Trudy Chambers
Location: Knox, Maine
Islandport Press:
The Cows are Out! Two Decades on a Maine Dairy Farm
BY: Trudy Chambers Price
ABOUT THE BOOK: Family dairy farms are disappearing in Maine and with them, a way of life. Trudy Chambers Price has captured the daily joys and struggles of the family farm in a way that ensures this Maine way of life will not be forgotten.
Price and her husband raised two sons and hundreds of cows on Craneland Farm in Central Maine. The work was never-ending and exhausting, but also exhilarating and rewarding. In this bittersweet memoir of two decades of dairy farming, Chambers writes of the daily trials of haying, cow breeding and milking against a backdrop of gentle and entertaining rural life. She introduces kind neighbors, eccentric neighbors, visiting city folk and loveable pets. The Cows Are Out! is a tribute to hard-working family farmers and to an important part of Maine's historical and cultural heritage.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Trudy Chambers Price was born in Island Falls, Maine, and grew up in the Aroostook County town of Caribou. Her family has lived in The County for more than five generations. She was one of three children and like most County youths, earned money picking potatoes, starting at age ten and working for twenty-five cents a barrel. Trudy graduated from Caribou High School in 1958 and from the University of Maine at Orono in 1962. She married Ron Price the day she graduated from college.
In 1966, she and Ron purchased a 150-acre dairy farm in Knox, Maine (about fifteen miles from Belfast), where they worked together for the next twenty-three years while also raising their children, Kyle and Travis. During her time at Craneland Farm, she also spent two years teaching third grade at Mt. View Elementary School in Thorndike to help pay the farm bills. She also began to write about her experiences as a dairy farmer. The Cows Are Out! is the result of that effort, begun on a typewriter in her old farmhouse on Knox Ridge.
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