Great Brook Farm State Park

With all the wonderful variety of parks and conservation land in Easton, I seldom feel the need to go elsewhere for a recreational walk, but on Thursday I had the job of chaperoning our Envirothon team to the state competition which was held at the 900 acre Great Brook Farm State Park. I'm definitely going to take Maggie for a ride to this wonderful place that combines the extensive trails of Borderland with a working dairy farm.

The parking lot overlooks a small farm pond with a visitors center, picnic benches and a view of the dairy operation on a nearby hill. As I walked to the Envirothon registration tent, I saw something I had never seen before-swallows taking a bath. Half a dozen birds would skim across the farm pond at full speed and dip into the water using their momentum to pull them back into the air shaking the water off their wings. Just another trick that these superb flyers can pull off.

While the students competed, I got to walk around the property on just a few of their numerous trails. A large pond with many streams was a center piece of the trails I chose, but their are also hills and trails that run the edge of farmer Mark Duffy's fields. Bird life was all around me and once again I wished I had taken the time to learn the different calls and songs of the birds. Enough were visible, however, to make for an interesting study. I was also able to pick out a deer in the forest as she watched the line of student performance tents that were obviously in her favorite field.

Back at the headquarters I visited a traveling exhibition from the Silvio Conte National Wildlife Refuge that covers the whole Connecticut River Watershed. It featured a walk through trailer with four common environments as they would be seen at night and a series of interactive exhibits. My favorite was the eagle grip station. An eagle can grip with up to 400 pounds per square inch pressure, and the challenge is to see how your grip matches up-I hit 90 psi and the students were in the 70s and 80s. The rangers say that not even the most muscled human who has tried this machine has come close to the eagles grip. By the way, bald eagles have been seen fishing in Lake Winnecunnet in Norton for several years now. These have been immatures, but an early season report this year noted an eagle with at least a partially white head. Even tiny Knapp's pond on Union Street had a reported eagle sighting within the last two years. Expect to see eagles in Easton at Borderland and perhaps Wheaton Farm as the population continues to recover.

The best part of the day was the dairy operation. Mark and Tamma Duffy have leased land at Great Brook since 1987 to run a 120 cow dairy operation along with a model farm with sheep, goats, ducks and chickens. There is also a wonderful ice cream stand. The Duffy's have been successful enough that both their son and daughter have remained in the family business. Recently, the Duffy's have created a robotic dairy operation that they are currently testing with 60 Holsteins. We were lucky enough to get one of the first tours of this new facility. Now I'm pretty old fashioned when it comes to dairy farms-you know cows grazing on pastures, and lovely milkmaids hand milking the cows three times a day. OK, the lovely milkmaids were long gone by the time I was hanging out on the Gomes Farm on Bay Road in the 1960s. They had a milking machine like everyone else, but Mr. Gomes still had to attach the darned thing to his cows three times a day.

Mr. Duffy told us there are many ways to run a dairy and that for someone with a lot of fields the pasture system still works. He has turned to robotics to maximize his profits in an increasingly competitive market. It apparently happened in stages. He has been an advocate for scientific feeding for a while, for instance. Gone are the bales of hay we are still familiar with in Easton. He uses a blend of corn (from the stalk to the silk) and cut grass about the length my lawn will be when I finally cut it next week. His cows are divided into age groups and raised together. Young heifers and pregnant ones live at the model farm while calves are segregated individually. I was not happy to hear this at first-visions of veal calves stuck in a stall where they can't stand up danced in my head-, but each calf has its own pen and superlarge dog crate to live in, and each is feed its own mothers milk. Calves present the farmer with two problems-first if they stay with their mothers they tend to over or under eat and get sick. Second, if the calves are bottle feed, but raised together they tend to suckle each other and damage their udders. This year's calves seemed very happy being separate, but close to each other. They were all created by artificial insemination using semen that has been sorted out to produce a high percentage of heifers (in case anyone is looking for a very unusual new job). That's as artificial as things get on this farm-super close attention to feed replaces the hormone stimulation that some large dairy producers use.

On the way to the robotic barn we learned that cow tipping is a rural legend.  Cows sleep about 45 minutes a day in five to ten minute cow naps. They never sleep standing up, and they never lock their legs while standing like a sleeping horse so they are essentially untippable.

The robotic barn was amazing. Sixty cows live there with minimum human intervention. They never go out to pasture. Mr. Duffy explained that for much of the year in New England, the weather is not ideal for grazing. Cows like the temperature cool because they sweat like a dog through their tongue. Most of their time in a summer field is spent trying to stay cool. Mr. Duffy asserts that the typical cow wants to be pampered and live a life of absolute predictability. Each girl has a necklace with two electronic devices on it that identify her to the computers in the barn. The barn has no walls like the typical barn and giant fans circulate the air. Each cow is free to wander around the barn and even go to the beauty stall for  a massage and cleaning at the automated cleaning station, but most spend their time laying on specially designed European cow mattresses. Each mattress section is arranged so that the rear end of the cow hangs over into an alley where the manure is dropped and then swept away by an automated cleaning bar. An inflatable wall for the barn is raised in the winter not to warm the cows, but to keep the manure from freezing to the alley. When the cow decides it wants to be milked it wanders down to the robotic milking machine, one of the first in New England, that cost about $200,000. This machine comes from Sweden and Mr. Duffy noted that he and his farmhands had planned to name it with some beautiful Swedish milkmaid's name like Ilsa or Inga, but he was called away to plow snow while the machine was being installed and his wife and daughter named it Lars. Lars has a laser camera that inspects each cows under carriage when she walks into the milking booth and checks it against previous pictures. it then uses a hose to wash and rinse the udders before the laser camera returns to help attach the milking machine to the euphemistically called "quarter." Meanwhile the cow is rewarded by getting really expensive grain-the more milk she has the more grain she has a chance to eat. The machine records the amount of milk and runs certain tests on the milk before sending it to the refrigerated holding tank. Cows can self milk at any time of the day or night. It turns out the average cow milks itself 2.4 times a day instead of the traditional three. All this infrastructure was made possible by state and federal grants to improve small family farms. Lars and his mechanical cousins are revolutionizing the dairy business in Europe and allowing small farmers to fight off agribusiness. It was a surprise to me, but those cows were the most contented looking lot I had ever seen, and, as anyone who has ever lived on a farm knows, despite the robot, farm work never ends so the dairy crew has simply been reassigned to other farm projects. Amazing! Definitely worth a visit.