LeBlanc Family Farm

Meet Jonathan LeBlanc. Jonathan was adopted by a loving Hardwick, Vermont couple as an infant, and has milked cows alongside his adoptive parents on their family farm twice a day, every day since.  As an adult, he and his wife Rachel adopted six children of their own and slowly started taking over the management of the farm.  Jonathan developed the farm considerably: he transitioned to organic, and grew a sizable pasture-raised pork operation, building a community of loyal buyers purchasing directly from the farm.

Soon after his 33rd birthday, a friend broached the subject of locating his birth parents.  After some initial hesitation on Jonathan’s part, they identified the address without much trouble, and Jonathan penned a short letter, asking if they would like to be in touch.  Days passed with no response.  After a few weeks, Jonathan stopped eagerly checking the mailbox, figuring they had decided it would be too complicated to meet their child, now a grown man with children of his own.  Months passed.  

In recent years, the time came for Jonathan’s adoptive father to formally pass ownership of the farm.  This moment can be a challenging one, financially and emotionally.  Many family farms do not successfully make the transition.  The allure of selling the farm, especially for lucrative development projects that make-or-break retirement plans, can be hard to resist.  Children leave for greener pastures or cleaner sidewalks, recognizing that there are (many) easier ways to make a living.  The children who stay often find that the prior business plan is no longer working. This can be interpreted as a critique of, well…prior management.  Jonathan is not the only farmer who tells me he often gets “suggestions” from Dad, which are usually thinly veiled jabs at any new initiatives offering slight departures from the past.    

Then there is the simple math – where is the money going to come from?  

Amid transitioning the farm to contract with Stonyfield Farm (one of the premier organic milk buyers in the region), Jonathan and I met to discuss his predicament: He needed more time to work with the new partner, expand the herd, and complete the construction projects he had going.  But ultimately, he wanted to make an offer to his dad to buy the farm.    

For the Bank’s part, we needed to be able to provide Jonathan with something more than what would typically be a 20-year note.  On a 40-year note, Jonathan’s monthly payments could pencil out to be about 25% lower.  Fortunately, in 2023, we’d offered our depositors the option of investing in a 100-year CD – with the specific intention of supporting longer-term farm mortgage amortizations. By taking advantage of the flexibility that came from those long-duration deposits and consolidating some existing debt, we were able to complete the transaction in August, while only marginally increasing the farm’s existing annual debt payments.  

This was around the time a letter arrived in Jonathan’s mailbox, apologizing for the delay, and expressing a great interest in meeting.  His birth parents were alive, still married to one another, and located in New York City.  Jonathan took the trip down—quite the journey for someone who describes a good week as one in which he doesn’t leave the farm for any reason.  After some tears and swapping of stories, Jonathan heard the familiar echo in his head – did they ever think about him?  Did they ever wonder what he was doing and who he had become?    

Before he had worked up the courage to ask, they spent the day together in New York. While checking out at a store, he happened to see his mother type in her ATM code.  “Glancing over her shoulder, I couldn’t help but notice that her ATM code was my birthday”, he told me.  

“There’s not a day that goes by that I do not think about you,” she smiled.  

To our 100-year depositors, please know exactly what your dollars are doing: supporting a business operator of the highest character, the continuity of a multigenerational farm, and a household filled with love up in Hardwick.

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