Joe and Mary knew that without farming experience their chances of getting a bank loan to start a dairy were slim to not at all. So they saved their money in hopes of starting small. Both worked long hours. They married and lived with Mary’s parents to save money. “We banked every penny we had,” Mary said.

By 1991 they had saved $10,000. With that they bought six heifers and rented an unused barn in nearby Shoreham, Vermont. “We rented that barn for $400 a month,” Mary recalled. “It was a very moderate setup. We started shipping milk with six cows, and people laughed. But those cows were bought and paid for. We had no debt.

Quit His Day Job

“We bought a little tractor for $2,000 to haul the manure, and we just went from there.” At first, they bought all the feed for their herd. Joe quit his painting job and started working at another farm. Mary kept her job at the store.

“We both had long days...16, 18-hour days, and there was a lot of traveling involved,” Mary said. “I’d get done with the morning chores, then go home and take a shower and go to work. Whenever we’d get a thousand dollars saved up, we’d go pick out a cow over at a neighbor’s, and he’d bring her over. We just built the herd up from there.”

Prelude To Problems

“When we moved to the new farm,” Mary recalled, “we were milking 84 cows and had $65,000 in debt. By the spring of ’99 we had the cows paid off, and we bought the landlord’s line of farm equipment. Things were going super; they couldn’t have been going any better.” But disaster was near.

On the evening of September 6, 1999, Joe was dozing on the sofa when Mary looked out the window and saw fire breaking over the ridge of the barn.

Dodging burning tarpaper coming off the barn, they opened doors and got some of the cows out. But suddenly there was no air. Joe and Mary escaped with their lives, but 70 of their cows did not. Their young calves were gone, but most of their heifers were out on pasture.

It was a devastating blow. Each cow had been selected carefully and purchased with hard-earned savings. “To us, these weren’t just cows,” Mary said. “They were pets.”

Surviving cows along with new ones bought with insurance money were moved into another barn while the Warrens looked for a farm. They found one with potential and not much else. But the price was $275,000, more than they could manage. So, in an attempt to make it affordable, they asked the Vermont Land Trust to purchase development rights to the farm.

Sold Development Rights

The Land Trust saw the young couple as an opportunity, and four months later a deal had been reached. The Land Trust bought development rights for $175,000 and Joe and Mary bought the farm for $100,000.

They immediately invested another $150,000 in a new milking system, cow mattresses, and water bowls, and a free-stall barn for dry cows and heifers.

Individual cow care is at the heart of their approach to herd management. For them, this means a tie-stall barn and a herd of no more than 90 mature cows.

They also practice careful financial management. Using a worst-case scenario, they developed a plan to figure out how they could survive on ten-dollar milk and a 50-pound per cow daily production average. “It’s never going to get much lower than that,” Mary said, “and our expenses are based on that. Everything’s got to work on paper.

“Joe talked about farming when we were first going out,” Mary recalled. “He said I didn’t have to be part of it if I didn’t want to. But I said, ‘If I’m not part of it, then I won’t be with you.’ So I kind of held my breath and jumped in with both feet.

“People don’t know how we do it, because I have to work with him all day. It’s a working relationship. We’re both kind of the boss, and we discuss things. If we don’t agree, we don’t usually do it.”