shot I was gonna do something farm-oriented, production-wise, but I didn’t have to build the dairy,” Andy said. “The dairy was where everybody looked at me like, ‘You want that?’”

He knew what he was in for, having watched his father work. The dairy requires a rigid, three-times-a-day milking schedule, workdays of 12 hours or more and few vacations from the barn.

As the Creswell farm has grown from 50 to 500 cows in recent years, so have its demands. The farm milks at least 200 cows daily and produces about 30,000 pounds of milk to ship to Smith Dairy Products Co. in Orrville every other day.

“He grew up doing most of this stuff,” his father said. “It’s not as big a transition as you would think because it’s not like he’s always been on the outside. He’s ready for it, no doubt.”

Now that the dairy is large enough to support some hired help, Bill hopes his son won’t have to make as many sacrifices as he did.

Looking back, he regrets missing most of his two sons’ Little League baseball games because they were usually scheduled at feeding or milking time. His family was often late to church on Sundays and the cows often were to blame.

Holidays were no exception, Bill said. “When I was young, when we had the family get-together on Christmas Day, they always came here because we had to milk before we could go and when we came back, so we always got to stay home on Christmas.”

The dairy has survived with the support of extended family.

“It’s not just the immediate family. Brothers-in-law have pitched in,” Bill said. “You’ve really got to love what you do.

“That’s what I told Andy. It’s a way of life. It’s not a job.”

Bill doesn’t consider himself retired.

He works as an auctioneer and, though he is no longer on the dairy’s payroll, he still averages at least 40 hours a week helping his son on the farm.

There’s always plenty of work to go around: The Creswells own the four corners of land around the dairy and grow about 500 acres of alfalfa, corn, soybeans and wheat.

Bill’s house sits within a mile of his parents’ ranch home and Andy’s house, all along the same rural road. Bill keeps a close watch on the dairy’s production and talks with his son every day about how the business is running. “Really, it was a pretty smooth transition,” he said of Andy’s takeover. “These are his cows and his buildings. ... He’s brought in the new ideas, the new technology that we didn’t have.”

Bill’s wife, Ruth, grew up about two miles from the dairy. She met him as a teenager while working on a 4-H project that involved heifers.

She does the bookkeeping and cares for the family’s calves, which need to be bottle-fed every day.

“It’s a good way to raise a family,” Ruth said of their lifestyle. “We worked together every day.”

Even though much of her husband’s life still revolves around the farm, Ruth said she’s happy to see him scaling back. “Now I can have some time with Bill. It’s like now I’ve gotten him back.”

Bill’s parents, Faith and Bob Creswell, started their farming career with 18 cows, all registered Jerseys.

Bob did all the milking himself. Twice a day, morning and night.

“The cows all had a name,” said Faith, 80.

“They’ve got numbers now,” said Bob, 81.

“It was altogether on a different scale,” Faith said. “By the time we left, about 14 years ago, they milked 40 to 45. So this is a whole new experience and it just seems so different to us.”

The farm was about 200 acres of pasture and woods when Faith and Bob married in 1945. She was 18; he was 19. Bob had been helping his mother run the dairy since 1937, when his father, William, died of pneumonia. Bob’s father founded the dairy in the late 1800s.

Bob had three older sisters and, when his mother died, he purchased their shares of the farm. He ran the farm until an angioplasty in 1992 made him think more about retirement. The next year, he sold the farm to Bill. He and his wife escape to Florida in the winters, but in the summertime, you’ll find him at the dairy nearly every day.

He doesn’t milk anymore but still likes to run the tractors, bale hay and give his grandson advice.

“I think he stays busier than I do,” Andy joked.

Andy’s grandparents are proud to see him carry on their legacy.

“A family farm is a tradition,” Faith said. “I think it’s like a family value. I’m glad that Andy wanted to continue it and I really think he’s sincere about that.”

Every now and then, Andy will do something that his grandfather doesn’t quite approve of, but Faith will remind him that even he didn’t always know how to do everything.

“We know they have their ups and downs. It’s not all smooth sailing,” Faith said. “But we hope for the best and hope they make it.”