Ard Ridge Road wanders over the hills of Nancy, snaking past the quaint houses and the grazing cows of the farming community.
Jim Whittle moves down the road slowly and deliberately in his GMC pickup truck, toward his one-story, three-bedroom house, his barn and his three dozen cows spread out over 35 acres.
He has just left Mill Springs Pizza Express, where he has biscuits and gravy every morning at a round, wooden table with a rotating cast of familiar faces – fellow Nancy farmers who’ve known each other their whole lives.
In baseball caps and plaid shirts, the group talks politics and agriculture and reminisces about times gone by. Cigarettes and cups of coffee punctuate the conversation.
There are those things in life that have been the same for as long as anyone can remember. And then there are those things that change as one watches helplessly.
The cost of fuel for Jim’s tractor has doubled. Ten years ago, bags of feed for the cattle cost about $3. Now they cost $8.
“They’re running the small farmer out,” Jim says, looking out over the pastures of his childhood. He graduated high school determined to have a small farm of his own. He had spent his entire youth preparing for one, watching his mom and dad support their family off the land.
“You see it coming with cattle now. If you don’t have a huge operation – if you don’t have 5,000 cows – you’re out.”
Jim pulls up to his barn and hops out of his truck to feed his cows. He used to raise pigs until he started losing money on them. The Nancy farmers have tried raising turkeys and running dairy farms.
“Everything we’ve started eventually dies down so that our expenses are more than our income,” says Jim. And the young kids these days aren’t picking up the old lifestyle, he says. They don’t know how to raise a garden or how to care for cattle.
“But someone’s gotta raise the food we eat,” Jim says. “If everyone quits we’re gonna be in pitiful shape.”
He’ll keep his cows for as long as he can break even on them.
“There’s no light at the end of the tunnel though,” he says. “It just gradually gets worse and worse.”
In the afternoon, Jim climbs back into his truck and gets onto the winding road that will take him to the old pizza place for lunch. His friends are already there, teasing each other and reminiscing about old times.
