FARMINGTON – Dairy products brought to the door by a milkman is a thing of the past for most communities. Home delivery of milk in the Farmington area is now also history.

For several years, Bailey Hill Farm Dairy provided the service to approximately 200 customers as well as supplying about 15 local stores with milk, said Konrad Bailey early Tuesday morning. But, he recently stopped that part of the business, along with processing milk and making ice cream.

The reason, the 45-year-old said, is a change in priorities. He’s tired of working 20-hour days, seven days a week and going three years without a day off. Family has to come first, he said.

Seventeen years ago, Bailey said, he left a five-day-a-week position as a millwright to return to work on the farm with his parents, Kenton and Shirley Bailey. But, now it’s like working two seven-day-a-week jobs with too much to do and not enough people to go around.

He returned to help build and diversify the family farm as a business for his children and nephews, he said, but while his son works with him, it’s not a burning desire for either of his children.

“It’s the law of diminishing returns,” he said, as he explained the work involved and the difficulties of making farming financially feasible.

“The agriculture system is flawed,” he said, “because the farmer has no control over prices. As fuel prices recently went through the roof, milk prices went up a little, but it forced farmers right against the edge.”

Bailey said the farm realized a $20,000 loss this year because of fuel oil. To provide home deliveries and stock stores, he employed two people and spent $1,000 a month on barn supplies to support it, he said.

Agriculture prices provided by the United States Department of Agriculture for May show a farmer should have received $3.47 per gallon for milk shipped bulk rate from his farm. For home delivery, he was charging $4 a gallon, he said.

“I don’t do what I do for money. I do what God wants me to do,” he said. “But when the land won’t support itself, it’s time to realize I don’t have to work seven days a week to provide cheap food.”

“In Canada,” he said, “you don’t see house lots popping up on farm land because they get paid what it costs to farm.”

Years ago, while working on a farm study, his father, who tried to help farmers band together, was told by a professor at a local university, “‘Your pay is your love of the job,'” Bailey said. He wondered how utility companies would like to be paid with love.

“The reward of farming is the success accomplished through hard work and sweat, but when it doesn’t support itself, it is what it is,” he said.

Bailey and his son, along with help from a part-time worker, his wife and mother, plan to continue working the 25 cows and 80 heifers on the farm, but he doesn’t know where it will end, he said.

“There are no promises even though a farmer is considered a traitor by other farmers when you leave farming. It’s like a fraternity,” he said. “But I’m not going to compromise my family to feed people at a loss.”

Bailey said he hopes to spend more time with his son, now 20, teaching him carpentry and other skills.