- When the road bears your name,
it likely means
you've lived there a long time,
as the Patnodes have for four generations.
♪ ♪
- Yeah, at eight, I bought my first calf,
or my dad bought it for me,
and from there,
it just kept growing... [laughs]
And the love and the passion just kept taking off,
I guess, from there on, you know?
- It was love and passion
that led to meeting the love of his life.
- I didn't come from a dairy farm.
I didn't grow up on one, but all of my friends
showed cattle.
- Jenni wanted to be like her friends
so showed her borrowed cow at the county fair.
- We met there,
and he claims
that I was, like, spraying him with the hose
to flirt, but I just didn't know what I was doing.
[both laugh]
So that's how we met,
and then he gave me a ride home after the fair,
and we've been together ever since,
so... what is that?
- 19 years. - 19 years.
Yep.
It was a little bit of adjustment
going from not growing up on a dairy farm
to-- his work hours
were from 5:00 in the morning
until about 7:30,
8:00 at night.
- 365 days a year. [laughs]
- Weekends, Christmas,
so it was a little bit to adjust,
but that was our life.
- Yep. - That's-- that's what we knew,
so we made it-- we made it work.
- But making it work, they say,
started getting harder and harder.
[cow lows]
- The financial part was the big problem.
Milk prices are the same as they were
in the '70s or '80s.
Things got really tight, and...
we... [laughs] Paid the bills when we could
and hoped we could continue to pay them,
and then we kind of started to fall behind,
and it just got...
to where we weren't gaining ground.
- Yes! That's how high I can go!
- They talked to bankers about expanding
and came close to signing for a $2 million loan
but didn't want to risk losing their land
or burdening their children with debt.
- They're nine and five,
so I don't want to tie them down right now,
but, uh... - That was part of it, too.
When we were asked to expand,
they said they're nine and five.
They can't make that decision.
You know, if they're 20 and they said,
"Yeah, we want to go all in,"
we probably could've, but...
whatever they decide to do,
they're just responsible and kind, caring people.
At the end of the day, that's what we're hoping for.
[rustic music]
♪ ♪
- It's been only a few weeks
since they made the decision to get out.
The memories are still raw,
and it's hard to talk about that last milking
and saying good-bye.
- I'll talk. [laughs]
I'll talk.
♪ ♪
Uh, it was hard.
It was something that we knew would be hard,
but we didn't realize it would be
as hard as it was,
and, um,
we didn't realize how hard it would still be.
♪ ♪
So, I wrote a blog,
kind of to just tell everybody
for our family and friends to know.
Tomorrow morning, the alarm clock
will go off early, 4:30 a.m.,
to board our dairy cows on trucks and trailers
for them to live on other farms.
There isn't a book for this.
There probably should be,
but no one wrote about what to do next
when you sell your fourth-generation family farm.
No one wrote a book about how to get
through that last milking,
tears never seeming to end
as you hold each other tight
with no words to be spoken.
No one wrote a book about where to go from here
or how to get over the emotions of the loss
you feel in the pit of your stomach,
the heartbreak.
No one wrote a book that tells you
how to get over that feeling of failure,
even though you know you gave it your best
to the bitter end.
- Through Facebook,
Jenni's post was shared thousands of times.
- Yeah, our phones were blowing up that night...
- Yeah.
- Or for, like, the next week,
just text messages, phone calls,
um, and then like you said,
uh, messages online
from all over the country
and the world.
Um, it was...
quite amazing, I mean, the outpouring...
- Yeah.
- Of support.
- Witnessing the widespread interest
in their story,
Jenni and Weston say that much more
than their dairy herd was being lost.
- I think a sense of the culture
of America. [laughs]
I mean, really, the--
they say, you know, like, Wisconsin,
America's Dairyland, and...
- I think growing up, the...
family helping the next family down the road,
the responsibilities we learned as kids,
the work ethic--
I don't know if you see that as much.
- While Weston weighs his work options,
they all enjoy
the unexpected family time together.
- Even if our kids aren't gonna grow up
milking cows,
it's still important to us
that they still get the same work ethic
into them that you did.
- I still want to be able to raise my boys
in the 400 acres here we have
tucked back in this valley.
Now duck down.
Get down. There you go.
♪ ♪