Both sides of Tongore Road, in Marbletown, were lined with pick-up trucks, trailers and cars of every size for a few hundred feet from the entrance of F&C Brooks & Sons Farm this past Saturday.

The gray clouds above cried softly and steadily as adults browsed two lines of heavy machinery — from tractors to 20-foot-long cylindrical field mowers— and their children happily played. It was the end of an era: the last dairy farm in Marbletown, and one of the last small dairy operations in the county, was on the market. Farmers and land sculptors alike flocked to the property to get their hands on some used tools.

“It brought tears to my eye,” said Frank Brooks, the patriarch of the operation. “I walked away because I didn’t want to watch it go.”

The hardest part was saying goodbye to his herd of cows, who were shipped over to an auction in Washington County. Brooks was able to sell all of his old equipment, but only recouped 70 percent of the money he spent on them. Dozens of eager buyers crowded around a skeletal-looking trailer parked in the largest barn, with its wooden beam ceiling towering high overhead. Shovels, horse shoes, an antique ice-block grabber, and an assortment of small trinkets were thrown off the back and sold to the highest bidder. They gave them a new life and purpose.

Brooks had worked on farms for as long as he could lift a shovel. At the ripe age of 14 he rented his grandparents’ land, formerly called Generations Farm on Pine Tree Lane in Marbletown, and took over the business. To pay for what farming couldn’t provide, Brooks began working for the Ulster County Highway Department and continues to do so today.

In 2008, Brooks bought his nearly 50-acre land on Tongore Road, where he harvested countless gallons of unpasteurized milk, produced roughly 1,500 bales of hay each day, and rented an additional 1,000 acres to grow heaps of corn. He used to rent out some of his land to part-time residents from New York City, to share the cost of property taxes and uphold the rural character of the area, but Brooks does not know if that will be possible after the sale. The property is listed through Keller Williams Commercial for $880,000 and includes a house and multiple barns and outbuildings totaling 10,000 square feet, in addition to the farmland acreage.

One of the main reasons behind Brook’s decision to sell was that he simply couldn’t find enough people to work the farm with him. On a typical work week, Brooks woke up at 3 a.m. every morning to start milking, which can be a hard sell for your average laborer. The problem persisted even after he began paying workers $15 an hour. With only one full-time worker to help Brooks and his family with the workload, the farm couldn’t last much longer.

On top of that, Brooks was not making nearly as much money as he used to on his milk; he put some of the blame on the Dairy Farmers of America, a national milk marketing cooperative that helps various farms sell their dairy products. During the pandemic, the DFA refused to pay for more than 85 percent of the milk Brooks produced, leaving the remaining 15 percent to be poured down the drain. Brooks explained that the main reason for the payout decrease was because schools weren’t in session, which resulted in a lower demand for milk. He was frustrated that state leaders allowed the DFA to make such a decision, which erased virtually all of his profits from milk production.

The future is blurry at best and Brooks genuinely does not know what it holds for him. Brooks has another Marbletown house to move into, but farming seemed to be out of the picture for good.

“We’re going down a bad path,” Brooks said. “It’s the end of an era for small farms.”