of the ice cream gerald is on the dairy side of the family and joel tell me a little bit about the history of wilcox in manchester and  the ice cream we came on board in about nineteen forty eight and my father really like make an ice cream and my brother i would just saw his family doing that and then had  so we had to move to polish and then eventually we got back here to i was in a legal battle with my brother on the ownership of the lands how we really couldn't tell the parents so he went this other way which his labor intensive i think i've known you both you know him for a short period of time and i have to say you are some of the hardest you get into it what is your schedule and how did you get into a trade get up by seven seven thirty but that just takes so long because of our labor intensive we extremely difficult to make ends meet i cut everything here and there and it's still not really good enough  similar constraints we were fortunate that we got into cheesemaking about fourteen years ago and that has helped the situation but not answer those with all the problems just efficient in the every day george takes all day to do everyday chores and so all you can't take time off it's just made it difficult we're sort of discussing that expand at the time had we needed to in order to increase the income for the family and my oldest son has supported us and many ways  was there a period of time in your life when caring was successful and profitable in a in a happy healthy way to make a living oh yeah basically we've enjoyed it up until  the fire which is two thousand and one and once had occurred it just really put a damper on things and we didn't really have a high debt load before then and after that leaves i would encourage him to stay in business so it was enjoyable and things were i have a store which we grew our own grain and fire that was taken out of pollen and then at all unique i mean obviously if we're now down to one hundred dairy farms it's a tough tough business and talk a little bit about the weather this summer and what this is doing to us all say you had been half of it at this point or more like a third yeah yeah we are he should be i should have been done by middle of june where you're making me feel better because i did not say both we don't we're not out of the same scale but the same problems and the same effect it has it's a story for everyone throughout vermont tell me a little look give me some good news there was a point in time when you considered we needed to have the cows and pascha and so that's when we decided to build the superstructure and bring him home here to take advantage of lease to rotational graze all the time so we did  were you would gone through a fierce three year process yes transition is right and so close you couldn't make it do you think that had you been able to do you think that might have put you in a different situation today or well we didn't have a very sport that was really close by so i mean made treating animals difficult we didn't like the idea that if you treated your best favorite cows that you had to sell  basically and we didn't have a home for six or six years and so that made a difference in there and in our land that it wasn't productive i mean now i'm i'm growing so that anything else except you know the herbicides made a difference organic in my philosophy but i have never been able to see that i could economically make the transition even to the yes you got me that's one thing i've always admired every time i've come down here is you have some most beautiful cats i've ever seen anybody raise my there's got to be some secret i'm trying to figure but obviously you feed them really well make sure we feed and more they're getting more grainier and you know the transition you can't really tell the difference now when you go to water right so that's made a difference i do i have always admired how well your animals look and i know you know just by up there in london dairy because we have a lot of fields that want to neighbors but what's the problem that we run into is it feels that we've invested time and money into getting productive are being sold for lots and and you know i'm fortunate and appreciative to have access to that land but every year we seem to lose another five or ten acres here there and it starts to really add up you have that problem down here with manchester's development  been fortunate to have some people who have made has made a huge difference i mean current use program because it really benefits them in me the same time i don't pay ransom and that cut their costs down and so they're i was glad the time that was good i recently tried to do it but the price they wish to give for my development rights was about half of what the property was worth to be developed right and so i mean that's forever and one didn't give me enough to build a barn and pay off some other debt so i refused to do it their criteria is so you can compare your land t saw so obviously unfortunately the pressure becomes do you now sell some of that property for development and gain the income that you need i can't and good crap plan or something and i just everything i own now is from the partition is it when one block and i just i just don't have enough when you have a beautiful place here you're looking up at equinox in the backdrop beautiful property as you drive south on old route seven you go right by your place and it stands out and  think you know the state of vermont is fortunate to have the remaining farmers that we have and somehow we need to hang on to those big promise till the price of milk and basically  and sell in two thousand we changed the way milk was priced to took it off the a price off the chicago mercantile exchange and saw you want a component pricing to try to get other products in other countries and so free trade is nothing but a bust for us farmers and cost other people in this  country you think at some point with this is what i keep coming up with at some point transportation costs are going to be exorbitant and we can become competitive again you know because you look at your foods and you look at made and so there's no no quote on it no tell me a little bit about those products what does it mean you get no protein concentrate by taking milk running it through a filter and you get proteins on one side and lactose and country runs twenty four hour a cheese that and so legally you can add milk you can add cream and you need certain amount of cream a certain amount of powder proteins to make cheese and so now if you look at the imports at that time you'll see them in january and february of each of these years milk protein concentrates have increased by one hundred to two hundred percent in those two months and so the processors most profitable times of the era came out of us farmers backs high quality goes down the price of milk goes down we don't get paid crap for anything and so it's all because of imports and we've got our government as an free trade in everybody wants this free trade bullcrap so now you've got to compete against people in other countries that can produce it for last it doesn't don't have the same taxes they are supporting the rest of the world and so how can you compete it's an unfair trade agreement right sickly right and so our founding fathers would roar in their graves if they saw what was happening we don't have this between the states why should we allow imports to come in here without the same rules and restrictions as up to the rest of us and so all of you ever to see something done with a trade agreement don't anything important you know it would take more farmers and we got today right i mean we worry about big guys you know adding another five hundred thousand cows some room guys are going out of business because the price is too darn low and so it's the same as everything else as imports and unless you restrict which canada does i mean again thirty dollars i don't know where you go up there they've got to tractors everywhere that  and that's because the farmers are getting paid a decent price for their milk we get a lot of visitors through our place that are canadian and they say you can tell exactly when you cross the border because the canadian farms are profitable and affluent doing well right across in the united states and farmers are driving so tractors and you know the same stuff that we're up against right and so that is the main problem and our government our government and the people and even our regulates imports and so one of their rules is if you don't use your imports license this year you don't get one next and so consequently they people have to use it up by the by december i think that's when the physical whenever they have it or else they are going to get one next year so i just encourages imports i'm always amazed as busy as you are with the farm that you're able to keep up with all of this i have been fortunate to get one magazine called milkweed and pete arden which lot of people don't like he has his writers and he have had these different articles in there which shows that you know no protein concentrates is another good one and we have america's part of a very america and so you're going to get shut off if you're not careful very america is exports milk powder out of this foreign terror which is the head of new zealand and so they're going to take care of their people first and so i think we're going to get some feedback on this video i think business is good stuff cantero may have one point some billion i recognize fifteen sixteen years ago that as a small producer just would never have any impact on the national scene i'm not political i don't have enough sway anywhere to make a difference so my conclusion was that i had to produce and market a product for myself where the marketing becomes my responsibility and that has not totally been successful either but it  allowed my farm to stay on a relatively small scale which i enjoy and allowed me a little better profit margin it does tremendously increase our workload and responsibilities because we've taken on the whole production and marketing piece have you ever considered trying to do something like that or that's just out of the question right now is how the question because of the amount of time we spend producing doing every day george we would like to do something like there is a time there is no time right now and we don't have the virus and so you're sort of held hostage right about it now and most farmers today  really caught in this terrible price squeeze and so it's not good for overall farming basically what do you think about this country losing its agricultural heritage national producers federation and the international association for milk processors i think they want to be able to put in sweeteners like aspartame which is a into a  ludicrous i mean our milk consumption and food form has gone down except that are total consumption of dairy products keeps going up every year people are more yogurt there are more all these other cheeses and stuff our consumption  many visitors to our farm they can watch me milk they can watch me feed the cows they see the land that i produce a feed on they know our practices and it gains confidence in the product that we're producing and i think that's going to be our strength down the road but there again this idea of diversifying you've got just so many hours in a day and now you're trying to raise hogs and raids veal calves and where do you get the time to write all that give up sleep yeah you can