Adam Crete wakes up 2:30 a.m. seven days a week.
His bedtime, on the other hand, is a little more irregular. He pegged it at “whenever my kids let me.”
Crete owns and operates Highway View Farm, a 200-Holstein cow dairy operation in Boscawen. The third-generation family business earned the New England Green Pastures Award for New Hampshire – the honor for dairy farm of the year in the state.
The farm’s milk is sold to Dairy Farmers of America and processed at the HP Hood plant in Concord. A cow at Highway View is milked three times daily and produces, on average, a whopping 88 pounds of milk every day.
The farm’s biggest moneymaker is its dairy operation, but its income is supplemented with corn silage – animal feed made from corn stalks – that’s grown on about 450 acres and sold to other farms.
Locally, though, the farm is perhaps best known for its sweet corn, a crop it grows on about 12 acres on the property and sells out of a farmstand in the yard.
“Our family waits all year for your corn,” one commenter wrote on Facebook.
“Best sweet corn on Earth,” another said.
Edgar Crete bought the farm on River Road in the 1950s and converted it from a chicken to a dairy operation. Adam Crete’s parents, Bruce and Martha, took over the business in 1991.
Growing up on the farm, Adam Crete wasn’t sure he’d take it over one day.
“I saw how hard my father worked – and I wasn’t sure I wanted to work that hard,” he said.
But when Bruce died in 2008, Crete did just that, taking over the day-to-day operations of the business. He co-owns the farm with his mother, Martha, who still does the accounting, and his sister Sarah Sayer. Seven full-time employees work at the farm, along with a handful of seasonal part-timers.
Not much has changed in 30 years, Crete said, but the farm has seen some innovations. It recently stopped tilling the land, and plants winter rye as a cover crop. No-till agriculture is supposed to improve soil quality and water retention, and Crete said the farm switched over in part in reaction to last year’s extreme drought.
The drought hit the farm hard, although it still managed to grow enough silage to feed Highway View’s own herd.
This year’s rain was a welcome relief – until it didn’t stop. With so much precipitation, the Merrimack River flooded about 5 acres of land. And without a lot of dry days, silage harvesting is way behind schedule.
“It’s almost been just as stressful, with all the rain,” Crete said.
Like most New Hampshire dairy farms, Crete also struggles with chronically low milk prices.
“The toughest part is the milk price. If we knew we had a good market and a good milk price, it would be a lot easier. And then there’s fighting the weather,” he said.
Crete has three daughters, the oldest of whom is 5 and the youngest 8 months old, so he said it’s too soon to know whether a fourth generation of Cretes will run the farm. Abby, the eldest, has already declared she’ll be a veterinarian.
“I think my best bet will be for the middle one,” he said, referring to his children. “She’s all about riding in the tractors.”
(Lola Duffort can be reached
at 369-3321 or lduffort@cmonitor.com.)