PROFILE: She nurtures a growing appreciation for farms
As published on page one of the March 5, 2011 edition of The Keene Sentinel, and online.
SULLIVAN -- Tiffany Briggs is a farmer, and she wants more people to understand what that means.
The petite, 34-year-old blonde owns and operates the Bo-Riggs cattle company with the help of her husband, parents and two young daughters. They sell meat at the Keene Farmers Market and a few local stores, and provide the ground beef that goes into the "local burger" at Fritz Belgian Fries on Main Street in Keene.
Briggs recently graduated from an intensive, two-year program in advocacy sponsored by the American Farm Bureau. Non-farmers' ideas of who farmers are and what they do are riddled with misconceptions, she says.
"I've met a lot of people through the Cheshire County area that purchase our beef from us, and they're very supportive of us because we're a family farm. Well, 98 percent of other farmers in this country are family farmers," she said.
Briggs' own farm houses three generations of humans and about 30 head of cattle, on the land where Briggs grew up. It was her passion for animals as a girl that help get the farm started. Her grandfather had a dairy farm when she was growing up, she said, but in the 1980s he sold off his herd.
"That was a very sad time for me," she said. "I was about 8 or 9 years old, and we would go to his dairy farm for school vacations and weekends."
It was her brother who first begged their parents for a calf, she said, but after a few years of tagging along to fairs and 4-H Club events, the 12-year-old Briggs started keeping animals of her own.
These days, her 11-year-old daughter Olivia shows animals six times a year, and 7-year-old Victoria has started raising her own lambs and pigs.
"That's probably our fun part of growing up on a farm, the competitiveness. Some kids play soccer, some kids play baseball, our kids show market lambs and market steers," Briggs said.
But it's not all fun and games. Growing up a farmer teaches a special kind of responsibility, she says.
"I had some friends through my high school years who would say 'I can't believe we have to stop by your house and do chores before we go out,' " she said. "That responsibility was a life skill that everyone needs to learn."
The local food movement has been a boon to the farm, Briggs says.
Four years ago, their business was limited to selling calves to 4-Hers to raise. But the increased popularity of local food was an opportunity to connect with customers, and Briggs took it.
"We decided, you know what, we really need to be out there telling our story," she said.
The family started running their booth at the farmers market in Keene, and made connections with Fritz Belgian Fries and the Hannah Grimes Marketplace. Because the farm is so small, production costs are too high for their meat to be sold in supermarkets and still be priced affordably, Briggs said.
The Farm Bureau program, called Partners in Agricultural Leadership, was a continuation of Briggs' longtime involvement with the farm bureau's young farmers and ranchers program. She was one of 10 people chosen to go through the training, which included experience talking with consumers, lawmakers and members of the media.
"The PAL program really is for people who are going to the next level," said Dan Durheim, executive director of the American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture. "We bring in a lot of high-power executive type people to do training with them, and then we do a lot of role-play so it's very intensive."
Durheim says he's known Briggs' family for more than a decade through their involvement in his organization. She's not the same person she was when they first met, he said.
"The big difference is the edge of self-confidence," he said.
Briggs takes initiative in representing the industry, Durheim said. Examples include her article in the Sullivan town newsletter to warn drivers about slow-moving farm equipment on the road in the fall, and a letter to a national glossy woman's magazine in response to an editorial that was critical of the industry.
"Tiffany has really embraced and taken on the responsibility of being a farmer," he said.
Early in the leadership program, the farmers visited a Whole Foods supermarket in New York City and talked to customers and employees about food. People get a partial story from television and the Internet, Briggs said, which can lead some bemusing ideas.
"One of the things they had was beef from vegetarian-fed cows -- well, all cows are vegetarian," she said. "So it was marketing, but it was just what every farmer does."
Briggs works full time off the farm, and her husband works as a contract farmer, growing crops on other people's land. In the summer, they lease land across the region to graze their cattle -- there's just 35 acres of pasture on the farm.
Briggs would like to see their customer base expand, and she's always on the lookout for new grazing land to rent. Health insurance keeps her tied to her desk job, but she would like to see the farm support not just the current family, but future generations. And this gives her defense of farmers -- all farmers -- a personal dimension.
"One of the problems we're facing is, we want a place for both of our daughters to come home to to farm, and how can we have a farm that would be able to support my husband and me and our daughters and their families," she said. "A lot of people think that when a farm is large it's not a family farm, not realizing that it's generations and generations there, farming together."
tagged with: 4-H, cattle, farming, profile, Sullivan N.H., Tiffany Briggs
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