| AUGUST 15, 2011 -- It’s been nearly 50 years since the Balthaser family’s once thriving dairy business was bought out by a much larger dairy processor. And theirs is one of the few farms left in the Route 222 corridor just south of Reading, Pennsylvania.
Yet for these resilient people, life on the farm is all they know and they aren’t ready to stop yet.
“I got to keep working. I wouldn’t know what else to do,” said Jim Balthaser, third generation on the farm.
His family has been selected as this year’s Reading Fair Farm Family of the Year.
It’s an award this self-effacing farmer is taking in stride.
“Usually a larger dairy farm is the one that gets it. We just do a little bit here and there,” he said.
Jim and his family farm about 200 acres in Spring Township, just south of Sinking Spring in suburban Reading.
Jim, 52, and his wife, Gladys, 55, have three children between them: Matthew, Melanie and Mark.
The farm is a little more than a mile away from the heavily traveled Route 222, a four-lane highway that connects Berks and Lancaster Counties.
It is nestled within rolling hills and gleaming ponds that make the city, even though it’s close, seem far away.
And the family is proud of what they have.
Jim’s grandparents, Zenas and Irene Balthaser, were the first generation on the farm and started it in 1926.
The couple maintained a herd of 80 Holsteins, bottled their own milk and owned five milk trucks, which they used to deliver bottles of milk to local businesses and residences.
“We even made ice cream, too,” said Dorothy Balthaser, Jim’s mother.
But the growth of large dairy processors eventually caught up to the Balthasers. The family’s bottling business was bought out in 1963 by the larger Cacoosing Dairy, which eventually sold out to Clover Farms Dairy.
“The dairies got eaten up by other bigger dairies. There was just no future in it,” Jim said.
In 1971, Dorothy and her late husband, Donald, Jim’s father, bought out the farm and shifted the focus toward crop farming.
Today, Jim and his youngest son, Mark, do most of the farm work. They raise a small herd of 45 beef cattle and farm two separate tracts of land, including 30 acres of corn, 80 acres of wheat, 110 acres of soybeans and 80 acres of hay.
Over the years, the family has had to adjust as land they used to farm has been converted into shopping centers and homes.
In 2001, Jim bought a neighboring 86-acre farm, which he now uses to house finishing beef cattle and for general storage.
Jim purchases steers from cow-calf operations, mainly in Chester and Sullivan counties. The calves arrive weighing roughly 400 pounds and are sent off to slaughter at around 1,500 pounds.
The herd is made up of mostly Angus and Red Angus, with some other breeds sprinkled in.
The cattle are raised on pasture and finished with a mixture of grains raised on the farm and other “extras” that Jim has found over the years, including ground-up potato chips and chocolate, which Jim gets from local businesses.
“It’s a good-quality meat when they are finished,” he said.
Along with the beef cattle, Jim’s daughter, Melanie, and her husband, Casey, raise a small flock of layer hens and sell the eggs directly off the farm.
But farm work is not the only thing that occupies their time.
Over the years, the family has built up an impressive line of antique farm collectibles, including tractors, machinery and even an antique Case car.
“I guess my dad had a disease, and me and Mark got it,” Jim said, laughing.
One of the oldest and most unusual pieces of the collection is a modified 1927 Indian motorcycle with a cultivator.
Jim’s father bought it from a Chevy dealer in Reading, and the family has since taken it to local fairs and auto shows, where it has wowed crowds.
“He said, we got to have that,’ and he bought it. People get excited when they see it,” Jim said.
Another piece, a 1937 John Deere tractor, was fully restored by Matthew as a senior project. He drives the tractor each year in the Gouglersville Grange Parade.
The old dairy barn is where most of the collection is kept. Most of the stalls where the Holsteins were once kept are now filled with pieces of the collection. Jim calls it his “farm museum.”
The pressures of farming in an area that is now essentially the suburbs can be great.
“The traffic is just a nightmare,” said Jim of getting equipment down the road.
Even so, the family has made living on the farm a lifelong commitment.
Mark, who — when compared with his more outgoing siblings is quite shy — intends on taking over the farm when his dad no longer wants to do it.
“He always wanted to have the farm. That’s what he has wanted to do since he was a kid,” Matthew said.
Melanie and Casey love raising their hens, and they both hold jobs off the farm.
Even though he doesn’t live on the farm, Matthew spends a lot of time there and brings his stepdaughter, Bianca, to the farm with him.
The family has mixed feelings about getting the award.
They were nominated before but never won.
Gladys is happy to receive the honor but feels it would have been better if the family would have gotten it when the kids were in high school, when they were ridiculed for being the “farm kids.”
“It would have made for some good positives to educate others about farming,” she said. “Nobody realizes how hard these guys work. It is a completely different lifestyle than what most people are used to.”
For Jim, the award was a surprise; he always felt larger farms were more deserving.
“It was a little yes and no. I should be proud though. We work hard at it,” he said.
Melanie, though, has no problem getting the award.
“I was glad. We had tried to do it before. It’s nice to get recognized for things you do,” she said. |
