BRIDPORT, Vt. – Jon Rutter, a dairy farmer in Addison County, walked through ice and mud to the school bus parked in his farm yard the other day. He peeked inside the door and had a word or two for the driver.
“I’ve always admired your cheapness having this bus here,” Rutter said.
The driver, Brian Gill, wasn’t ferrying Bridport schoolchildren. He was hauling thousands of pounds of farm supplies around the county, steering a rolling repository of teat dip, work boots, syringes, rat poison, ear tags, nozzles, antibiotics, hardware, cattle canes and scores of other items farmers need to run their operations.
Rutter, with about 200 cows at his organic dairy, ordered a product that wasn’t on board the mobile yellow store. He wanted a ton of kelp to feed his cows, a dietary supplement he says boosts his cows’ immune system. The purchase, for just under $1,000, would be delivered the next day by his helper, Gill said.
The advantage of shopping this way was summed in one word by Rutter: Time.
Time is always in short supply for dairy farmers. And a chunk of Gill’s time is spent opening barn doors and walking muddy lanes looking for farmers after he pulls up to their spreads. From farms the size of Rutter’s to one just a few miles away that’s about 10 times bigger – the 2,000-animal Blue Spruce Farm – farmers are buying items large and small from Gill.
At Blue Spruce, where they’re expanding even as they’re milking, the Audet brothers this week needed a supply of soap, another 150 to 200 ear tags for their calves, and a box of 20-gauge needles. Ernie Audet, one of thee three brothers who run the farm, returned the suede Wolverine boots Gill had brought on his last run and asked for a bigger size.
For 20 years, 19 of them in a school bus, Gill has been a kind of Avon Lady of farm supplies – with cosmetic-type gear, well, 150-pound containers of sanitizing solution, a top-seller. He grew up on a dairy farm in Cornwall, then worked for a stint as an artificial inseminator.
At 21, he decided to try something new. His first day on the job, driving a Grumman box van, he sold a shovel for $24.50, a tool that cost him $19.50. Gill, now 41, didn’t make $5 that day. Rather, he lost $4 – because he spent $9 on gas. But he was conversant in farming and seemed to have a knack for sales.
“I’m Brian Gill,” he said that first day. “I’ll be back in three weeks. I’d like your business.”
These days, with about 10 percent of his stock on board and the rest in a warehouse at the Cornwall farm, Gill has annual sales of $500,000 to $750,000, he said. He still hits every farm on his run at least once every three weeks.
He’s a curious and chit-chatty salesman who trades in stories about farming, football, Golden Gloves boxing and Little League baseball, rats in manure piles, kids and real estate. Gill has something to say on everything from moving a mobile home down a mountain gap to beating a rap on a traffic violation.
Gill puts in long days on the bus, traveling a route that takes him regularly to 125 Vermont farms, about 10 percent of the dairy farms in the state.
He makes deliveries in three counties: Addison, where he does the majority of his business, Chittenden and Grand Isle. The island run, which he makes every third Tuesday, is a 14-hour day.
Since Gill went into business three years after graduating from Middlebury Union High School, Vermont has lost almost 2,000 dairy farms. “This ship’s sinking,” Gill said. “I hate to see industries die, but I realize change is gonna happen.”
The shutting down of farms hasn’t meant a decline in his business. “There are less farms, but they use more things,” he said. “There are a variety of products, more of them, and larger sales at each stop.”
He bought his current school bus – his fifth – six months ago in Lancaster County, Pa., for $6,000. He spent another $2,500 to outfit it with shelves that line its walls and are neatly stocked with inventory.
By moving some boxes and papers, Gill can make room for a passenger in a seat behind his.
Rutter, who called the school bus option “cheap,” was on to something: Gill said he recently priced a box truck with about 300,000 miles on it for $30,000. His rig, though bright yellow, has been stripped of the lettering and signs that identify it as school bus.
Still, drivers occasionally slow down when they come upon Gill on the road. Using a bus means Gill has to haul everything down three steep steps in the front. But it serves his purposes well and certainly identifies him in the farm community.
“Yellow is the company color,” he said.
Wednesday, Gill’s truck stood in stark contrast to the silver-gray silos at Blue Spruce Farm, where Gill spent a good half hour or 45 minutes. The Audets are moving their calves to a new open-air building in the back, and Gill was getting used to the new layout.
He also needed to have a word with different brothers: Ernie for his shoe size, Earl about ear tags and a little bouncing from brother to brother – ending with Ernie – trying to sell the Audets a new solution, PH-sensitive, for cleaning cows’ hooves.
“It’s just something that constitute a big part of Gill’s business. He sells about $30,000 of farmer footwear a year, with the wear and tear of farmwork, walking through ice and mud and manure, building and fixing and milking, costing people three or four pairs of boots annually. For cows, prone to foot ailments from standing on concrete, Gill carries copper sulfate. Mixed with water it’s used to bathe the animals’ feet.
Gill’s eclectic inventory includes bags of cat food, a wise item to tote along as every barn seems to have a cat or two on the prowl. Stashed on the shelves are weaning rings, a studded nose piercing that, at $7 apiece, can be placed on a calf to dissuade her from sucking a young cow before she freshens, which can damage her udders.
There are also kickstops, another form of behavior modification. This adjustable C-shaped device, which might hang in a parlor, fits under a cow’s udder and over her hip to keep her from kicking when she’s being milked. If it’s used, it would be typically be on a first-calf heifer.
Gill demonstrated the drill, picking up a kickstop and fitting it on a phantom cow at the back of his bus. “This is what the machine feels like,” Gill told the errant animal, as if she were there. “This is what the process is like. Don’t kick me.”
Photographs of Gill’s three sons, ages 8 to 2 1/2, are taped to the front of his bus. On his rounds, he drives by the Bridport softball diamond, where he pitches, slow with a high arc, in the summer league. He wonders about the graying of farmers, and the dearth of kids interested in taking over. He savors the autonomy of steering his bus along the roads and past the farms of his childhood.
“I can’t imagine going to your shift at 7, getting out at 3,” Gill said, “having your two beers, eating supper, going to bed, getting up and doing it all again.”
AP-ES-01-27-06 1810EST
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