The next place we visited in the Palmer area was the Musk Ox farm where we took a tour. Its official name is the Musk Ox Producers’ Corporation. It is a non-profit organization with a mission “dedicated to the domestication of the musk ox and to the promotion of qiviut production as a gentle and sustainable agricultural practice in the Far North, with a focus on public education and providing income opportunities to Alaska natives.”

We bought our tickets, and while waiting for the tour to begin, we browsed in the shop where lovely hand-knitted qiviut sweaters, scarves, socks and caps were for sale. Qiviut yarn is stronger, warmer and lighter in weight than sheep’s wool, and softer than cashmere wool. Qiviut yarn is light as a feather; a qiviut sweater weighs a few ounces.

On the tour around the farm pastures, we learned more about qiviut; it is the soft underwool beneath the longer and shaggier outer wool of the musk ox. It is plucked by hand from the coat of the animal during the spring molt; then it is cleaned and spun into yarn. Although the animals we saw had finished molting, they were still covered by their long and shaggy outer coat of hair which hung to the ground.

The musk ox cows with their calves were in wide-open pastures, with strong fencing. The musk ox bulls were in a separate spacious pasture. Our tour guide explained that musk oxen can survive outdoors in the harshest arctic winter and do not need any shelter. In the wild, they are undaunted by the fiercest snowstorms, since nature has made sure they are well-insulated by their thick two-layer coat, the shaggy outer coat over the fleecy under coat.

This was actually my second visit to the musk ox farm, because my first visit had been in 1984, shortly after it began being developed. At that time it was called “The Musk Ox Producers’ Cooperative.” In 1984, I wrote about in my Dairyman’s Journal column for Hoard’s Dairyman magazine. A reader from Virginia by the name of Ben Herschberger read the column and sent me an interesting letter, telling me about the time he flew some Alaska Fish and Game Department personnel over Nelson Island for a musk ox count during the winter of 1981.

He wrote: “Nelson Island lies between Nunivak Island and Alaska’s Bering Sea coast. Around 1970 a herd of ten musk ox from Greenland was transplanted to Nelson Island. Over the next ten years the herd grew to over two hundred-fifty head. Nelson Island is just inland from Nunivak Island. It hardly seems like an island because it is separated from the mainland only by a river. The villages of Tununak, Toksook, and Nightmute are located on Nelson Island. Our family of five lived in a trailer at Bethel for almost a year—quite an experience!”

Ben’s mention of Bethel conjured up a vision of the little village (population 3,681) on the banks of the mighty Kuskokwim River that empties into the Bering Sea, adjacent to the equally mighty Yukon River. Together, these two rivers spread out and create a mammoth delta—a gigantic mud pie that makes the Mississippi delta look like a frog pond.

The Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta is dotted with myriad swamps and lakes teeming with fish, marine mammals and birds. This means plenty of food and skins for the Yup’ik Eskimos who live in countless tiny villages throughout the delta region. Roads are non-existent there. Travel over the entire region is either by boat or small plane. So I could understand thoroughly when Ben continued:

“We did charter flying in that area. Since it is the only way to go, there was a lot of it to do. During the summer months we were very busy, with daylight lasting until around eleven o’clock at night. However, we were not far enough north to see the midnight sun. My flying in Alask was mostly in Sessna 207s. 210s, 185s, and a Seneca II.”

In 1983, Ben and his family returned to his wife’s family dairy farm in Virginia.

He wrote: “Our oldest son is eleven, and another is nine. So already we have some help for the dairy farm. We are operating only a small forty-acre farm at present, but have an additional two hundred acres rented.”

He closed his letter to me by saying, “I wouldn’t mind hearing more of your Alaska experience, and I would like to see an article on the demise of dairying in Alaska.”

Video of Musk Ox

In addition to fishing, we wanted to see something of Alaska’s agriculture. So one day in Anchorage we got on the scenic Glenn Highway and drove north for less than an hour toward the village of Palmer in the Matanuska Valley.

There’s lots of fertile farmland in the Matanuska Valley, which sprawls over hundreds of acres below the Matanuska Glacier. The glacier melt-water, carrying its heavy load of silt, feeds the Matanuska River; the silt for centuries has been deposited over the wide flood plain as rich topsoil. Way back in 1935 the valley was chosen as the place in which to establish the Matanuska Colony; it was one of the most ambitious welfare projects promoted during the Great Depression by the New Deal administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Great Depression occurred during the same wretched era of the Dust Bowl when thousands of starving Oklahoma farmers headed west on Route 66, seeking the promised land of California. Everyone knows the story of the migrating Okies; John Steinbeck immortalized their tribulations in print in his novel The Grapes of Wrath.

But few people have heard about the Matanuska Colony. During the same Great Depression that devastated the Oklahoma sharecroppers, the farmers of the upper Midwest were also hard-hit; the New Deal came up with a plan to relocate 203 of those poorest farm families to Alaska and give them homestead land for a new start.

On May 10, 1935, a train dropped these 203 families, along with a few tons of their household goods, at the Matanuska railway station. Those first few months the colonists lived in a tent city in Palmer. They were awarded their 40-acre land parcels by way of a lottery. Land clearing and building homes and barns were delayed by bureaucratic boondoggles. Many colonists found Alaska too harsh; after four years, 60 percent of the original colonists gave up and left. But the others stuck it out and succeeded with their farms.

Arnold and Emma Havemeister, along with their daughter, Helen, were one of those original families. In the lottery they drew tract #167, and on Christmas Day 1935  they moved into a one-bedroom house on their new farm. Two more children, Annie and Bob, were born to the Havemeisters.

After Arnold’s sudden death in1942, Emma and the children kept the farm going, selling produce from their garden and milk from their cows. Emma passed away recently at a venerable old age, but son Bob and his wife Jean still live in the original colony house and continue work the dairy farm with the help of family and a few employees.

When we stopped there to visit them that afternoon, Bob was on his way to the hayfield to begin mowing the first cutting; his daughter gave us a tour of the barn. They have 80 milking cows, with a rolling herd average of 23,000 lbs per year. The herd is fed grain, along with hay harvested from 400 acres of land the Havemeisters work every year; 170 acres belong to Bob and Jean, and the rest is rented land.

Alaska’s dairy industry suffered a major heart attack in the late 1980s when the major processing plant filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy; the state took control for a few years but eventually closed the plant; that action eliminated the only market to which the few remaining dairy farmers could ship their raw milk, and they went out of business. But the Havemeisters did not want to quit dairying.

In 2012, they built their own pasteurizing facilities adjacent to their milk house. Now they can process their milk 3-4 times a week, bottle it, and sell it under their own label in stores from Anchorage in the south to Talkeetna further north. Today they are the only dairy farm remaining in Alaska.

The Havemeister dairy cows in pasture.

The next place we visited in the Palmer area was the Musk Ox farm where we took a tour. Its official name is the Musk Ox Producers’ Corporation. It is a non-profit organization with a mission “dedicated to the domestication of the musk ox and to the promotion of qiviut production as a gentle and sustainable agricultural practice in the Far North, with a focus on public education and providing income opportunities to Alaska natives.”

We bought our tickets, and while waiting for the tour to begin, we browsed in the shop where lovely hand-knitted qiviut sweaters, scarves, socks and caps were for sale. Qiviut yarn is stronger, warmer and lighter in weight than sheep’s wool, and softer than cashmere wool. Qiviut yarn is light as a feather; a qiviut sweater weighs a few ounces.

On the tour around the farm pastures, we learned more about qiviut; it is the soft underwool beneath the longer and shaggier outer wool of the musk ox. It is plucked by hand from the coat of the animal during the spring molt; then it is cleaned and spun into yarn. Although the animals we saw had finished molting, they were still covered by their long and shaggy outer coat of hair which hung to the ground.

The musk ox cows with their calves were in wide-open pastures, with strong fencing. The musk ox bulls were in a separate spacious pasture. Our tour guide explained that musk oxen can survive outdoors in the harshest arctic winter and do not need any shelter. In the wild, they are undaunted by the fiercest snowstorms, since nature has made sure they are well-insulated by their thick two-layer coat, the shaggy outer coat over the fleecy under coat.

This was actually my second visit to the musk ox farm, because my first visit had been in 1984, shortly after it began being developed. At that time it was called “The Musk Ox Producers’ Cooperative.” In 1984, I wrote about in my Dairyman’s Journal column for Hoard’s Dairyman magazine. A reader from Virginia by the name of Ben Herschberger read the column and sent me an interesting letter, telling me about the time he flew some Alaska Fish and Game Department personnel over Nelson Island for a musk ox count during the winter of 1981.

He wrote: “Nelson Island lies between Nunivak Island and Alaska’s Bering Sea coast. Around 1970 a herd of ten musk ox from Greenland was transplanted to Nelson Island. Over the next ten years the herd grew to over two hundred-fifty head. Nelson Island is just inland from Nunivak Island. It hardly seems like an island because it is separated from the mainland only by a river. The villages of Tununak, Toksook, and Nightmute are located on Nelson Island. Our family of five lived in a trailer at Bethel for almost a year—quite an experience!”

Ben’s mention of Bethel conjured up a vision of the little village (population 3,681) on the banks of the mighty Kuskokwim River that empties into the Bering Sea, adjacent to the equally mighty Yukon River. Together, these two rivers spread out and create a mammoth delta—a gigantic mud pie that makes the Mississippi delta look like a frog pond.

The Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta is dotted with myriad swamps and lakes teeming with fish, marine mammals and birds. This means plenty of food and skins for the Yup’ik Eskimos who live in countless tiny villages throughout the delta region. Roads are non-existent there. Travel over the entire region is either by boat or small plane. So I could understand thoroughly when Ben continued:

“We did charter flying in that area. Since it is the only way to go, there was a lot of it to do. During the summer months we were very busy, with daylight lasting until around eleven o’clock at night. However, we were not far enough north to see the midnight sun. My flying in Alask was mostly in Sessna 207s. 210s, 185s, and a Seneca II.”

In 1983, Ben and his family returned to his wife’s family dairy farm in Virginia.

He wrote: “Our oldest son is eleven, and another is nine. So already we have some help for the dairy farm. We are operating only a small forty-acre farm at present, but have an additional two hundred acres rented.”

He closed his letter to me by saying, “I wouldn’t mind hearing more of your Alaska experience, and I would like to see an article on the demise of dairying in Alaska.”

Video of Musk Ox

In addition to fishing, we wanted to see something of Alaska’s agriculture. So one day in Anchorage we got on the scenic Glenn Highway and drove north for less than an hour toward the village of Palmer in the Matanuska Valley.

There’s lots of fertile farmland in the Matanuska Valley, which sprawls over hundreds of acres below the Matanuska Glacier. The glacier melt-water, carrying its heavy load of silt, feeds the Matanuska River; the silt for centuries has been deposited over the wide flood plain as rich topsoil. Way back in 1935 the valley was chosen as the place in which to establish the Matanuska Colony; it was one of the most ambitious welfare projects promoted during the Great Depression by the New Deal administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Great Depression occurred during the same wretched era of the Dust Bowl when thousands of starving Oklahoma farmers headed west on Route 66, seeking the promised land of California. Everyone knows the story of the migrating Okies; John Steinbeck immortalized their tribulations in print in his novel The Grapes of Wrath.

But few people have heard about the Matanuska Colony. During the same Great Depression that devastated the Oklahoma sharecroppers, the farmers of the upper Midwest were also hard-hit; the New Deal came up with a plan to relocate 203 of those poorest farm families to Alaska and give them homestead land for a new start.

On May 10, 1935, a train dropped these 203 families, along with a few tons of their household goods, at the Matanuska railway station. Those first few months the colonists lived in a tent city in Palmer. They were awarded their 40-acre land parcels by way of a lottery. Land clearing and building homes and barns were delayed by bureaucratic boondoggles. Many colonists found Alaska too harsh; after four years, 60 percent of the original colonists gave up and left. But the others stuck it out and succeeded with their farms.

Arnold and Emma Havemeister, along with their daughter, Helen, were one of those original families. In the lottery they drew tract #167, and on Christmas Day 1935  they moved into a one-bedroom house on their new farm. Two more children, Annie and Bob, were born to the Havemeisters.

After Arnold’s sudden death in1942, Emma and the children kept the farm going, selling produce from their garden and milk from their cows. Emma passed away recently at a venerable old age, but son Bob and his wife Jean still live in the original colony house and continue work the dairy farm with the help of family and a few employees.

When we stopped there to visit them that afternoon, Bob was on his way to the hayfield to begin mowing the first cutting; his daughter gave us a tour of the barn. They have 80 milking cows, with a rolling herd average of 23,000 lbs per year. The herd is fed grain, along with hay harvested from 400 acres of land the Havemeisters work every year; 170 acres belong to Bob and Jean, and the rest is rented land.

Alaska’s dairy industry suffered a major heart attack in the late 1980s when the major processing plant filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy; the state took control for a few years but eventually closed the plant; that action eliminated the only market to which the few remaining dairy farmers could ship their raw milk, and they went out of business. But the Havemeisters did not want to quit dairying.

In 2012, they built their own pasteurizing facilities adjacent to their milk house. Now they can process their milk 3-4 times a week, bottle it, and sell it under their own label in stores from Anchorage in the south to Talkeetna further north. Today they are the only dairy farm remaining in Alaska.

The Havemeister dairy cows in pasture.