Harcum family may lose Colonial era-farm amid dairy industry decline

“You kept thinking next year’s going to get better,» the owner of Company A says. «Sometimes you would make some money. But the times when you didn’t make money wouldn’t equalize with the times when you did make money.”
To survive, Company A raids its savings account. Or sells off assets. Or piles up debt.
Such is the plight of William «Blan» Harcum Jr., the real-life owner of Company A.
His Mardela Springs business doesn’t make widgets. That would almost certainly be more lucrative. No, he’s a dairy farmer.
Or at least he was.
Amid downward global pressure on milk prices and ever-rising production costs, he sold his herd in August 2016. Now, Harcum and other family members are just trying to hang onto the land that has been run under their name since the 1600s.
Their story is a familiar one in today’s dairy industry. From 2002 to 2012, the number of dairy farms across the country shrank nearly 40 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Maryland has seen about 1,000 dairy farms evaporate since 1992, and the trend shows no signs of easing. In fact, since just last October, 21 dairy producers have gone out of business in the Free State, said Steve Connelly, assistant secretary of marketing for the Maryland Department of Agriculture.
“And we’re going to lose some more,» he said. «I don’t know where this stops.”
Now out of the dairy business themselves, the Harcums make a living on their 250 acres of land by raising corn, soybeans, watermelons and, most recently, hogs.
Beechnut Farm, as they call it, provides enough income to survive on but not enough to make a dent in their debt, the family says.
Harcum’s daughter, Rebecca, recently launched a GoFundMe campaign, hoping to raise enough money to refinance the farm’s stubborn debt. She set the goal at $600,000, which would wipe out their financial obligations, but she admits that even $50,000 would put them within striking distance.
Rebecca is banking on a surge of goodwill from people who remember visiting the farm on elementary school field trips between 1989 and 2015.
“If all the kids that came out on a field trip to the farm gave a dollar,» she said, «we’d have 50 grand easy.»
Nearly a month into the campaign, the drive has collected a little more than $3,200.
Complicating their situation: the death of the family patriarch, a protracted legal battle over his estate, an untimely illness and a grisly killing in a watermelon patch.
Toiling hundreds of years
Harcums have been tilling the Eastern Shore since the days of Isaac Newton and the restoration of the monarchy in England. Family lore holds that they received a land grant from Lord Baltimore in the mid-1600s. Blan and Rebecca count themselves as the 14th and 15th generation.
Like many farmers of their day, the early Harcums raised livestock and grew all manner of fruits and vegetables. That would change in the 1940s under the leadership of William «Blan» Harcum Sr., who decided to cast his lot with dairy.
They joined a regional cooperative that morphed and grew through the years into present-day Land O’Lakes.
For the uninitiated: Raising and keeping milk cows is one of the most labor-intensive lines of work in agriculture. The younger Blan Harcum recalls getting up at 2 a.m. and not finishing his day’s toil until after dark.
That’s 365 days a year. No holidays.
“He would give off for workers so they could spend time with the family and he would work,» Rebecca said.
At its height toward the end of the last decade, the farm employed a half-dozen workers and was milking 200 cows. As recently as 2014, processors were paying $20-$21 per hundred pounds of milk — more than enough for a frugal family like the Harcums.
“I took what I absolutely needed to get by,» Blan said.
Two years later, his life turned upside down. And the farm would never be the same.
Problems pile up
In February 2016, his father died at the age of 92. Blan Sr. had been influential in all walks of life, serving 50 years as a member of the Wicomico County Republican Central Committee as well as on several trade boards.
Resolving his estate brought fresh urgency to the farm’s long-simmering financial issues.
From years of operating in the red, the dairy was deep in debt. In later years, transportation costs skyrocketed because they no longer had other dairy farmers in the area with whom to share the bill. (The Lower Shore’s last remaining dairy farm, Chesapeake Bay Farms of Pocomoke City, has its own processing facility.)
Meanwhile, thousands more dollars were tied up in a mortgage.
The ongoing estate dispute has placed the onus of paying off the debt squarely on Blan Jr.’s shoulders, he said. Unless outsiders come to their aid soon, he and his daughter face the possibility of having to sell off land to raise money.
In the middle of the biggest economic crisis of his life, Blan was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. The disease was so serious that doctors removed his esophagus and moved his stomach up to the base of his throat.
The 69-year-old is cancer free today, he says.
But that crisis wouldn’t be the end of the family’s troubles.
A family’s redemption?
Harcum’s son, 31-year-old William Blan «Trey» Harcum III, got into a fight with his uncle, grabbed a linchpin from a tractor and bashed in his skull in the middle of one of the family’s watermelon patches, police said.
For the killing of Lee Harcum, 62, Trey received 10 years in prison.
Blan and Rebecca insist that July 2015 killing has no bearing on their financial situation. But Delmarva Now reports from the time of the sentencing suggest that the ordeal further tore the extended family apart.
Rebecca said she worries that news coverage of the killing has cast a pall over her plea for financial help on behalf of her family. Instead, she wants people to remember the school field trips, the milk they delivered to local schools and, above all, the family’s four centuries of contributions to life on the Shore.
She is putting in the effort, she said, for the same reason her father got out of bed in the predawn hours all those years, only to end the day poorer than when he started.
“Farmers are the No. 1 optimists,» Rebecca said.
 
 
Link: http://www.delmarvanow.com/story/news/local/maryland/2018/02/22/harcum-family-farm-dairy-industry-decline/323857002/