My lifelong dream to farm began when I was just a kid. I would listen to my dad talk about his upraising on the family farm and all the good things he got to do. I was born in a rural setting on what in those days was called a “gentlemen’s farm.” The owner of the farm was a national political leader who happened to own the farm, which he had operated as merely a self-sufficient estate, meaning his farmer (my dad) grew the crops that were needed to feed the livestock that produced the milk and meat that the farm’s families needed. My dad was the farmer or overseer of the farm for several years. By the time I came along, my parents had three sons living. They had the misfortune of losing my older brother when he was only 18 months of age.

Dad, being the good farmer, would raise and keep all the animals born on the farm. Normally, these animals either went for meat or were raised to produce the milk and other dairy products needed by the folks who lived in the main house. The four or so dairy cows Dad started with soon grew to some 18 cows, at which time the estate owner began to worry that perhaps my father was going to pursue dairying on his farm. He had had a previous experience that turned sour, and he wasn’t about to entertain any such activity again. He suggested that my dad look elsewhere to farm because he wanted only enough animals to provide for his estate farm and did not want to enter into production agriculture.

So, off the farm our family went, only to end up living in a tenant house on a farm where my dad continued to work mornings milking, after which he would drive off to a town job. Youngsters were not always welcome visitors on the farm where we lived then, so we got only brief opportunities to visit or work. These limited opportunities to work on a farm, sparing though they were, only served to intensify my drive to want to farm and to be much more involved in agriculture.

My ancestors were all farmers, and in fact, my earliest ancestors cleared and cultivated the lands of northern Westchester County, New York. I speak of the early 1700s when many early Americans still were living in the general area. In fact my great-great grandmother herself was of Native American descent. Farming was the occupation of most of my ancestors up to and into the early 1900s. My grandfather purchased his own farm in Mahopac Falls in 1913. His father-in-law (my great-grandpa Shear) joined him in th