The family farm: An ethnography of dairy farming in Vermont

Dairy farming persists in central Vermont as an economically viable occupational choice and those who choose to farm carry on a tradition with roots that reach deep into the past. This study explores the world of the dairy farm as a distinctive cultural environment and presents farm life from an insider\u27s point of view, as it is experienced by those who farm. As such it is simultaneously about the culture of agricultural life and the process of studying and representing cultural experience. This study was structured to identify the basic, underlying cultural patterns which are characteristic of family farming and to examine the ways in which these patterns manifest themselves in daily farm experience. Through immersion in the routines of farm life on central Vermont dairy farms, both as an interviewer/observer and a volunteer farmhand, a series of key areas of experience came into focus which comprise the core of this study. These include farmers\u27 perspectives on time and space, the role of work in farm life and its relationship to leisure, family relationships and the face-to-face transmission of knowledge, and the various ways in which farmers experience community. A concluding chapter explores the concept of a culture of agricultural life and examines its relationship to American popular culture, to continuity and change in agricultural practice, and to differing conceptions of traditional agriculture