As painful as that winnowing has been, the survivors were facing a startlingly rosier scenario this August: Milk prices were robust for the second season in a row. Growth, not retrenchment, was in the air, scenting the fields along Parker Road with a bouquet of freshly applied manure.
Not everyone, of course, was going the artisanal route. At the mouth of Stevens Road across from the country store, footings were being poured to extend the Young family's long, blue dairy barn. Up to 50 more head were being contemplated (pushing the herd to nearly 300), their bulk milk destined for the co-op in St. Albans and thence - at least a portion of it - your pints of Ben & Jerry's Homemade.
The barn is state-of-a-certain-kind-of-art, its side-windows carefully shaded, fresh air sucked in the back and sent up out roof vents, providing, even on the hottest days of August, temperatures more reminiscent of late spring.
In their youth, the heifers still graze the slopes above the lake. But come the milking years, they rarely venture out of doors in the manner portrayed, say, on a Ben & Jerry's carton.
So two roads diverge, Vermont's endangered herds consolidating on one family's modernized farm; Jasper Hill making its curd the old-fashioned way from a handful of fresh-pastured, registered Ayrshires.
There is always the low-hanging fruit, too, that decorates the season. Up Borland Hill, raspberry pickers were having a field day. And one morning, at the lake's edge, a beekeeper was spotted on a ladder sawing a limb off a hardwood tree, the better to corral a swarm of Russian honey bees that were hanging there into the hive box he had waiting on the ground.
