The door of the milking barn rattles open at dawn, alerting the herd at Rocky Glade Farms.

Cows, 160 of them, have gathered outside, languidly chewing on whatever cows chew before breakfast, their breath billowing into the cool spring air.

They look like chubby customers waiting for a bank to open. Mothers, daughters and cousins carrying liquid assets.

Nevin Hildebrand, 33, peers first at the herd, then at the tree line, as he enjoys the sunrise on his family's 230-acre farm an hour's drive west of Baltimore.

"It's the kind of morning a farmer likes to wake up to," he says.

The Hildebrand spread is a 1950s Saturday Evening Post cover come to life, a few hundred yards off Main Street in Woodsboro, Frederick County.

A stampede of economic factors -- including lower per-person consumption of milk and higher production per cow -- has nearly halved the number of Maryland dairy farms, from 2,500 in 1982 to 1,300 last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

But the Hildebrand farm is not likely to go under. The family seems glued to the soil, like the 50-foot elm tree in the middle of the wheat field. The rhythms of farm life appeal to the Hildebrands.

Nevin pats a cow on the haunches. "You feel like you accomplish something every day. How many people can say that? You work at a desk job, you're putting in time. Here, you can say, 'I helped bring this calf into the world.' "

Hildebrands have farmed at the foot of the Catoctin Mountains for more than half a century. Their kinfolk are buried just over a knoll, at the end of gravelly Hildebrand Lane. A nearby pasture holds the graves of their favorite milk cows.

LeRoy Hildebrand, 69, the owner and patriarch, has a wife, three sons, a daughter, seven grandchildren and the complete works of both Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour.

Two sons, Nevin and Marlin, run the farm now, with the help of LeRoy's younger brother Henry, a retired trucker who lives in Carroll County, and a hired hand, Jake Fogle. LeRoy still handles the paperwork for the farm. His wife, Ellen, a deeply religious woman, does all the cooking and sometimes helps feed the calves.

Encroaching suburbia

From the front porch of his 18th-century red brick farmhouse, LeRoy surveys a crop of wheat, 45 acres of it, planted in the fall. "Looks nice," he murmurs, as a breeze transforms the green rows into ocean waves.

LeRoy shifts restlessly in his chair. Suburbia is closing in, he says, and that irks him more than the aches and pains from years of lifting newborn calves and removing big limestone rocks from his fields.

An 18-hole public golf course went in recently beside a pasture; now the cows watch errant drives go whizzing by. Family farms (( often succumb because the work is hard, the young want a different way of life, and developers are eager to acquire the land.

Selling his farm could make LeRoy a wealthy man. But he doesn't want change, either for the Hildebrands -- five generations have lived and worked here -- or for Woodsboro.

"People come up here to get away to the country, then they complain that there's nothing to do," he says. "Or they fuss

about the smell of the cows. I don't mind it."

Close to the homestead

LeRoy's offspring have stayed close to the homestead. Nevin and his wife built a house adjacent to the farm. (Rather than clear the land of scrub himself, Nevin turned a herd of goats loose for several weeks. Farm wisdom at its best.)

Marlin and his family live in a 200-year-old house within shouting distance of LeRoy's. Shelbia, the daughter, built a new home on another corner of the farm. Son Gary lives a mile away, on a dairy farm he rents and works himself.

The focus of Rocky Glade Farms is the milking barn, which LeRoy and his father built in 1941, with lumber they cut from nearby woods.

Today the farm has 160 mature cows, milked twice a day, and 140 calves and heifers -- a farm team waiting to join the main herd of milk producers.

About 6 a.m., Nevin begins herding cows into the milking parlor, 14 at a time.

"C'mon girls, let's go," he says, nudging the balky ones gently with a walking cane. They lumber in as if on cue; some have been doing this for 10 years or more.

They take their places in elevated milking stalls. Nevin and Jake spray the udders with antiseptic, then attach mechanized cups that draw 25 or more pounds of milk from each cow with a gentle pulsation and a whooshing sound.

The dairy farmers never see their product these days. The milk goes through tubes and pipes and into a steel tank in an adjacent room. A truck comes every two days and picks up 13,000 pounds, to be processed and pasteurized.

Nevin is president of the Frederick County Young Farmers and one of the youngest board members of the Frederick County Farm Bureau.

He attended a Farm Bureau meeting in Annapolis not long ago. "If I had to drive that every day, I'd go insane," he says.

Know your employees

Nevin knows the cows so well that he can tell them apart without looking at the numbers attached to their ears. "That's 303 . . . 691 . . . 386. You see them twice a day for 365 days a year, you get used to them.

"You'd want to know who your employees were, wouldn't you?"

Nevin says he hasn't had a day off since December, when he went deer hunting in West Virginia for two days. Not that he's complaining. Last summer, he went to the beach for five days, no more. "A week would be kind of boring," he says. While there, of course, he phoned home to check on his cows.

Nevin's favorite is No. 574, a doe-eyed young Holstein that produced more than 32,000 pounds of milk last year. "She's real pretty," he says, slapping her flanks. "She's a Porsche . . . Bo Derek . . . a '10.' "

Nevin and Jake finish the milking and hose down the stalls; like much of the farm equipment, the stalls are second-hand, purchased from a West Virginia dairyman.

Meanwhile, Marlin has been preparing a monstrous batch of cow granola. His recipe: 4 1/2 cubic yards of silage; 1 cubic yard of wet barley; 700 pounds of hay, partially dried and chopped; 300 pounds of shelled corn; and 50 pounds of minerals.

All this is blended in an automated mixing wagon and poured into a trough -- a breakfast of champions for 160 cows.

At 8 a.m., the family sits down to its own breakfast, usually the same menu: several kinds of homemade pancakes, plus cereal and fruit and juice and milk (pasteurized store-bought milk). The Hildebrands say grace before each meal. Always grace.

Lunch -- the Hildebrands call it dinner -- is also savory: A typical meal consists of steaming roast beef and gravy, broccoli, corn, beets, macaroni casserole and homemade iced tea, finished off with warm slabs of fresh apple pie and conversation ranging from the Orioles to the weather to gun control.

'I like farming the ground'

Thus fortified, Marlin heads out to chisel-plow a 45-acre field. He has the same fondness for rolling stock that his brother Nevin has for livestock. "I like farming the ground," says Marlin, 38. "It gives you a sense of pride, especially if you've got a nice-looking tractor. It's like driving a Corvette."

Mostly he drives a 1974 Allis-Chalmers that weighs 8 tons. Marlin bought it used in Illinois for $14,000 five years ago. A new one would cost five times as much today.

The tractor will tow the chisel plow, which looks like a giant rake with 18 metal teeth and breaks ground to a depth of 6 inches.

The sound system in the tractor blares "Little Old Lady From Pasadena" as Marlin fires up the engine. The roar blots out all other sounds, though he can hear the ring of his cellular phone.

The 45 acres to be plowed are alongside the golf course, near the first green.

Marlin chugs along at 3 mph, turning over the soil and exposing several dozen golf balls. He scratches his beard and shrugs. "I don't know if those balls will rot up or not."

About four years ago, Marlin says, the golf course was a cornfield. "I'm just glad it's not townhouses," he adds.

Even in rural Frederick County, family farms are disappearing fast, Marlin says. "There were a dozen between here and Walkersville when I was in high school. Now there's only three or four."

During most of his three hours of plowing, Marlin sits twisted around in the tractor, looking backward to make sure the rows are straight. He does this whenever he plows, and years of it have given him pinched nerves in his neck. "Farming is hard on everything," he says. "But I'd rather do this than have to drive to Baltimore or Washington every day."

Marlin seems to have a sixth sense about the location of underground rocks, which are the land mines of the farming business. "You can feel the rocks with the tractor a little bit," he says.

Abruptly, the Allis-Chalmers slows from a crawl to a creep. "Whoa," says Marlin, as if addressing plow horses instead of a 200-horsepower motor. "There's a rock here." He can't see it, but he remembers the spot from past years.

Later in the afternoon, Marlin is joined on the tractor by Allen, his 3-year-old. Observing from the sidelines is LeRoy, sitting in his Chevy pickup alongside the field being plowed by his son and grandson.

'Hear the ground breathing'

"I never get tired of looking at fresh-dug farmland," LeRoy says. "You can almost hear the ground breathing."

Nevin also has driven out to the field, on his three-wheeled all-terrain vehicle. Sometimes he uses the ATV to herd cows. His afternoon has been spent worming and delousing the heifers, repairing a watering trough and ordering a new metal gate to keep cows off the golf fairways.

Nevin also shot a groundhog. Their holes break both machinery and cows' legs.

From about 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., Nevin, Marlin and Jake milk the cows again and feed the calves. Jessica, Marlin's 7-year-old, helps with those chores. Then everyone goes home to their respective families.

Nevin's house has a definite cow decor: a cow clock in the kitchen, a cow doorstop, cow salt-and-pepper shakers and dozens of stuffed cows. Sometimes Nevin sleeps on cow-print sheets.

Marlin's home reveals his passion for machines. He has collected hundreds of toy tractors and plows and front-end loaders. A wall hanging of a tractor hangs in the living room, above the sofa.

Dusk seems to arrive early in the rolling hills of Frederick County.

On his porch after supper, enjoying the twilight, LeRoy leans back, closes his eyes and listens to the music.

Ellen, his wife of 39 years, is playing a hymn, "Lily of the Valley," on the organ, joined by a chorus of spring peepers outside.

Marlin is usually asleep by 10 p.m.

"Sometimes it's later, but that tells on you," he says. Often he'll doze off at 8, while watching television.

One show he never misses is "Seinfeld," the hit sitcom about singles life in New York City. Marlin, the burly, bearded farmer, is hooked on the hippest show on TV.