Bodwell life in America

A Farm That Will Stay a Farm

Hal Bodwell and the dairy farm on Stumpfield Road, Kensington, New Hampshire

Most Bodwell farms are now a matter of old deeds and census pages. The farm on Stumpfield Road in Kensington, New Hampshire, a few miles west of Exeter, is still working. The family has owned the land for about a hundred years, and it has been a dairy farm all that time. At various points it also raised vegetables and chickens. Harold "Hal" Bodwell, who runs it today, belongs to the sixth generation of his family to farm it.

Going away, and coming back

As a boy, Hal helped his father on the farm. He liked the work well enough, but he wanted to try something else. At the University of New Hampshire he majored in zoology. In his junior year he took a few agriculture courses almost by chance. There he found the science behind the chores he had been doing all his life, and it hooked him. He finished with a minor in dairy studies.

Even so, he did not go straight home. He and his wife Elaine moved to New York State, where she had been offered a post as an occupational therapist. Hal worked in construction at first and then joined the state Department of Agriculture. But he wanted to farm with his own hands, and in the end he went back to Kensington to work alongside his father and uncle. Together they grew the herd and rebuilt the milking parlour.

Hal later laughed about coming home sure he could teach the older men a thing or two. He soon found that farming was far harder than it looked. He stayed anyway, joining what he had learned at university to what generations of his family had learned in the fields. The farm came through several hard times for dairy. Today Hal and one employee look after about 125 cows. They also sell grass-fed beef and supply small shops and customers who want to buy local food. In 2017 it was one of only five dairy farms left in Rockingham County.

Three hundred acres, kept open

Hal had long wanted to protect the land from development. He worked with the Southeast Land Trust of New Hampshire to place the whole 300 acres under a conservation easement. The job was large enough that it was done in two stages:

• The south side of the road. About 110 acres, including the farmhouse and barns, were conserved in late 2016. The cost was $485,000, paid mostly by New Hampshire's Land and Community Heritage Investment Program (LCHIP) and the 1772 Foundation, which works to save farmland.
• The north side of the road. The remaining 200 acres of fields and woodland followed a few years later. That easement cost $940,000. LCHIP gave $175,000 and the town of Kensington $100,000, and the rest came from private gifts. The Lewis Family Conservation Foundation led with a large donation, and more than a hundred local people gave as well.

This is an agricultural easement, so the family still owns the land and can keep farming it and cutting timber. The land stays open to the public as it always has been, and hunting is allowed except where crops are growing or cattle are grazing. The Bodwell acres were the last piece of a larger puzzle. With them in place, almost 2,000 acres of conserved land in Kensington now join up. The state's Wildlife Action Plan ranks the farm among the best wildlife habitat in New Hampshire, and its streams run into the Exeter River, so keeping it undeveloped also protects drinking water.

Why he did it

Hal's reasons were plain. He had spent years clearing the fields by hand, picking the stones out of them, and he could not bear the thought of houses going up on them:

"I didn't want to see it filled with houses."

There is a family story that sums it up. When Elaine walks the farm with one of their daughters, she sometimes points to a spot and says what a lovely place it would be for a house. Hal always has the same answer: put a house there, and you could no longer take that walk.

He does not know whether either of his two grown daughters will want to take on the farm. He was content either way. Even if no Bodwell owns the land a hundred years from now, it will still be open fields and woods, and he sees that as a legacy for the whole town of Kensington.