He had auctioned more than 50,000 cows as he traveled across the country during the dairy sell-off of the past decade. Some were corporate herds of 1,000 or show cattle that brought up to a million dollars, but often Fraley had been the last visitor at family barns like the Watsons’, where he auctioned cows, machinery and sometimes even the property itself for a 10 percent cut. The average Pennsylvania family dairy farm was earning about $20 for every 100 pounds of milk — and that same amount now cost more than $30 to produce. He’d seen farmers who tried to hang on by neglecting their equipment, underfeeding their cows, extending their hours and borrowing tens of thousands they could never repay.
His career had unfolded against a steady backdrop of bankruptcies, accidents and tragedies: the New York farmer who shot all 51 of his dairy cows and then turned the shotgun on himself; an Amish father who suffocated with his two sons after becoming trapped in their grain silo. In 2018, a Wisconsin farmer had sold his cows at auction, taken a part-time job at a grocery store and then killed himself with a note in his pocket. “I’m a dairy farmer,” it read. “I want my old life back, but I can’t get it anymore. Everything I do fails.”