A golf cart hauling two of Rob Morrill’s biggest blessings – a pair of children with tousled hair and chattering voices – careened along the dirt path coursing through Morrill Farm.

Home from a swim in the Merrimack River, they plunged their fists in and out of a family-sized bag of Cape Cod potato chips and examined one another’s fingers, splayed like starfish and shimmering with salt.

Through these children, the youngest of his descendants, Morrill glimpses the future of his family dairy farm.

Today, the fourth generation of Morrills — Rob’s sons Andy, Kevin and Ryan, the toddlers’ father — already runs the farm. In 2019, what was once a dairy farm began raising beef for the retail market at Ryan’s encouragement. Andy began growing small grains to sell to local breweries and distilleries around the same time. Now, at least a dozen New Hampshire brewers use Morrill grain; Henniker Brewing Company has even named a beer after the local supplier.

On a blistering June afternoon, sweat beading on his forehead, Rob Morrill reminded his sons that, in business as in life, change is the only constant.

“At this point the farm is in good hands,” Rob Morrill said. “It’s going to be different in the future than what it was.”

As for himself, he shrugged: “What’s your definition of retirement? You do what you want, right? Well, that’s what I’ve done my whole life.”

Morrill Farm has been a landmark in Penacook for nearly a century. The farm has grown and evolved to survive. Its model has always been diversified. Rob’s grandfather, John Morrill, who in 1925 first moved the business from Mountain Road in Concord to its current location, owned a concurrent coal business. In the early 1940s, Rob’s father started a snow-plowing business his sons still run in the winter.

As his family enterprise approaches its 100-year anniversary, Rob Morrill is determined to make it last.

The Morrills are in the final stages of securing something of a centennial birthday gift for themselves, a conservation easement on their 208-acre home farm through the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests. In 2021, the society conserved 124 acres of the family’s land in Boscawen and the organization has already met its fundraising goal to purchase an easement on the Morrills’ Penacook farm. Anne Truslow, vice president for development at the Forest Society, said they hope to close on the easement by the end of summer.

The land includes more than a mile of river frontage and provides a habitat to at least 13 plant and animal species classified as rare, threatened or species of concern, according to the New Hampshire Natural Heritage Bureau.

Once the easement is settled the land will be protected from development in perpetuity.

“My father, even my grandfather, they were pretty passionate about their land. They would roll over in their graves if this farmland wasn’t farmland,” Rob Morrill said. “I work this land, but you know, there might be a day when there isn’t a Morrill working it. But it’s going to be farmland. It’s going to be open space.”

Rooted in the land

In the early 20th century, John Morrill’s farm business was comprised of one cow, a pair of horses and 50 acres of tillable land. An empire by comparison, his family’s farm now encompasses more than 500 acres of tillable land, about 320 dairy animals and 40 feeder beef. A constellation of cattle speckle their pasture, an expansive quilt of verdant green.

Rob Morrill has fond memories of his early years on the farm. He remembers April 1970, when he stood in the farm’s rust-colored cow barn, then a new structure, and watched as the first cow was milked inside.

“A day like today would have been a family day, where we were all out in the hay fields,” he said, tugging at a gray ball cap embroidered with a heifer. “If there was hay everybody was involved.”

Sustaining the business had always and would always require elbow grease. Rob and Sherri Morrill married in 1980 and when their first son was born Sherri left her customer service job at the old Concord Savings Bank to work on the farm; there was no shortage of milking and feeding of the animals to be done. “I came to work many days with a baby in a Snuggly or a kid in a backpack,” she recalled.

Their children took their first steps on the land. They learned to feed calves. Then, Rob and Sherri gave their children the option to leave. For Rob, studying agriculture at the State University of New York, Cobleskill, in the early 1970s had been full of small eye-openers, like the silver bulk tanks that reinvented a tedious system of canned milk that needed to be personally delivered to the processing plant. He wanted the same for his children.

“It totally blew my mind,” he said. “You know, when you work in one place, that’s the only way that you know.”

Andy went out west on a combine crew and made lifelong friends, Ryan worked for a logger and Kevin took a job with an embryo transfer veterinarian in Maine. Like their father before them, they eventually found their way back to the farm. Their sister, the Morrills’ only daughter, also married a dairy farmer and lives in northern New York state.

“It is one of the biggest blessings I’ve had in life, that all four of my children are involved in the dairy industry, because it’s so rare,” he said.

Despite tremendous expansion and change, so much stays the same year to year and generation to generation. Ben Morrill, 14, works as a calf feeder on the farm several afternoons a week, like his father and grandfather did when they were his age. The farm itself has supplied milk to the Hood plant on North Main Street in Concord during its entire existence.

“It’s all in the family. There’s tradition up here,” Rob said.

‘For the love of dairy cows’

After years of early mornings and missed weekend engagements, Rob and Sherri Morrill have taken a step back. Sherri still milks cows on Sunday afternoons and, in preparation for their open farm day on July 5, she’s become the family’s armchair archivist, sorting through old photos and newspaper clippings to display on a gallery wall.

Neither she nor her husband will relinquish breeding red and black Holsteins, either. The Morrills show their cows, with their pedigrees and auburn-splashed coats. They sell them, too. Recently, a buyer from upstate New York purchased an eight-month-old calf from the family, a descendant of Carla, the original red and black Holstein the couple started with in the 1990s. They have even sold embryos overseas.

“Any of us who have ever gotten up before 3 a.m. to milk cows will tell you that, if you got to get up that early to milk cows, you do not want to look at ugly cows,” Rob quipped. “We market cattle that we want to do well for other people. We do it for the love of dairy cows.”

The future of the business belongs to their children. Some of their challenges resemble those of previous generations; others, like the environmental impacts of climate change on their grain production are uncharted territory. With new technologies and know-how, the solutions they come up with will certainly look different.

Their son Andy, who drove combines on big grain farms in Montana years ago, knows that Morrill Farm isn’t large in the grand scheme of American agriculture. And he knows farmland is a finite resource.

“We’ve got a lot of family here. How to feed everybody – that’s always been the biggest struggle,” he said. “We would need more ground and we don’t have that. Do more with less, right?”

In the absence of more acres, he’s doubling up on the acres he has by double cropping. As early July approaches, he’ll harvest the winter barley and plant a summer annual crop, like sorghum sudangrass, which they can harvest into round bales and either sell or use to feed their own cows.

“We definitely want to continue what we’re doing. We’re also always looking what’s going to be the next thing,” Andy said. “And there needs to be a next thing. We just don’t know what it is yet.”

If you go

Morrill Farm’s open farm celebration marking its 100th year of family farming will take place on July 5 at 33 Penacook Road, in Penacook. Guests are welcome to roam the farm, eat ice cream, drink chocolate milk and explore farming equipment from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

To learn more about the Forest Society’s planned conservation easement on the Morrills’ home farm, visit https://www.forestsociety.org/farming-future-help-protect-morrill-dairy-farm-merrimack-river.

Rebeca Pereira can be reached at rpereira@cmonitor.com