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Cash cows

If developers are driving Hernando dairy farmers into retirement, well, Lee Pedone isn't crying in his milk. The sale of his cattle and his land has allowed him to open the barn door to heaven.

By DAN DeWITT
Published March 24, 2005

[Times photos: Daniel Wallace]

Lee Pedone rounds up cattle on land he leases near State Road 50 in Ridge Manor, in Hernando County. Pedone, 49, has sold his dairy cows and is under contract to sell his land.

	"If you've been dairyin' for 30 years and you don't have to go to the barn in the morning, that's heaven," Pedone says.
	Lee Pedone, left, and Ryan Stallsmith ride out to round up cattle for vaccinations and castrations.
	Lee Pedone, left, stands by as Ryan Stallsmith, center, and Robert "Shorty" Brown saw off an ingrown horn on a cow.

RIDGE MANOR - Lee Pedone took off his sunglasses to let it be known he had something important to say.

"Now, sometimes I'll sleep until 8:30 in the morning," he said, and then grabbed his interviewer's shoulder to say, wait, there's more:

"Ten, even."

He didn't work last Christmas for the first time since before the birth of his now-grown children. On a recent ski vacation to Colorado, he took the unheard of step of silencing his cell phone.

When he is greeted each morning with the new facts of his life, he cannot help but smile. He goes through his days with the amazed, blinking look of someone who can't believe he is so free. Not only is his time all his, but so, in a way, is the world; he has enough money - or the promise of it - to buy anything he could reasonably desire.

This is all because Pedone, at 49, has joined the rapidly growing ranks of retired dairy farmers in Hernando County.

He has sold the farm.

"I'm in heaven," he said. "If you've been dairyin' for 30 years and you don't have to go to the barn in the morning, that's heaven."

Development has been advancing north from Tampa for decades and the front line is now in Hernando County. That is how opponents of growth see it, as a battle.

Their enemies are the developers who post the chilling orange rezoning notifications on agricultural land, and the farmers, like Pedone, who sell it.

Of the five dairy farmers working in Hernando at the beginning of 2004, three have sold their land or their cows, a trend seen in urbanizing areas throughout the state.

Pedone's 350 acres of pasture is in a 4,800-acre area near Interstate 75 designated by the county as a "planned development district." The land in this district, which sold for $3,000 to $4,000 an acre 15 years ago, is now worth 10 times that amount.

County planners had once expected this district to accommodate 12,000 new residents. They are now scrambling to prepare for at least twice that many: a new city with three times the population of Brooksville, the county seat.

Pedone hears this and shrugs.

He is fit now that he has plenty of time to run and lift - thick through the arms and shoulders, slim at the waist. But he still looks as gruff and scruffy as he did when he was a sleep-deprived dairyman. His New Balance sneakers are broken-in to the point of being crumpled, as is his ball cap. His jeans sag. His freebie running shirt is frayed at the collar.

He doesn't care much about environmentalists because they never seemed to care much about people like him. They have never tried to understand his struggle to buy and hold on to his farm.

"I gave my life for this," he said. "I gave my young life."

Pedone was raised a speculator, not a farmer.

His father, a Lakeland developer, kept cows only for tax reasons. Pedone learned just enough about farming to realize he could make money trading dairy cattle, which he started doing while earning a degree in finance at the University of South Florida.

Later, when he had a chance to take over a herd from a bankrupt farmer in Hernando, his main interest was in the 50 acres surrounding the barn.

"High, dry and by the interstate. Where else are you gonna develop?" said Pedone, who also noticed this parcel was next to a large tract owned by Brooksville families with the power to all but pick up a pencil and draw the county's comprehensive plan.

But if he always expected this payoff, he had no idea how much he would have to sacrifice to make it come due.

"We lived poor," he said.

He moved here 22 years ago, into a used, single-wide mobile home he bought for $1,500. His daughter, Ryann, was born a year later and was followed by a son, Lee II, in 1986. A few years after that, his first wife was driven away by the grim conditions on the farm.

To explain, Pedone sat at his kitchen counter and, in blue ballpoint, drew a diagram: a kindergartner's picture of his barn at the top of a gentle slope, with the work rendered as a series of unending spirals overhead.

"Dairyin,' " as Pedone calls it, is like long-distance truck driving - the more time you put in the more money you make - except that no trooper has ever told a dairy farmer to pull over and take a rest.

As his herd grew to 550 cows, he found he could produce 4,500 gallons of milk a day in the 12 stalls of his automated milking parlor. But he could do so only if the morning and afternoon milking sessions expanded until they nearly merged.

"My a- was always in that barn," he said.

That meant he slept only two or three hours a night. Or, as often was the case, he lay in bed for two or three hours thinking about all the ways his assembly line could be brought to a disastrous halt.

Cows need water, food and, most urgently, to be milked. If Pedone lacked any one of the parts required to keep the line running - workers, well water, electricity - the health of his herd would be at risk.

"In this business, everything is perishable," he said, "including the cows."

He needed his cows, of course, to keep pace with another treadmill - the monthly cycle of bills - that always seemed to be gathering speed.

This was partly his own doing, because he continued to buy more cows and land, but not entirely so.

As in nearly every sector of the economy, consumers have chosen cheap goods - in this case, the sub-$3 gallon of milk - over a traditional social institution, the family dairy farm, said Russ Giesy, the dairy extension agent who covers Central Florida.

"We have this great perception that we desire to have our dairy farms in these green meadows, and yet society's economic structure is forcing that to go away," Giesy said.

To maintain profits, dairy farms grew larger and resorted to innovations such as bovine growth hormone. The increased production, in turn, has kept prices absolutely stagnant.

During a recent dip in the market, in 2003, Pedone was receiving $1.36 a gallon, precisely the amount dairy farmers earned in 1979.

Pedone said he probably would have been forced out earlier if he had not discovered, 12 years ago, that builders needing fill dirt would pay him for the sandy soil on his farm.

"Dirt is what pulled my splinter," he said.

He has since developed another business, grinding yard waste into mulch. And, though Pedone is proud he never had to ask his father for help, when his father died several years ago, Pedone said, "We got a lot of nice stuff. I ain't gonna lie."

So he has had a bit of breathing room in recent years. He could pay laborers to take on more of the work. He had enough money to buy horses and equipment so his children could compete in rodeos, and to build a house with vinyl siding on the hill opposite the barn.

He won't say how much money he received for his land, only that the deal has not closed and that he hasn't yet received a penny.

But it's clear that he has enough money to enjoy the emancipation that came, in early December, with the selling of his cows.

The vacation to Steamboat Springs was the first time in his adult life he has really been able to relax, he said. He is away again this week, to watch a professional tennis tournament in Key Biscayne. He is accompanied by his girlfriend, Karen Lukas, who has agreed to become his third wife - another reason, he says, for his perpetual smile - and for whom he recently bought a large diamond ring.

The selling of this farm, as it is seen from Pedone's front yard, does not seem a great tragedy. The traffic on I-75 buzzes continually. The fill operation has left deep pits in the pature. The back end of a massive Wal-Mart distribution center is visible to the north. Once you know the brutal schedule of dairying, the barn seems no more picturesque than a slaughterhouse.

But it is hard not to feel little bit queasy thinking about the future, a sea of rooftops. When he is pressed, Pedone admits it doesn't appeal to him much, either.

His son is building a promising career as rodeo cowboy in Texas; his daughter, a barrel racer and USF student, plans to move there after graduation.

Pedone said he will probably buy a place there and in Hernando County, on 20 or 30 acres, where he'll raise a few beef cattle, and buy dairy cows for other farmers.

"I don't want a bunch of land but I need to have a little land."

- Dan DeWitt can be reached at 352 754-6116 or dewitt@sptimes.com

[Last modified March 23, 2005, 14:09:02]