For 15,330 days, he's milked cows. How many days are left?

"We're doing things the old way."

Every day for the last 42 years, Sammy Norton has milked cows. Every morning, at 4.30. Every afternoon, again at 4.30.

That's 15,330 days.

"It’s rough when it’s zero degrees," he said.

Rough, too, when it's rainy. Or he's got the flu. Wants a vacation. Or maybe even sleep in.

"Seven days a week, every day, 365 days a year," said Norton. "You don't milk them for a day, you’ll make them sick. These cows have to be milked."

Since 1982, Norton has farmed dairy cattle on 300 acres of Meigs County farmland.

With his herd ranging from 65 to 100 cows, Norton, 78, is the last of his kind, a small dairy owner in a world growing increasingly and alarmingly large.

"Those guys are milking a lot of cows now, 500 to 1000, maybe more," he said. "The big 1000 or 2000-cow dairy is about like a machine. All they want is the milk."

Norton's spectacularly black-and-white Holsteins are enormous, with udders often carrying 35 pounds of milk. He feeds them a particular blend of feed, watches them with great care that resembles, well, love.

Right?

"Why yeah," he said.

Norton is generous, inviting, kind as the day is long. I lost count of how many times we all laughed and grinned in what was easily one of our favorite days.

Yet: how long will this last?

"I'm the only dairy in Meigs County," he said. "There's not any in Rhea County. None in Hamilton."

According to the 2022 Ag Census, the number of similar-sized dairy farmers – between 1 and 99 cows – is drastically shrinking across this region.

From 2017 to 2022, Bledsoe, Bradley, Grundy, Hamilton, McMinn, Meigs and Rhea all lost small dairies. At this scale – when each county has three, maybe four small dairies – any loss or reduction is significant and lamentable.

(Marion County, however, increased from 1 to 2 small dairies. Sequatchie County stayed even at 4. The 2022 census reports seven in Hamilton County and three in Rhea County, but Norton believes they have since shut. Most regional dairies, he said, are found in Sweetwater and Athens.)

Small dairy farmers are endangered.

Where is the next generation of small dairy farmers?

What will happen when Norton retires?

What is the future for small dairy farmers in east Tennessee?

"Now, guys are using robots to farm," he said. "David, farming has moved off and left me."

At 3.55 pm, all 65 Holsteins are out on pasture, lounging in the shade and creekside mud.

Time to bring them in.

"I used to use a dog," said Randy Couch, who's known and worked with Norton for decades. "I’ll tell him and he’d go get them and he would bring everyone of them in."

Now, it's Couch, hollering and waving his arms.

"Heeeya! Heup!! Hey-yip!"

The cows stand – front knees like a postulant – then make the afternoon pilgrimage towards the barn. Like his father before him, Couch has worked on dairies most of his life.

"That’s all I’ve ever done," he said. "When you get up so early, and work all day long, sometimes your body feels like it’s drug out."

The cows saunter through the fields, their udders like medicine balls, swaying under them. How much does all that milk weigh?

"Lord, I don't know," said Couch. "I milk her plumb all the way out."

Full again by morning?

"Yes," he said.

4.15pm: The cows faithfully line up in the barn, heads bowed into a blend of silage and concentrate feed.

Norton grows 80 acres of corn for silage, a crushed blend of stalk, head and grain, all of it fermenting under big bunkers.

"Like pickles," he said.

Each day, they combine silage with a mix of crushed corn, distiller's grain, soybean, cotton seed, cotton seed hulls.

"Here, smell of it," he said.

Inhaling, I sniff too hard, the concentrate hitting the back of my throat; it is arresting, this earthy richness, and illuminating. Every glass of milk we drink is made up of all these out-of-sight factors, from cotton seed hulls to corn silage to 4.30 alarm clocks.

"When they get a bite of that, they get meat, potatoes, beans, everything. That is why they call it a total mix ration," he said.

Cows are bred first by artificial insemination, then with a bull who "cleans it up." As heifers, they calve after a nine-month gestation; then, milking begins. Norton will milk the cow for seven months before letting her "go dry" in the pasture.

"Seven months bred, you take her out of the herd and rest her for two months," he said. "She’ll have another baby and here we go again."

"You understand?" he asks.

I understand that I'm 50 years old, been drinking milk my whole life, yet have never spent time in a small dairy until now. I have earned multiple degrees, yet have so very little understanding of the complex relationships that go into one ... single ... glass of milk.

It is so humbling.

"You like them?" Norton asks. "What you think, Sarah?"

Norton worked the factory line at DuPont when, in the early 80s, his father, who worked beef cattle, retired, giving him the opportunity to buy the family farm.

"I loved to farm, but didn't like factory work," said Norton.

In 1982, he bought the farm and 50 heifers from a friend. When they began to calve, he quit DuPont and began dairying.

4.35 pm: The cows move into the dairy eight at a time. Norton and Couch dip a medicine that prevents mastitis onto their teats, attach a black suction cup, then the milking begins. Maybe eight, nine minutes. Milk is piped to a holding container that then pumps into adjacent room with a 1600 gallon storage tank kept at 36 degrees, which stays full, minus a glass or two his grandson sneaks.

Norton sells to Mayfield Dairy Farms, with a supply truck coming every other day to empty the tank. Some cows produce 120 pounds of milk a day; others, only 60. Norton keeps close notes, multiple times winning McMinn County Farmer of the Year for production.

Even still, profit is often hard to find.

"We're not getting overpaid, I can tell you that," he said. "Matter of fact, if it wasn’t for government subsidies, I probably would not have made it."

Norton keeps a closed herd, reducing any risk of bird flu. "There’s never been an outside cow come in here for 25 years," he said.

Norton says he breeds for feet, legs, milk and udders.

"You see how pretty she is? See how it comes up between her legs towards her butt? They carry a lot of milk up there," he said.

"That’s a good udder. See that crease? And how far that udder comes up on her?"

Eight more in, eight out.

"What you think, David?" Norton asked. "You’ve never been to a dairy like this? We're doing things the old way."

Around 5.15 pm, Norton takes us by a second barn to meet Boo Zoo, his racking horse. Norton loves riding racking horses, a form of walking horse that, well, see for yourself here ...

How fast? 20 miles per hour?

"He'd do 32," he said.

Norton's phone rings.

"I'm just a piddling," he said.

He'll ride us by his home, showing us his 1960 Massey Ferguson tractor he's restored – "I drive it in parades" – then filling our bags with beef cuts from his freezer. In his living room, we see Farmer of the Year plaques, photos of his four children, five grandchildren, seven great grandchildren.

Around 5.45 pm, we crest a rise; he parks the side-by-side.

"Look here," he said. "That is so pretty."

We're on the boundary where hay meets corn fields, a high point of the land – once his grandfather's, then his uncle's, now his – that is Norton's favorite spot.

"That’s a big field of corn there," he said. "That steeple sticking up. That is a pretty sight. The hay down there. The white barns."

"David," he begins, "when I started this, you could have come to me and said, 'Sam, you’re working real hard. I’ll come and help you for $50 a week.'"

"And I’d say, 'David, I appreciate it but I don't have $50.'"

"David, I don't mean to brag on myself, but I've done all this and bought everything. Bought the land, the cattle. I've done it every bit from scratch with no help. My mother give me $10,000 one time. I've scratched and raked and scraped the rest of it. "

At auction in 1990, he bought another 140 acres.

"I bought it for $3200 an acre. They said, 'that Sammy Norton’s crazy,'" he said. "Now, what is it? $10,000 or 12,000 an acre?"

How many days has the Norton family spent here? He stands on the same land as his ancestors.

What is the future?

"All my kids amounted to something," he said. "How can I put this burden on them?"

At 6.50 pm, with the cows done milking, Norton takes us one more place.

"Last stop," he said.

The Pisgah Cemetery is located on the northern edge of Norton's land. His grandfather, mom and dad all buried there.

A few years ago, a friend asked: Sammy, can I be buried here in your plot?

"This friend brought tears to my eyes," he said.

It was heart failure.

"We were best friends," he said.

Then old memories, stepping out from a door unlocked: he'd have a box of chocolate-covered cherries. when I came over, he'd not have as many.

He'd have a new shirt in his closet. I could never understand that. When I was young, if my mama gave me a new shirt, it went straight on my back.

Norton turns.

The sun is getting lower on the horizon. The day is coming to a close.

Two weeks later, mid June, 2024:

A small dairy farmer from Sweetwater approached Norton with an offer.

I'd like to buy your cows.

Some 40 years after milking his first dairy cow here, Norton said yes.

"I just feel like it's time for me to quit dairy," he said.

"It's kind of bittersweet. But I feel like it's about time. I'm wanting to slow down some and they won't let me. You've got to have hands on up there. It's just seven days a week, 24 hours a day. I feel like it's time for me to slow down while the cattle's high. It's time to get out if you want out," he said.

I hate to see them go, Couch told him.

I do, too, Norton said back.

Both men are tired; illness, bodies worn down, the 4.30 alarm that never stops.

On Father's Day, his family came up and took pictures with the cows.

"It's the end of an era," Norton's daughter said.

We spent just one afternoon there, yet, for some reason, this news stopped us in our tracks. There was an abiding fondness and affection with Norton, his cows and the land. All of it, full of so much precious goodness, so wholesome, so ... rare.

And now, Tennessee has lost one more small dairy farmer.

A few days ago, I told Norton as much.

I'm glad for you. Glad you can finally rest and enjoy other things, I told him. But it still makes me sad.

"It does me, too," he replied.

All photography by Sarah Unger (sarah@foodasaverb.com)

All design by Alex DeHart

All words by David Cook (david@foodasaverb.com)

Story ideas, questions, feedback? Interested in sponsorship or advertising opportunities? Email us: david@foodasaverb.com and sarah@foodasaverb.com

This story is 100% human generated; no AI chatbot was used in the creation of this content.