Farm therapy has sustained Thomas Maxwell all his life, and it’s especially important to him now.
Tending to the land and animals is good medicine. It keeps him active and engaged – breathing in fresh air blowing through the pasture grass and thinking about how to raise the best beef cows possible.
“I live through a positive mental attitude,” he said at the kitchen table with his wife, Judy, while taking a break from tending his herd.
Tom is 81 and fighting stage 4 prostate cancer that has made its way to his spine, but you would never know it. He has spent his life baling hay, loading trucks, and fixing gates, and he can’t let it go.
“As I get older, I really can’t do that much,” he said. “But I have figured out the best way to take care of my land.”
Tom drives his Polaris Ranger over the 170 acres that have been in his family for three generations and more than more than 100 years, since 1906.
Growing up here, Tom worked with his family raising dairy cows, hogs, and sheep. The farm is home to old structures, from barns to houses, from generations past.
Tom and Judith took down the original house in 2010 and renovated a more modern house nextdoor. Now, the two maintain the farm with their son, who lives just down the street.
Cole Maxwell, 27, will take over the farm eventually, but for now he helps his dad with the big projects on the farm. Although, when trees fall, Tom is most likely to take care of it himself.
“I can’t cut a lot of wood anymore, so I got an electric chainsaw, and I take my sprayer around on the side of the buggy to kill the ironweed.”
Tom knows every rock and groundhog hole and every pasture fence line on Dry Creek Valley Farm, and he cares for his cows like they’re his own children.
Judy says they recognize his face, and the cows always know what to do when heads their way. “It was the same with his father, too,” she said. “I swear, it’s their bullheadedness, the cows see them coming.”
Tom worked in a factory for a while and then for a printing and direct-mail advertising company in Newark for 31 years before retiring at age 58 to focus on the farm.
The Maxwell family has been raising grass and beef cattle for almost 20 years. Tom says that grass-fed cows are healthier. He sections off his large pasture and allows the 29 cows to graze for a couple of days and then moves them to the next section.
He said he has never had to give them medication for worms and rarely calls a veterinarian.
“Large farms just look to get their cows as big as possible, feed them as much grain as they can eat, and when they get sick, they pump them full of shots,” he said. “Once a cow becomes sick, it is likely to fall ill again. I haven’t had to have a vet come out here in 20 years. We raise our cows to be sustainable.”
| Read Part 1: Ohio’s Historic Family Farms program preserves state’s agricultural heritage and history of its top industry
| Read Part 2: Licking County’s Historic Family Farms, Part 2: The Original Hatfield Homestead, circa 1831
| Read Part 3: Licking County’s Historic Family Farms, Part 3: The Stevenson “Crack of Dawn Farm,” circa 1890
| Read Part 4: Licking County’s Historic Family Farms, Part 4: The Shaw Farm, circa 1883
| Read Part 5: Licking County’s Historic Family Farms, Part 5: Legend Hills Orchard/The Hoar Farm, circa 1904
Tom is an avid reader of many agricultural magazines and newspapers, and he found great wisdom in the writings of a few authors.
“There was a huge push in the ’90s for farmers,” he said. “It was ‘get big or get out,’ and I got caught up in it – borrowing money to expand, monocropping fields of only soybeans and corn, and soybeans and corn. Eventually, I said enough is enough, and we went back to beef cattle.”
The family sells to customers across central Ohio – people who would buy a whole cow and fill their family’s freezers with a year’s worth of beef.
Dry Creek Valley Farm is listed on the website EatWild.com, and some customers come to the Maxwells through that listing. Many found Tom through word of mouth, and he sells them whole cows, halves or quarters to stock their freezers.
“We have red Angus cows,” he said, looking out across pasture that stretches as far as anyone can see across the valley north of Dry Creek Road in McKean Township. “There is a lot of talk about black Angus being the best, and Angus does have the tenderness gene, but I chose red Angus for a reason.
“The red Angus are much less sensitive to the heat,” he said. “One day, I looked out, and the red Angus were grazing standing in the hot summer sun, and I turned to see the all the black cows sitting in the shade.”
A man who raises beef for a living wants to see his cows eating grass.
Tom studies pedigrees and only buys cows he can trace. Part of his farming philosophy is sustainability.
“These corn and soybean only farms strip the soil of nutrition,” he said. “Their goals are quantity – how big can we get the cows, how much more corn can we grow?”
All of this has had an effect on the environment, he said.
“Dry Creek never flooded,” he said. “Now, the bottom pasture of my farm floods all the time, ruining the soil. We never had flooding, and now it floods more than five times a year. It is all because of ‘Get big or get out.’ There is nothing to stop the runoff from these farms; their soil is degraded.”
Tom believes that big farming booms in the 1990s are to blame for a lot of what is wrong with the agricultural industry today. Government subsidies allowed big farmers to get bigger, leaving little room and creating low survival rates for smaller farms. “Take away the subsidies, see where these big farmers end up without taxpayer dollars.”
Much of Tom’s beliefs come from the many pages of agricultural articles and books he has read. One author he quotes frequently is Alan Guebert, an award-winning agricultural journalist who writes the syndicated column “Farm and Food File,” which appears in the Farm and Dairy newspaper.
“I’ve done everything I can do to hold onto (the farm) and make it profitable enough to sustain it,” Tom said. “I just want to be able to pass it on.”
He said he grew up watching how much his family put into the farm. “I saw what my dad did, and I remember watching my grandma die in the house, so I don’t want to see anyone disrespect it,” he said.
Tom’s farming principles are attuned to nature and help preserve the environment and historic character of his farm. It allows wildlife to flourish on the property along with his cows.
“My neighbors down the street are all soybeans and corn and soybeans and corn. They told me over here is the only place they have seen red-winged black birds in forever. I say, ‘Come around here, I see them all the time.’”
Tom parks his four-wheeler along a fence line and sits, listening as the cardinals, nuthatches and downy woodpeckers chirp.
“It is so peaceful,” he said. “A lot of times, I come out here to think.”
It’s all part of Tom’s positive mental attitude – his PMA, as he calls it: He loves where he lives.
“Growing up here, I was a wiseguy, and didn’t appreciate everything I had and did. Now, I wouldn’t give it up for anything. It is a legacy – that’s the only way to describe it. It is hard to put into words what the land and everything we have here means to me.”
Tom may not have loved the hay-baling of his youth, assisting with every chore his father asked of him – plus helping out neighbors who helped the Maxwell family in return – but good lessons and some of his best memories come from those times.
“I remember my first hogs,” Tom recalled his first gig without any help. “I definitely fed them too much, they were the fattest pigs. I sold them for an okay deal, but I had never felt more proud of myself, that is one of my first memories of going off to do farm tasks by myself. It was fulfilling to work on fattening them up and taking them down to the auction.”
And soon, he was off again in his four-wheeler, tending to the land and his animals, and drawing strength and wisdom from his farm therapy.
Delaney Brown writes for TheReportingProject.org, the nonprofit news organization of Denison University’s Journalism program, which is supported by generous donations from readers. Sign up for The Reporting Project newsletter here. Brown reported this series as part of the Lisska Summer Scholars Program at Denison University, funded in part by the Robert F. & Marion E. Ball Family.