(Host)  The last dairy farm in Rockingham has milked its last cow.  Arnold Fisher farmed along Pleasant Valley Road for 60 years.  But This month he sold the last of his dairy herd.

VPR's Steve Zind visited Fisher to learn about his life in farming and his reasons for retiring.

(Zind) Arnold Fisher's farmhouse and barn face each across a road that once saw little traffic beyond the mailman and an occasional milk truck.

Now there's a fairly regular stream of cars and trucks that round a nearby curve and whiz past.

It's no easy matter crossing from the house to the barn. but there's even less reason to make the crossing now.

A fan in the open doorway stirs the air inside the barn, where until last week a few big Holstein heifers remained.  Now the barn is empty.   

(Fisher)  "C'mon.  C'mon."

(Zind) Fisher stands at the barn window and calls to a few young heifer calves he's raising to sell.

Back in the farmhouse, Fisher sits on the porch and recalls a lifetime spent in the dairy business.

(Zind) Did your parents farm before you?

(Fisher)  "Yes, over in Grafton on Fisher Hill.  In those times they were so small.  We milked about 15 or 16 was the top."

(Zind)  "How could you make a living milking a herd that small?"

(Fisher)  "Well, you didn't spend any money.  I mean, 50 years ago, that was the size many herds were.  There weren't any big herds.  Not in the southern part of the state."

(Zind)  You told me that you came here in 1950.  You've been farming here for over half a century.  How did you end up here and not on the farm your parents were on?

(Fisher)  "That was small and stony.  It still is."

(Zind)  A man of few words and long, thoughtful pauses, Fisher says when he was young and didn't want to be a dairy farmer. 

(Fisher fisher7) "I had no intentions of milking cows.  I always liked carpenter work."

(Zind)  But any plans to be a carpenter were shelved when Fisher attended school at what's now Vermont Technical College.  Back then it was the Vermont School of Agriculture.  When he finished in 1949, he bought the farm he's on now.  Fisher was married in 1950 and a son was born the following year.

In the 1950s farm work was still largely done by hand.

Balers had yet to become farm fixtures and the hay was brought in loose.  Many farmers still used oxen to get the work done.  The Fishers  had a tractor.

(Zind) Did you live pretty comfortably?

(Fisher)  "Yes.  You didn't work all day Sunday.  You took the day off.  Of course, you had to do chores.  Now, every day there's just as much to do....

(Zind)  Why is that, because now you have all this mechanical gear that you didn't have back in the 1950s?"

(Fisher)  "You have to pay for it. You have to pay to run it.  Repairs are un-Godly now!"

(Zind)  As Fisher sees it, modernization came at a price.  The introduction of the bulk tank, the need to upgrade the buildings and milking equipment to meet health standards and the constant march of technology toward increasingly sophisticated equipment required farmers to carry more and more debt to cover the costs.

(Fisher) "Certainly from the early 60s up through, we got more machinery all the time but we had to work harder.  Which doesn't make sense, but that's the way it was."

(Zind) Fisher raised his son and two stepdaughters on the farm.  They vacationed in Canada and twice traveled to Alaska. 

(Zind)  Did you enjoy farming all those years?"

(Fisher)  "Yes and no."

(Zind) "Tell me about the ‘yes' part and the ‘no' part.

(Fisher) "I like animals.  The main part of disliking it was I didn't make any money."

(Zind)  And that, ultimately, was the reason Arnold Fisher decided to stop farming.  Now, in his 80th year, he's spending his first summer not milking cows.  This month, quietly, the last of the dairy herd was trucked away.

(Zind)  "Did you watch them go?"

(Fisher) "No."

Fisher isn't done with farm work. He and the hired help have corn to get in and hay to cut, but that'll be sold to others this year.

Fisher says there were once 50 dairy farms in Rockingham.