Originally published Saturday, February 14, 1998

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

There are at least 150 reasons Sally and Jerry Sinnema haven't had a vacation in 22 years of married life:

And they're all black-and-white and say "Moo!" a lot.

If Holsteins are here to stay, you can't say as much for dairy farm families working their own spreads. Jerry and Sally Sinnema, third-generation Carnation dairy farmers, might be among the last.

Who in his right mind would work from 3 a.m. to 9 p.m., seven days a week, 365 days a year, year after year? "There are times we've seriously considered quitting . . . which is why I should remember to check my lottery tickets," quipped Sally, whose family also has deep dairy roots in the Snoqualmie Valley. She fell in love with Jerry when they both attended Tolt (now called Cedar Crest) High School, and fact is, they both love this hard way of life.

"The very best part has been, and still is, being close as a family, being with my kids all the time. We work with one another and depend on one another as a family," she said as she paused on the barn side of their West Snoqualmie Valley road property.

Christmas, Easter, July Fourth, all the holidays are -- must be -- observed at midday, between the morning and evening milkings. Any family birthday parties are celebrated between milkings or at the supper hour . . . with all the candles blown and everything cleaned up in time for the evening milking.

Oh, there was one minivacation, a three-day trip back to Madison, Wis., as part of a dairy association convention. Virtually everything else in their daily lives is plugged into or molded around twice-a-day milkings and year-round calvings.

This Norman Rockwell sort of mom in overalls and knee-high rubber boots dashes back and forth across the road between the milking barn and her home, where she does her house chores and farm book work. But the three Sinnema daughters -- Tasha, Shana and Katie -- were raised as much in the barn as in the house.

"I began helping with the milking when the girls were 5, 2 and 1 month," Sally, 43, recalled. "I might leave the older one in the house and have the other two on floor mats out here in the machine room. They slept with all that noisy machinery running.

"Then they were in a play pen, in with the calves, when the oldest girl was big enough to watch the other two."

Dairy farming "is a way of life, not a job," Sally said. "And we're in it to the point where we're too young to quit and too old to start over again at something else."

Jerry's part of the interview is conducted over the din of machinery and moos in the double-six milking parlor where he and helper Tim Heen are doing production-line, non-stop work. Conversation is sparse above the sounds of work and the piped-in KMPS radio country music. Sorry, Dave Ross, no talk-radio in dairyland. "The cows seem to like the music . . . but so do we," Jerry, 45, concedes during an unusual break.

Aside from a small break when he tried construction work, he's been milking cows "since I could walk," Jerry said. He and Sally began buying the farm from his dad, Cor Sinnema, about 10 years ago. His mother's father, Grandpa Vandermeer started the farm. His parents live on five acres nearby and Dad Sinnema still helps out with chopping silage.

"We couldn't make it if we had to buy our own," he says of the hay they grow on 140 acres of river valley flood plain. "As it is, we have to buy straw and about 16 tons of supplemental feed a week."

The milking herd's gone from about 75 when he took over to about 150, plus about 100 younger stock. And Jerry and Sally have added a commodity shed for feed and another pair of milking stations to run about 132 cows through twice-a-day milking.

That translates to about 70 pounds of milk daily per cow, up about 20 percent from earlier days. "We've had to boost production with more feed because prices haven't risen," Jerry explained. "The price to us fluctuates from $10 to $16 per hundredweight, and it costs about $12 per hundredweight to produce the milk. There's not much left, especially since the government dropped price supports several years ago."

Which is why Larry DeBoer, Jack Decker, Scott Wallace and other local dairy farmers he knows have dropped out of this business in recent years. "Even Carnation Farms is scaled down from what it used to be; I can think of only maybe 10 small dairy farmers left between here and Duvall."

They couldn't begin to afford buying new stock, so the Sinnemas follow the old Dutch dairy farming philosophy of keeping a closed herd -- raising their own calves, selling off some and raising the others till they're old enough to milk. They "beef" those too old to put out the required quality or quantity.

"We're done expanding; we're about as big as we can afford to get and still maintain," he said. Much of their bottom land is immune to development, and surrounding high ground development is bringing anti-dairy sentiments. Dairy farming now requires costly manure lagoons and a whole lot of environmental and governmental regulations.

In turn, some folks in nearby developments complain of the smell of dairy farming wafting through their costly home sites upwind from the valley floor.

Friends of the Sinnema girls who may visit and ask for a glass of milk may wrinkle their noses at the taste of whole milk, which is like a malted milk compared with how it ends up in supermarket gallon jugs. And the girls "take a lot of teasing" from some non-farming kids about living and working on a farm, according to Sally.

"They get $2 a day for doing their daily dairy chores, and they've always been able to make more by taking care of the calves, that sort of thing," Sally said. "They've loved it, and it's been a great life to grow up in -- cow (bleep) and dirt didn't matter. But it's a little different now that they're grown. They probably won't spend the rest of their lives on dairy farms."

The family budgets for special purchases, including farming and dairy equipment. "The pressure is always there to keep running, so I have to make most of the repairs myself," Jerry said. They bought a car "about 10 years ago," he noted. "Last year, we finally had to buy a new -- rather, used -- tractor, an '87 Massey-Ferguson four-wheel drive, for $32,000. They cost about $75,000 new."

Sally added that other special budgeted purchases have included a hot tub, a satellite dish antenna, and an above-ground swimming pool.

There are some things that no amount of money can buy. "Sunrise on the (Cascade) mountains across the valley is spectacular! I wouldn't give up that view for anything," she exclaimed as we stood in the pre-dawn.

But more than that: "It's the sense that we own our house and our livelihood; we don't work for someone else. We've built it up and kept it going and you put your heart and soul into it and you've made it work.

"That, and having your family work with you and be with you -- that has made it all worthwhile."

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I.