Common Ground: Holy Cow

January 2006

Holy Cow

by Traci Hukill

The first time Larry Cummings came across a calf that didn’t know how to drink milk out of a bucket, he more or less shrugged. There was a lot to do in the calf barn, many pens to clean quickly and, if one of the new arrivals was still nosing around the fence slats for a bottle to suck warm milk from, it wasn’t his problem.

But sometime during his two-week rotation at the calf barn, that changed. Cummings, who is 48 years old and a recovering cocaine addict — not to mention a lifelong city dweller who had never shared a Zip code with a cow, much less personal space — began to take responsibility for his charges’ welfare.

Pretty soon, Cummings was coaching other guys on how to teach the calves to drink by holding a nipple in the bucket and snatching it away after the calf had started sucking. It tickles him to think about it. “She’s going, ‘Oh man,’ and she’s really shakin’ and waggin’, and now she’s looking over at her partner’s bucket because her partner’s not hip to it yet,” he says. “It’s really comical sometimes.”

Cummings grew up with family pets and was always good with animals, but that was a long time ago and a world away. “Coming out here really reacquainted me with that. Some of the hard layers were peeled back from what I went through getting here,” he says. “As soon as you realize you’re caring for something that can’t really care for itself, it’s a nice thing.”

Cummings is a resident at St. Anthony’s Farm, an organic dairy in Sonoma County that doubles as a drug and alcohol recovery program. Like the 27 other men and 14 women who live, work and struggle toward sobriety here, free of charge and without compensation, Cummings will leave after six months. Most will return to SF’s Tenderloin or wherever they came from (St. Anthony’s focuses on providing services to the Bay Area’s homeless). A few will go to a halfway house in San Francisco run by St. Anthony’s Foundation for another six months of support. Cummings hopes to go to Giles House, a clean and sober residence in Sonoma County, as far away from his old city stomping grounds and habits as he can get.

“I want to stay in the big open space here, not all that hustle and bustle. Here you can ease on by,” he says. It’s a far cry from his attitude when he first arrived in the van — homesick after a half hour’s drive, unnerved by the quiet nights, the size of the cows and talk in the dormitory of mountain lions.

Cummings is mulling whether to apply for regular employment here. But, for now, he’s a resident, working 35 hours a week, seeing a counselor regularly and going to 12-step meetings. He’s a hard and willing worker, so he’s training to spend his last two months at St. Anthony’s doing dairy maintenance, the top job among residents.

He’s been through recovery programs before, but this time he thinks it will take.

“This is a special place,” he says. “They let you get in tune with you. They allow you to learn and continue to grow. They tell you they expect you to grow.”

Friar Boedekker’s Farm

The emerald hills rolling west and north from Petaluma are home to dozens of dairy farms. Black-and-white Holsteins, the heavy hitters of the milking world, are a common sight as you drive down any of the numerous backcountry roads. You might also see dainty brown Jerseys, prized for their milk’s high butterfat content.

From Valley Ford Road, St. Anthony’s looks no different from the other dairies. But it’s unique on more than one count. It was the first organic dairy in Sonoma County and the first dairy to supply Petaluma-based Clover Stornetta with organic milk. Today St. Anthony’s provides Petaluma-based Clover Stornetta with 10 percent of its organic milk.

Dairy Manager Jim Kehoe, a third-generation dairyman from Inverness, says the thinking behind St. Anthony’s going organic was pragmatic. It was 1998, and St. Anthony’s Farm needed to find a way to make what it did more profitable.

“The thought process was: milk prices were really low, we’re a small dairy, and how would we compete?”

Going organic was also in keeping with a general trend at the farm toward the twin goals of sustainable husbandry and sustainable recovery. Founded in 1954 by Franciscan friar Alfred Boedek-

ker to furnish food for his SF soup kitchen, the farm had grown into an intensive industrial hog farming operation — the largest west of the Mississippi. Homeless men from the city, many of them alcoholics, moved there and worked on the hog farm. But it served as a shelter, not a place to prepare for a return to society. In the early 1990’s, responding to an alarming rise in drug use among SF’s homeless population, St. Anthony’s Foundation decided to change the farm’s focus.

“They had to make a hard decision,” says operations manager Cathleen Moller, pointing out that workers at the hog farm sometimes put in 60 hours a week. “You couldn’t sustain a hog operation and sustain recovery. But the foundation really pays attention to what’s going on in society. They call it the sign of the times.”

So the foundation took the financial risk and plunged in. By 1993, the hogs were sold off, and the farm’s small dairy herd increased. The residents would not live there indefinitely as laborers, but would come for a six-month work-based drug and alcohol recovery program. The operation would be kept small enough and the workload light enough that the residents could focus on taming their addictions.

Soon, changes in the dairy industry began to force more changes at St. Anthony’s. The farm had always sold milk to Clover Stornetta, but in the mid-1990s, the company with the grinning cartoon cow, “Clo,” emerged as a leader in clean, humane milk production. In order to sell to Clover Stornetta, a dairy could not give its cows bovine growth hormone (rBST, a milk-production stimulant,) and it needed to meet certain animal welfare requirements.

After keeping up with Clover Stornetta through that period of time, organic was the next logical step for St. Anthony’s. “And it went hand-in-hand with the recovery program, getting off synthetic fertilizers and so forth,” Kehoe says.

It didn’t take long for Clover Stornetta to seize on a marketing concept that seems especially appropriate to St. Anthony’s. They call their organic milk “the milk of human kindness.”

Clo’s Encounters of the Herd Kind

I visited St. Anthony’s on an unseasonably warm morning in November. It was about 10am when I turned into the white-fenced farm and the men were heading uphill toward the cafeteria for their first snack since breakfast at 6am. More than half appeared to be in their twenties. Some waved as I drove in, others swatted each other with their hats and horsed around. Still others trudged slowly up the tree-lined road, not looking up. Small bands of Holsteins were scattered around muddy paddocks and pastures in the front part of the farm, standing or lying placidly.

With a milking herd of 240 cows and 500 animals in all, St. Anthony’s remains a relatively small operation that retains the feel of a family farm. Some organic dairies are built on the industrial model, with thousands of animals that lack access to pasture. St. Anthony’s cows rotate through some 250 acres of pasture on the 300-acre farm, a generous ratio. The scale and tempo of the place are humane to both man and beast.

The farm is set to take its commitment to sustainability several steps further. The first stop is through a methane biodigester that will turn the gases from cow manure into electricity. That, in turn, will feed into the power grid, offsetting the costs of running the dairy. And next summer, the farm hopes to be marketing organic Clover Stornetta butter made on the premises — yet another step toward self-sufficiency.

The staff at St. Anthony’s believes the work on the farm uniquely complements the work of recovery. Liza Buckner, who for 13 years has run the half-acre organic garden where the women work, says it helps recovering addicts on multiple levels. Physical labor, sweating and drinking water assists in detox. Behaviorally, the structure helps residents learn to deal with authority and the rigors of employment. And then there is the spiritual element, learning to care for yourself as you have learned to care for seedlings or newborn calves.

“The things you do to be a good steward of the land are the same things you do to nurture your sobriety,” Buckner says. “One of the things about an organic system is you can’t fix something once it’s become a problem. You can see around the bend and prevent it, but once the problem shows up, it’s too late.”

Dairy supervisor Curtis Fjelstul starts the newcomers on his crew with relatively simple tasks — and lots of manure duty, shoveling it up and packing it away.

“It’s a metaphor for life, a lot of it,” he says. “Because everything they do is a cleaning process. So at the end of the day, they have this productivity in front of them. Everything is fresh and clean. It’s a metaphor for getting the shit out of their lives and getting clean.”

Traci Hukill is frequent contributor to CG.

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