Farm to Freshman

A few weeks ago, my colleague Doug Hilson and I chucked our respective spouses for the day and headed off to the Ulster County Fair, in New Paltz, New York. It wasn’t for the carnival booths and thrill rides, or the over-priced greasy pizza and cotton candy—all of which make me feel queasy—but a place for urbanites like us to see farm animals that have been raised on family farms instead of factory farms.

We began with the sheep, recently shorn and sporting fashionable blankets so they’d remain clean for the judging. The 4-H kids tending them were busy shoveling manure and distributing hay. The pigs were disappointing—only one breed—but the good news was they were hormone- and antibiotic-free, they were snorting about in a good-sized, clean pen, their owners were petting them and calling them by name, and their tails weren’t clipped, the way they are in factory farms. The goats gave us permission to scratch the tops of their heads. The chickens looked spectacularly glorious in their individual cages, oblivious to their looming fates. And the Mini Lop rabbits—well, how can you not smile at those floppy downward ears? There were even a bunch of guinea pigs—most Americans see them as pets, but Peruvians, I happen to know, see them as future kabobs.

When we strolled into the cow barn, we encountered Katherine, an 18-year-old, sitting on the fence while minding her brown-and wet-eyed, caramel-colored Jersey cows. We learned she’s heading off to Cornell this fall, with the long-run goal of going into large animal veterinary medicine. Katherine was as comfortable lolling about with her several huge cows as I am cuddling my cats. She explained that her family’s dairy farm has over 400 cows, and that the herd is ranked one of the top ten in the nation for milk fat and protein. She added that the herd was pure—no hormones, no antibiotics. And she noted that for her family, treating the cows humanely was critically important. Many in the herd were still grazing even though they were pushing fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years, instead of being treated in the American way—whipped off to slaughter after four years of heavily forced, hormone-driven milk production.

Katherine’s father and mother were present (I asked their permission, as well as Katherine’s, to use their daughter’s name and picture and talk about her in this post), and added that the family had started with a single Jersey cow in the late 1960s, and that they’d carefully bred the herd to its current state. They also said that Katherine had been assigned chores with the cows from the time she was a toddler.

Listening to Katherine tell us how she had grown up working on her family’s farm, and how she personally tended 30 of the cows, and what made each of them special (she’d brought about seven cows to the fair, including her favorite, Glow), I had a sudden thought. Colleges need to actively target and recruit farm kids. Their rigorous habits, their sense of discipline, and their firsthand understanding of animal husbandry, would bring a rich and different perspective on life than what most suburban and urban kids know.

In pushing college applicants to write college essays proving how “extraordinary” they are, we get application essays about the summer spent hiking in Nepal, the semester abroad learning Chinese, the Saturdays spent at soup kitchens, and the long hours at the violin. But all these extraordinary extracurricular activities are almost always artificially concocted. They’re a result of the savvy, ferocious ambitions of students, their parents and their guidance counselors, all of whom desperately work together to make sure the student looks “extraordinary.”

But what we really need to learn about an applicant is what he or she is like when no one is looking. What is the student like in a quotidien sense? In Katherine, we see a young woman who hadn’t ever done anything glamorous with her summers, but had instead spent day after day, for most of her young life, tending cows—and not because it would make for an interesting subject in a college application essay (although it probably would). She tended cows simply because she grew up in a family where she was required to do serious chores. Katherine seemed to have developed a steely but sincerely felt tenderness toward her cows—a deep affection, no question, but entirely unlike the sentimentality that so often accompanies feelings toward pets.

As we drove back from the fair, Doug and I agreed that if Katherine is what you get when you raise your kid on a farm, all kids should be shipped off to farms. We were only half joking.

Katherine, if you should read this post, good luck at Cornell.