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The Williams’ dairy farm: A Land & Sea archival special
Dairy farming in Newfoundland and Labrador changed a lot over the back half of the 20th century, and the dairy farm run by the Williams proved it.Calves like this one were almost all born via artificial insemination on the farm by the early 1980s. (CBC)The Williams family had been in the dairy farming business for…
Dairy farming in Newfoundland and Labrador changed a lot over the back half of the 20th century, and the dairy farm run by the Williams proved it.
The Williams family had been in the dairy farming business for decades when Land & Sea visited the farm in 1983. In the time that had passed since Emmanuel Williams — who had died in his 90s a few years earlier — started the farm, much had changed.
Even in the years since it had been taken over by Weldon Williams, his wife Valda Williams, and now their six children, dairy farming had become more modern and more complicated.
The dairy farming itself had become highly mechanized, now part science and part business. As a result, the milking was now the easiest and most routine part of the operation, even with 400 gallons of milk coming from the farm's 96 milking animals daily.
The pedigree of those animals was increasingly complex — and expensive. A month-old heifer with good bloodlines could cost up to $2,000, and the family would travel across eastern Canada to get one. Nearly all the breeding of those animals was now down by artificial insemination.
However, once in a while a birth wouldn't progress as it should, and Weldon and Valda's son Wayne Williams would have to take matters into his own hands. Literally.
Valda Williams was responsible for the farm's bookkeeping, which had also expanded significantly over the years. It used to be that she did the farm bookkeeping in an exercise book, she said, and just gave the book to the accountant at the end of the year for taxes.
“It's not that easy today,” Valda said. “We have to keep count of everything.”
That included keeping track of the output from the cows, which was important in part because the butterfat content of the milk they produced determined the price the farm would get for it. That tracking was done by Joan Williams, Wayne's wife.
But however complicated it had gotten, the record keeping — which covered everything from expenses to cow bone density — couldn't be neglected, Valda said.
“It's very important,” she said.
“It's just as important as milking the cows.”
Learn more about the dairy industry and the Williams' farm in this episode of Land & Sea, available to watch in full on YouTube.
Want more Land & Sea? Click here to see a playlist of archival episodes on our YouTube channel, and you can watch more recent episodes on our CBC Gem streaming service here.
Read more from CBC Newfoundland and Labrador
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