How Dairy Farmers Are Turning Manure Into Money
The Connecticut River cuts between the Green Mountains of Vermont and the White Mountains of New Hampshire and rushes into the heart of Massachusetts, where Denise Barstow Manz stands in the wind, surveying the land her family has farmed for 217 years.
“We have some of the best soil in the entire world,” says Barstow Manz. “It’s called Hadley silt loam.” She explains how the rich Connecticut River flood plain that’s wedged between the river and the Mount Holyoke mountain range behind her nourished tobacco, asparagus, broom corn and squash for her 1800s ancestors, and how it now grows hay and corn for the current farm’s 600 dairy cows.