Hoboken woman leaves city life behind, relishes balance of nature on small farm | Faith Matters

When I reached Betsy Brennan by phone, she told me she was mourning Martha. She had known Martha for 15 years and “had witnessed the birth of every one of her daughters.”
Hoboken-bred Brennan, 33, is now a farmer at the Hawthorne Valley Farm in Ghent, New York, about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Hudson County. Martha was one of her prize cows. She’d known her the longest of all the cows “and raised a lot of her daughters (calves),” she recalled.
The fact that some are still on the farm helped Brennan pull through her grief.
The last gift Brennan gave Martha before the cow was slaughtered for meat, for which most animals are raised, Brennan said, was giving the animal “as little stress as possible.” Martha was near the barn where she stayed at times, surrounded by the people most familiar to her, and “smelling the grass she grazed,” Brennan said.
Animals in large slaughterhouses “do not get that gift,” she contrasted.
And that is the whole purpose of Brennan’s vocation on a small farm.
The farm is one of many departments in the non-profit organization Hawthorne Valley. It is a mostly open campus with many visitors daily for the learning programs they offer, as well as a summer camp, a farm store, a Waldorf school and other initiatives. It describes itself on its website as “a place to rediscover one’s connection to nature, to how our food is grown, and to ourselves as participants in a dynamic social and natural ecosystem.”
Brennan works alongside about eight other full-time farmers and about five seasonal apprentices. Her work falls into what can be called humane farming.
“The solace in my work is that when the animal is in its last final moments their sacrifice is as clean and safe as we can provide for them,” Brennan said.
Her personal mission is simple: “I love being connected to the rhythms of nature and spending the majority of my life outside, doing things most people don’t understand is still being done to get food to their tables.”
An average day for Brennan is doing a wellness check for all of the animals: seeing what their mood is, if something has upset the balance in the herd, or if any pigs seem like they’re under the weather. She also does a lot of general maintenance of the milk room, dairy barn and animal enclosures, as well as milking the cows, feeding and looking after them.
“I have to be tired by the end of the day, proud of what I did, and comfortable knowing every person and animal I worked with on a given day felt the same respect and support that I think I deserve,” Brennan explained as her philosophy.
“Raising livestock can have a very negative impact on the environment, but at our farm we try our best to work in balance with nature and rotate our grazing animals so that their manure can fertilize the soil,” she said.
She also said they bottle and process milk on site and process their animals into meat within the county, which keeps the carbon footprint lower than the average farm.
Raised Catholic, Brennan feels encouraged by Pope Francis’ concern for the environment.
“Everything is related, and we human beings are united as brothers and sisters on a wonderful pilgrimage, woven together by the love God has for each of his creatures and which also unites us in fond affection with brother sun, sister moon, brother river and mother earth,” said Francis in his environmental encyclical, Laudato Si.
Brennan said she feels honored that the pope feels strongly about the connection between earth and life.
“The intersectionality of God, life and earth has been its strongest in my life since I started farming,” she said.
And it all started when she was a fifth grader at the Hudson School in Hoboken and went on a farm trip to Hawthorne Valley Farm. She later went to summer camp there, became a counselor, and returned full-time to co-manage the summer camps. During the 2020 pandemic, she began working for the actual farm.
She spends a lot of time teaching and supporting the apprentices over a nine-month program learning about farming at this scale, with both livestock and vegetable production.
By pure coincidence, the annual Hudson School class trip took place as I reported and wrote this column. They remained there for four days and resided in the hostel on site. Brennan was thrilled.
“I am also an educator at heart, and as someone who learned from farmers my whole life, it feels fitting that I can have that role now as well, passing things on to a future farmer,” she said.
Outside of her livestock work, she is also the administrator for the farm’s more than 300 member associates who help sustain all their work. She met her husband, Harrison Mahon, working on the farm and he now works at a nearby farm in Hudson, New York.
They do not raise turkeys and she said she sometimes feel a little uncomfortable around Thanksgiving.
“I consider how sacred food is and how disconnected the average American is to where their food came from, who grew it and picked it, washed it, packaged it,” she said.
She loves her work.
“I deal daily with new life and death on the farm and my foundational faith in God and the saints helps me see through the veil of dying and gives me so much to celebrate with new life,” she said.
Brennan also said she is a very forgetful person and St. Anthony has helped her find many of my misplaced tools. But most importantly she has found her vocation working among God’s creatures and creation.
The Rev. Alexander Santora is the pastor of Our Lady of Grace and St. Joseph, 400 Willow Ave., Hoboken, NJ 07030. Email: [email protected]; X: @padrehoboken.