[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 104 (Wednesday, July 27, 2005)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9152-S9153]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               THE HOWRIGAN FAMILY OF FAIRFIELD, VERMONT

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, I rise today to acknowledge the Howrigan 
family of Fairfield, VT, who recently celebrated their annual family 
reunion.
  The Howrigan family is a bedrock of Franklin County and Vermont 
agriculture, and has done much to carry on our State's agricultural 
stewardship tradition.
  I have known many members of the Howrigan family for years and have 
come to appreciate the sound counsel on dairy issues and other aspects 
of farm policy.
  Mr. President, I thank the Howrigan family for their service to 
Vermont agriculture and their communities, for they represent the 
finest tradition of our rural State.
  I ask unanimous consent that a July 24, 2005, Burlington Free Press 
article featuring and honoring this wonderful Vermont family be printed 
in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

            [From the Burlington Free Press, July 24, 2005]

                    Howrigans: A Dynasty of Dairying

                           (By Candace Page)

       Fairfield.--When Harold Howrigan's four grandsons crammed 
     into the back seat of their aunt's pickup truck for a road 
     trip last week, Tim Howrigan, 12, couldn't wait to tell the 
     others what he'd heard about a breakthrough in mastitis 
     research.
       ``The cows that get the new treatment, their calves produce 
     more enzymes'' to prevent the udder infection in dairy cows, 
     he told them. He explained to his 10- and 11-year-old cousins 
     how it's better to keep cows healthy than to have to cure 
     them after they've become sick.
       In the Howrigan clan, you are never too young to learn the 
     family business.
       ``It's in the blood,'' says W. Robert Howrigan, 86.
       Howrigans have been milking cows in Fairfield since their 
     arrival from Ireland's County Tipperary in 1849. One 
     Howrigan, William, and his wife, Margaret, reared 10 children 
     on a 35-cow hill farm in the Depression days. Today, 32 of 
     their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren work 
     farms in Franklin County--a dairy dynasty unique in Vermont.
       The descendants of William and Margaret milk more than 
     3,000 cows and produce maple syrup from nearly 40,000 taps; 
     their fields, pastures and woods cover 10,000 acres in 
     Fairfield and neighboring towns.
       More farms--38 of them--ship milk from Fairfield than from 
     any other Vermont town, in part because of the community's 
     high Howrigan count. The family has provided two of Vermont's 
     most influential voices in state and national dairy policy: 
     William's sons, the late state Sen. Francis Howrigan and 
     Harold, 81, a longtime leader of the St. Albans Co-operative 
     Creamery.
       Howrigans have graduated from Harvard; become nurses, 
     doctors, teachers and lawyers; left Fairfield or Vermont for 
     good. But an extraordinary number of the men, and some of the 
     women, have chosen a farm life like their parents'.
       They constitute a one-clan countertrend to Vermont's annual 
     loss of family farms in the face of low milk prices, the 
     flight of young people and the attraction of less back-
     breaking work.
       ``Saddam Hussein couldn't drive these people off their 
     farms,'' Vermont Agriculture Secretary Steve Kerr says, 
     ``They love farming. You can see that in their faces. And 
     it's not just that they love what they do; they are making 
     money at it.''
       The sprawling but tight-knit family network has proven 
     fertile ground for growing both success and love of the 
     farming life. Dozens of pairs of Howrigan hands will 
     materialize to help build an uncle's barn, move a cousin's 
     herd or teach the finer points of farming to a sister's 
     child.
       Kerr could not think of another Vermont farm clan as big 
     and long-lasting as the Howrigans. ``I don't see why what 
     they've got isn't sustainable forever and ever,'' he said.
       Twelve-year-old Tim Howrigan, for one, knows just what 
     he'll do when he grows up: ``I'll be a cow farmer,'' he said.


                            A farm education

       Margaret McCarthy Howrigan bore a child every 18 to 24 
     months between 1915 and 1933. She made sure 10 children were 
     fed, clothed and washed in a house not reached by electric 
     lines until 1939.
       A teacher before her marriage to William, she put as high a 
     value on education as her husband put on improving his 
     farmland and tiny herd. Margaret's children would go to high 
     school. Her girls, all five of them, would go to college if 
     they wanted and every one of them did.
       William's boys were a different case. Yes, they were needed 
     as workers on the farm, but in the Howigran family, farming 
     meant more than the endless repetition of milking cows and 
     cutting hay. A farm was for problem-solving today and 
     improving for tomorrow.
       As children, the Howrigans helped their father transplant 
     lines of maples along Howrigan Road, build drainage on the 
     roads in their sugarbush to prevent erosion, and turn the 
     piles of stone hauled from their fields into the foundation 
     of an all-weather road.
       Decades later, Francis, the oldest boy, would put this 
     lesson into words his children still repeat: ``Live as though 
     you're going to die tomorrow, farm as though you're going to 
     live forever.''
       He and his brothers found challenges for the brain and 
     plenty of stimulation for their entrepreneurial instincts 
     right on the farm. They grew up in a narrow, hill-edged 
     valley but didn't see the farm as confining or constraining.
       At 17 or 18, Harold built what he thinks was the first 
     mechanical gutter cleaner in Vermont, on assemblage of chains 
     and pulleys and a 5-horsepower motor to haul manure out of 
     the barn.
       ``I just got tired of shoveling,'' he said last week.
       In his teens, Francis acquired a drag saw to cut firewood 
     for neighbors. He bought a truck and began hauling milk and 
     hay for other farmers. In his 20s, he rented a nearby place 
     ``on halves'' from a neighboring farmer, paying half the 
     expenses and taxes, keeping half the income. By 32, he owned 
     his first farm. Ultimately, he would accumulate 10 farms and 
     more than 4,000 acres.
       When Robert, Francis' younger brother, couldn't persuade 
     his father to buy the farm next-door, he borrowed the money 
     to buy it himself. He, too, would acquire additional farms--
     five in all--to pass on to his sons.
       Even Tom, who did go to college in his 30s and became a 
     surgeon, continues to live in the house where he was born. At 
     84, he still spends many of his days cutting brush and 
     improving the family woodlot. ``I consider myself a longtime 
     surgeon but a lifetime farmer,'' he said.
       Some Howrigan sons still prefer to get their education on 
     the farm. The family tells the story of Michael Howrigan, 
     Francis' grandson, who enrolled in college after high school.
       ``He called home every night. He wasn't homesick. He just 
     couldn't stand not knowing what was happening on the farm,'' 
     said his father, also named Michael. The younger Michael soon 
     quit school and went into partnership with his father in the 
     family business.
       There's no farming without family among the Howrigans. 
     William's children started at 5 or 6, hauling wood for the 
     stove, feeding calves, scraping the barn, picking bugs off 
     potato plants that yielded 300 bushels a year in the cold 
     valley.
       A big family also means constant companions--siblings to 
     share chores, play baseball in the pasture or climb the 
     maples on the hill. Most Howrigans grow up sociable, and the 
     pleasures of sociability help make farming attractive.
       ``It's pretty magical. I have cousins and siblings that are 
     my best friends,'' said Kate Howrigan Baldwin of Burlington, 
     one of 12 children of Francis Howrigan. ``There's an 
     allegiance that is unspoken. You know you are going to help 
     one another and be there for one another. It's not a 
     mandate--it's what you want to do.''
       Family is the first thing Brendan Schreindorfer mentions 
     when he is explaining how a village boy ended up buying his 
     own milking herd at the age of 24. His mother is a Howrigan--
     William was his great-grandfather--but his parents did not 
     farm.
       Instead, Brendan spent his youth tagging along behind his 
     grandfather, Robert, and his uncles and cousins on their big 
     farm north of Fairfield Center.
       He was determined to become a dairy farmer since he was a 
     child, he said.
       ``I think it was the fact that everyone was always working 
     together to get something done. People pull together and it 
     pulls you along. It's a family thing, and it never leaves 
     your system once it's there,'' he said.
       Five years ago, his parents co-signed a note to help him 
     buy his herd. This winter, he borrowed money on his own to 
     purchase a 625-acre farm in Sheldon. (He'd built up equity, 
     but the Howrigan pedigree might have helped him get the loan, 
     he said.)
       His new place was run down--his cousins helped him with 
     repairs through the winter. He needed to move his herd this 
     spring--a small squadron of Howrigans showed up with trucks 
     and trailers to help.
       Howrigans help one another bring in hay, harvest corn, fix 
     equipment and build barns. Patrick Howrigan, 54, of Sheldon, 
     raised the rafters of his 200-stall barn in a day, thanks to 
     volunteers led by his brothers and cousins.
       ``A lot of neighbors helped, but family was the driving 
     force,'' he said.


                            love of the land

       Harold Howrigan's air-conditioned pickup truck bounced down 
     a dirt track through one of his fields last week, between 
     rows of corn taller than the cab. He nodded toward a nearby 
     woods. The landowner, he said, had subdivided the land and 
     put in five or six houses.
       There was the slightest hint of disappointment or 
     disapproval in his tone. Since he bought his first farm in 
     1968, he has acquired more than 1,000 acres, a rolling green 
     landscape of maple woods and productive fields with million-
     dollar views.

[[Page S9153]]

       ``I've never sold an inch of land. I just don't want to do 
     that,'' he said.
       If the Howrigan clan has a leader and role model, Harold, 
     at 81, fills the bill. His square face is topped by a puff of 
     white hair, his ruddy complexion crinkled by the weather. 
     It's a face that would look equally at home in a Tipperary 
     pub, a testament to his purely Irish ancestry.
       Like many of the Howrigan men, he seems gruff and a bit 
     standoffish at first meeting. Howrigans have the ``quiet 
     gene,'' says his niece Kate Baldwin.
       Over the kitchen table in the farmhouse he shares with his 
     wife, Anne, or on a tour of the land they farm with their 
     three sons, he expands. The gruffness melts into stories of 
     childhood on the farm. He shows a visitor field after 
     hillside field, not saying much, apparently for the pure 
     pleasure of looking at the land and the results of a 
     lifetime's work.
       Land was ``a treasure,'' he said, to the Irish farmers who 
     immigrated to Fairfield from a country where land ownership 
     was all but impossible for them. That fierce allegiance to 
     one's own acres also runs in the Howrigan line.
       Even in the hardscrabble days of the Depression, his father 
     treated the land well--planting trees, combing stones from 
     the rocky fields, preventing erosion. ``He never cut a live 
     maple,'' he said.
       Harold and his sons use the latest technology in their 
     sugarhouse, but they collect sap the way Harold's father did, 
     with hanging buckets and sled-top tanks pulled by five teams 
     of horses.
       Horses don't require new roads to be cut and are easier on 
     the land. ``There's no substitute for horses gathering sap. 
     They're nicer to work with, they come to you and stop. A 
     tractor won't do that,'' he said.
       With the other farmers of Fairfield, the Howrigans have 
     created a town perhaps more pastoral than any other in 
     Vermont. From many of Howrigan's hillsides, the view of corn 
     and hayfields and grazing heifers seems to have changed not 
     at all in a hundred years.
       But does he value his land for its worth in bushels of corn 
     alone? Or does he find it beautiful, as well?
       ``I think it is beautiful, and I work to keep it that 
     way,'' he said, looking back toward the home farm. ``I 
     treasure it for its value as working land and for its beauty, 
     too.''

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