Ellington Family Struggles To Save Their Farm

ELLINGTON - Farmer Peter Charter remembers vividly the gut-wrenching day he sold the dairy cows.

He believes it was his greatest failure.

"It's not your fault," Peter's wife, Verna, 53, said to him one afternoon this May as she smoked a cigarette in the kitchen, her bluejeans dirty from working in the fields. "It's the market. You had no other choice."

Peter, sitting at the head of the dining room table, looked at his pudgy hands. This wasn't the first time he had heard those words, and it wasn't the first time he didn't believe them.