Vermont Farm Women: Lisa Kaiman

The following is a partial excerpt from Peter Miller's newest book, Vermont Farm Women.

There is something quirky about Lisa Kaiman's two passions -- skiing and milking. She first put on skis at the age of three when her family brought her to Vermont from New Jersey to ski at Okemo ski resort, so most of us can understand the first. But milking? This one blossomed in 1985, when she helped out at a friend's farm in Bridport, Vermont. 

"I love milking. When I'm not milking, I'm dreaming about it. It's calming. Relaxing. It gets in your blood and you can't get it out. Maybe it is the tempo of the swish, swish, swish of the milk."

This combination of sport and chore has led Lisa to create a dairy farm in Chester, Vermont, a twenty-minute drive from the ski slopes of Okemo Mountain. 

Lisa planned at an early age to become a veterinarian. She graduated from the University of Vermont and began veterinarian school at Colorado State, well located for skiing.

"I hated vet school." ..."So I sat down and asked myself, 'When were you the happiest, when were you the most relaxed?' And it came back to milking."

Lisa returned to Vermont where she worked a variety of jobs as she searched for a place to start a dairy. Four years later she had enough money to buy a house in Chester with 33 acres. No electricity, no running water, no kitchen, no bathrooms, no heat -- but no mortgage either.

And no barn. She applied for a loan to build one, but banks don't like to give money for that; dairying is a risky venture, and the loan interest rates are high. In Vermont the trend has been to close dairy farms, not start them. Lisa was told by other farmers that she was nuts to start a dairy farm; there was no way she could succeed, experts warned, particularly if she had only under thirty cows, when the average Vermont farm milks one hundred and some large dairies outside of Vermont milk thousands. In addition, Lisa is not married and has no physical support beyond what is packed into her five-foot, one-inch, 100-pound body; no moral support beyond her own pluck and drive....

You'll have to get Peter Miller's book to finish Lisa's story and read about many other Vermont Farm Women. See our book review for additional information. 

Source:  Peter Miller, Vermont People, Waterbury, VT: Silver Print Press,  2002.