to come down and visit with them this is marion marjorie from or river farm and you guys introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about the farm and your history here and all that you do w your names marjorie susman and marion and i have been here since one nine hundred eighty one we actually moved here for a farm job and after we were here for about a year the people offered to sell it to us and we knew somehow that we wanted to make cheese we wanted to grow vegetables and we wanted to do everything on a pretty small scale and we've been doing that you know obviously over the years we've changed we used to ship milk we used to look from thirty cows and make the cheese into a much bigger vegetable garden and we can now but you know it's evidence flowed and this is where we're at now which is a great the then we would make it again and we just sort of started thinking it wasn't we weren't able to do as much cheese as we wanted and demand was being met and so we sold the where we raise a limited number of those items and so most of it to the middlebury to collect and how we even thought of that i'm not even sure we thought oh how cool is this bit and then i thought i don't really have a book in me i had a little blog that i do and that's kind of fun i enjoy that a lot quite frankly i would never want to go on a book tour yeah i mean you would i sense is you wouldn't and you would still sell out read ok so yeah tell me a little bit about your your first experiences coming up here it must have been a little bit of a transition moving into the community and being two women that were dairy farmers and wanting to make cheese what was did the community embrace you was or not immediately i think you were skeptical i think what we had like problems he pretty much from the get go believe that we could do it and he was fabulous and a great help and i went to ag school i don't think i mentioned this before but we were down in western mass in the seventy's and i went to stock which school of agriculture which is a two year land grant school at u mass amherst and we were able to borrow money interest free there have a great do you know about that program told me about it was a lot of crabtree who was a saloon dancer around the gold rush time died and left millions of dollars and some of it for new farmers not women but just new farmers and we were able to borrow in so like right from the get go we got help from a woman guardian angel which i think was a good thing perry said yeah you know i think our neighbors you know while waiting i mean they want to see them when they realize that we could work as well as the in that we were sticking with the you know they came around in their thinking we have a fabulous neighbor down the road to set and he comes in hook up you girls sure can work yeah that's quite a watch one dairy farm after another go out of business i think we might have stayed there but we were really we live quite close to vermont so brattleboro sort of our town of them time and that was all we knew about from you know the farther north you got the more think we also thought that there'd be hundreds of people doing what we were wanting to do we thought oh you know all these back to the landers there's going to be people making cheese there's going to be people you know having small diversified farms and sort of  people here you know we have and now one of the falls into the category of having people work for us yeah you know also to tell you what we want to do that we're not no you don't want to manage people intellectually it seems like a great idea and i know that we have things to that we could teach people but yeah well part of the reason i ask is because we i shared similar feelings like i just don't want to take on that added role but recently we have had a number of interns at the farm and i have a big rambling old farmhouse so there's plenty of room for people and they actually typically live in the farmhouse with me and  it is turned out to be one of the most wonderful experiences against my better yeah and the young people there's such a movement of young people that are excited about agriculture  need me for so many years we wondered what was going to happen because it didn't seem like the next generation was interested in it and now they're saying ok i see what you've done and it was very cool when you what yeah now it's been fabulous to see these young people starting yeah it's been very inspiring and they bring in this wealth of and you know i i realize i'm becoming this old  know they sit around the dinner table talking about ideas i'm never work and yet they're they're full of great you know it's really what we need i see but i don't i've been first starting who ever thought when our neighbors found out we were thinking about cave worked well for you and it isn't yeah it's working great i mean most of our cheese is is waxed the theory being we just wanted a regular eating kid friendly meccan cheese kind of cheese we didn't i mean when we first started it's so weird to think that like the food thing hadn't happened so there was none of these cave cheeses that weren't washed right jesus i mean you know who knew we were going to have goats but we didn't think anybody would would  so i picked up on was and we were sort of in the same category we wanted to make a cheese that was our town and yet affordable yeah yeah and one of the things that discourages me you were talking about price point is that these cheeses are so exorbitant that they only cater to a very high end clientele and i want to feed the world yeah well and we love it i mean we love it when people come up to us at the in the co op and go your cheese is our family cheese it's the cheese that we always have in the fridge and now we have kids that were brought up on our cheese and they want their kids to have the cheese and it's it's a great thing and we love going to katie's is great we don't do that much because we would have to go out of state to sell it i think yeah and it's you know i think it's changing i think you'd be surprised right now and i think we could you know there's also a huge amount of shrinkage and that we put it came to use and in the cooler it's ten it's it's fourteen pounds in the year later when  selling the kit well we sold the cave a little bit before two thousand but that two thousand we really started and we realized last year that we had never raise the price in twelve years so we raised the dollar i mean you know where do you go with that i don't want to see  bit warmer and so we get really two very different jesus yeah one recipe which is pretty cool yeah yeah and that's one of the things i love about what we do in same thing we we had a didn't really have time to deal with them because we get into the garden and we notice the and what we did to them with it's a very forgiving cheese and if you've given away all you see i know yeah you just before market in do you kono we marketed through we do a couple places in middlebury we do the co op in the other bakery and then we have maybe four or five accounts in burlington and thats it we go up to well we go to middlebury weekly mistakes and i think that that's you know and from your mistakes well we go through you know we make mistakes a couple of times and we try not to make them three times yeah you know we figured the first time we didn't know the second time we forgot like just said i understand that intellectually but everybody's different i mean you know yeah yeah i'm a slow learn they all fresh and in november we start making cheese right away and it's fabulous you know it's when you came and visited us whatever year that was and we were doing it the exact same we make cheese every monday and every thursday being in the mix i think yeah but we did that for fifteen years we did ship million and you know like i said we looked thirty cows and we had a beautiful herd of jersey all registered and when we ship milk and we were on test we had the third high heard in the country for our size herd so you know that's we've always loved our cows and now we just have less and we can love them more i'm amazed i don't get up here as often as i used to but it just seems like every time i come up into the champlain valley i just get this sense that farmers are working harder and you see farms that have gone out of business you see i just passed on the road this self propelled mower that had to it had two wings had to be learned where you were if you run and yeah and i'm like wow these guys are working so hard chase and this dream  and what is their quality of life you know and is it working and is it sustainable and how does it impact outside of being milk shipping milk is such an iffy thing i mean right from the since we started since the sevent it's always like farmers are beating their heads against the wall i mean you don't know what you're getting for your next paycheck on it the cost of everything go goes up and you can't you know you don't get that money i mean what kind of a job is it the old stopping shipping room because it was so unpredictable and but we were really tied into the mulch and we were afraid not yasin the check if it comes on and it's soon as we stopped and it was a little bit you know we had it age that cheese before we could start selling it but once we did and once the cycle of that began it was that bulis much better than shipping milk what in what intrigued me what still intrigues me is that you guys seemed to really be able to target the things that you valued in your life and you made the business work around what worked for you and that as zero is really impressed me and i found myself in a situation i was describing where you know because of debt load we just had to keep building the business we got to a point of milk and about seventy cows and we were making one hundred thousand pounds of your cheese a year and you know i really found myself in a place where i wasn't that happy with the choices i think when marion was saying in ninety five when we decided to sell the cows we kind of looked at each other and said wait a minute what was it that we wanted to do we are milking three hundred sixty five days a year we're look look all we're doing is working what happened to the quality of life and that really once we asked ourselves that we thought we've got to do what we wanted to do which was have a little subsistence farms feed our neighbors and that's pretty much what we do we make about seven thousand pounds a cheesy year we sell it all locally we deliver their selves and the same with the vegetables we were sort of determined not to have employees so we have one person that works in our garden in the woods she is more than an employee as she is a close friend and she knows more about gardening we do and she's worked for us for years fourteen years so it's lead a question of telling her what to do if we just you know we sort of turn are loose and she knows what's happening and that sort of our ideal employee because neither one of us really care to tell people what to do we tend to like to do stuff ourselves and in terms of the cheese nobody except those doesn't it which is kind of good for quality control consistency so that's been one of our kind of going principles over the years if you can't do it yourself them through it and i think the other thing was what you were saying about the debt load is that we've always been very careful way if we borrowed money for the barn we would addict have to pay for the pipeline or do something but we are goals have always been to pay off off the loans and so that's it's been my goal to well up until recently our barn was sort of falling down and we you know we knew we needed to do something but we didn't want to take a loan and then recently we've sold the development rights to the muslim trust and so we got a little cash infusion and part of it's going and continues to him that's been a really big thing for us and really important thing was selling the development rights it just was not a hard decision it was a wonderful decision to make we've been working with al coronets that that's the only interest for you know if he sort of stopped in periodically to see how we were doing and i don't think we were ready to intel now but you know now with retirement or old age you know sort of there because while we don't have debt we don't have retirement money also so this was a nice thing to get a little bit of confusion for money and to put money into the barn and to make sure that a low we stay in farming which is a great thing because we don't have kids so there's nobody like that please that too so it's a great feeling since you started to get into that subject a little but do you have thoughts for the future you'd like to see somebody continue with the farm yeah but we just went through that farm by ability project and this ten simple reason was to try to figure out what transition to retirement was going to look like the upshot of of our decision is that you know we're not talking about it's not it's not that we can't you know we don't want to i mean i it just doesn't seem like something i mean eventually we'll be forced into it you know being too cryptic to keep tuning this but but we see you know even you know getting smaller like getting a more having any animals anymore sort of put us so we decided this is who we are i mean this is it it's more it's so much more than a job it's that it's an adventure and we are sort of yeah we were going into a little beef thing to around and we looked at each other were all like getting to that age where we knew we were going to want to do it forever and we thought where the people coming along and since a bit and we've seen that happen but they do have a different marketing at this i mean they market more directly cases of lettuce in a week in i don't know what they can sell but they make more selling what they do but i don't think they could sell that lowly and so it's a it's a choice and you don't have the headaches of the actual marketing yeah you go drop your have any regrets about that do you sometimes think back if i'd done this i could've done either one of us or much for travelling then it's thing so no we're happy here when we go anywhere we we not the berry is everything but it's a significant piece of the right and it is tough because you know land is really expensive but i think that people young people starting up have great opportunities with these incubator farms with the farm that chuck rovs has in in charlotte where he's doing you know so that people do greenhouses and the raw milk on his property and stuff like that i mean i think that the opportunities are endless i think that young people just have to do it a little differently but it's the land of trustees who work in the collaborate with young farmer yeah yeah yeah yeah i think it's an exciting time and i think that you know young people with all these value added and different pickles and alcohol and any just tons of different opportunities and any regrets from you looking back over the years anything you would do differently or