Tragedy comes to the River Cottage Farm

Yesterday I got the worst call. I was out in the field cultivating spring plantings when my dear friend Debbie Apple called. I picked up the phone to hear the news, her beautiful, almost completed dairy barn burned to the ground. I lost a barn to a fire years ago, I know why she called me first, I could understand, sadly, exactly how she, her son Brayden and her husband Greg felt as they watched their structure burn to the ground. This is her story to tell, but I wanted to immediately fundraise. Asking for help is the hardest thing to do, so I am going to ask for help for them. Please read this story and donate if you can.

These are Debbie's reflections:

The cause of the fire is unknown, but it seems it might have been a spark from a nearby grain fire. Brayden was in the barn to get some tools twenty minutes before we got the call that the barn was engulfed in flames. The fire lasted thirty minutes, and it took 20,000 gallons of water to keep it from spreading. The main thing is that no one was hurt and that our cows are safe and sound.

As the mother of a son who has milked in a 10 x 10 milking barn with no heat for 14 years without a single complaint, this was my great gift to him for his faithfulness, a beautiful dairy barn. This dairy had the cows up on a ramp so that Brayden could milk standing up rather than bent over, reaching under the girls, and he would have been able to milk three girls at a time, not just one.

We took a 50-year-old uninsurable barn and put on a new roof, foundation, walls, door, concrete pads and ramps, water lines, electricity, and the milking parlor stanchions. Saturday would have been our last workday to prepare the parlor for the cows on Monday. I was so proud of our work and couldn’t wait to show my insurance agent so we could get it insured!

So, starting now, we need to find a place to milk the cows.

Another part of the loss is our walk-in freezer. Thankfully, we haven’t moved any of our meat into it yet, but tomorrow we will start the search for a new walk-in freezer .

Now, here comes the really hard part, we need to ask for your help.

You can also donate through this GoFund Me page or if you are a River Cottage Farm customer, you can donate at any of the markets. Whether or not you can donate at this time, we will have everyone out to the new farm to see the new dairy when it’s up and running!

Here are our needs.

Barn –$75,000, including the barn, electricity, and water. This amount will build a barn 1/5 the size of the old tobacco barn.

Used Milking system – $8,000

Used walk-in freezer – $25,000 This amount will pay for a freezer one-quarter the size of the one we lost.

Concrete floor – 10,000

Fence posts, generators, tools, hay equipment, hay, air compressor, and everything else stored in the barn extra.