I'm excited to hear more about this book and how it relates back to the dairy industry.

Uh, thanks Susan.

Um, yeah, when I was, uh, growing up in, on the dairy farm in New York State, I, uh, I realized there wasn't a lot of books being written about farmers in general, but, um, probably none that I knew of that were being written about what our family's going through and, and people like our neighbors who had dairy farms and the difficult conditions of ...

That really started to happen, um, for us really in the '90s of trying to keep a dairy farm going.

So, uh, ultimately, that's probably why I became a writer is to try to fill that gap, to try to tell the story of, of the people around me, um, because I thought no one else was.

And, and if I didn't, perhaps these type of stories wouldn't get told.

Um, and the other aspect of the, of motivation behind the book, I suppose, was that, um, back then it didn't seem like there was a real clear picture of why farms like ours struggled as far as, you know, we knew the milk price was too low, costs were high of course, but, uh, it was difficult to pin down some of the factors or historical conditions or other actors in the industry that, that, um, might have had a interest different than, than ours as a producer.

So as you wrote this, what was your biggest takeaway in having conversations with your neighbors, uh, about what they were going through in the dairy industry?