WEST FRIENDSHIP, Md.—Clad in jeans and a salmon, button-down shirt, Teresa Stonesifer stands several feet from Midnight, as the cow rests in the green pastures of her farm. Stonesifer says she can feel her ears perk up.
“She’s been down. But I know she’s OK,” said Stonesifer. “I can feel it.”
The dark black cow is related to one of Stonesifer’s first cows as a child, also named Midnight. One of her fondest memories is coddling that Midnight as a little girl when her father brought her to the barn.
Stonesifer hopes naming Midnight after her predecessor brings the farm full circle across generations and preserves the family history of the farm.
“A lot of people have no idea of the heartaches that we go through on a daily basis. The blood, sweat and tears that go into farming. It’s bred into you,” said Stonesifer.
Almost 25 percent of the total land area in Howard County—nearly 161,000 acres—is farmland. Agriculture, an industry farmers say is changing and evolving, is among the top five industries in the county, according to data from the Howard County Farm Bureau. The county’s 318 farms average roughly 125 acres.
At Triple Creek Farm, a green expanse of rolling terrain on 97 acres in West Friendship, owners Stonesifer and her sister, Denise Dixon, struggle to hold on to the life, land and legacy of their family farm.
Passed down through generations since 1934, the farm has been protected under the county’s farmland preservation program since 1989. But its owners, part of the aging ranks of farmers in the county and throughout the state, wonder how long it will last.
Sustaining the life of the farm means embracing what is now a new normal for farmers in the county: taking on a second—or third—job to maintain the land and the legacy.
From the late 1980s, Stonesifer owned a small school bus company and worked the land when she wasn’t ferrying children to schools. She now works full time as “weigh master” at the county’s landfill to take advantage of health benefits after her husband, Gary, hurt his back in 1989 and is now physically disabled.
