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Date: 5/24/2022
HADLEY – The New England Fellowship of Agricultural Adventurers recognized Gordon ‘Gordie’ Cook Jr. and the Cook Farm in Hadley with the 2022 Agricultural Adventurers Award at the annual meeting of the Eastern States Exposition (ESE) on May 10 in West Springfield.
According to a press release from ESE, the award was given to the premier Holstein breeder and century dairy farm in recognition of Cook’s work in the purebred cattle industry, advocating for dairy farmers as well as his service on the Northeast Interstate Dairy Compact Commission.
“I’ve been fortunate to be singled out as the person, but I haven’t been able to do any of what I’ve accomplished without my family who’s done the things while I’m away and enabled me,” Cook said.
Cook Farm has been family-owned for five generations. Cook’s father bought the farm where they have seen continued success. Cook Farm won Premier Breeder for 30 consecutive years at the Massachusetts State Dairy Show and embryos from their herd have been distributed around the globe. For type conformation, Cook Farm ranked 12th in New England and 27th in the country. They previously won the New England Master Breeder Award, the Holstein Association’s Progressive Breeders Registry Award and Progressive Genetics Herd Award consistently for decades.
“We’ve always worked with developing cow families and cow families that have bred true,” Cook explained. “Our forte is we have fairly high cattle, they phenotypically express themselves quite well. Phenotypic is a realization; genotypic is an expectation and we prefer to have phenotypic results rather than genotypic expectations. That might be a little advanced scientifically, but it would be our philosophy.”
Cook received his Bachelor of Science in animal and veterinary science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and came back to the farm in the 1980s where he would take over from his father. He said it hasn’t always been easy, and credited his late wife and daughter-in-law Debby Cook with creating Flayvors and helping save the farm.
“That was my wife Beth’s idea and store, but she passed away last year,” Cook said. “Debby, who now has five kids of her own and is a full-time schoolteacher, now manages the store and quite efficiently. That’s been one of the monstrous reasons why Cook Farm has been able to continue in this business. Small and production agriculture don’t usually come to a great ending unless there’s something else going on, and that’s our something else.
“The farmer is the guy kind of left holding his hat,” Cook added. “I don’t have an affiliation necessarily with different politicians but I will tell you one politician that made a quote was John Kennedy and he said ‘[The farmer] is the only man in our economy who buys everything at retail, sells everything at wholesale and pays the freight both ways.’ That’s certainly true in the dairy industry from the dairy farmer side.”