BETHEL — Brian Blake has a broken hip, a fractured pelvis, 50 staples closing a surgical incision in his torso — and 30 cows that have to be milked on time twice a day — no matter what.

Thanks to a lifetime of hard work, solid values and a generous spirit, he also has a large group of family and friends eager to step in to help in any way they can.

Ever since July 19, when Blake suffered a serious accident in his barn, people have been asking what they can do to pitch in.

Each morning and evening at 7:30 p.m., cars appear in the driveway of the dairy farm that has been in the Blake family for nearly two centuries.

Willing workers file into the barn and get down to business, sterilizing the equipment, doling out grain and preparing the cows to be milked.

Others have cut and baled the hay in the fields on both sides of Route 26, ensuring that the cows will be fed through the winter.

“It takes about six or eight people to fill Brian’s shoes each day,” said Seneca Corriveau, who arrived one afternoon last week with her husband, Freeman, to wrap the round hay bales for storage.

As soon as word of the accident got around, people began posting on social media, asking how they could help and where they could donate money to help the Blakes with expenses. Andrea Gunther, a longtime family friend, started a GoFundMe campaign last week, raising over $5,000 in the first five days.

‘I heard something crack’

Until the accident, the last time Blake took a day off from the farm was in October 2003, when he had an opportunity to go moose hunting for a couple of days.

Before that, he said, “I had two days off once — when I cut my finger off.”

That all changed on that Tuesday morning when he went to the barn to start the morning milking.

One of his cows had given birth to a calf a few days earlier and had been having trouble standing. Blake was using a special sling apparatus to support her hind legs and keep her upright in her stall.

When he arrived in the barn that morning, he discovered that the cow, which had seemed to be recovering the day before, was still not able to stand on her own and needed additional support.

Working alone, as usual, he placed a strap under her chest to winch her to a standing position. He was in the process of lifting her with a second sling, intended to take weight off all four of her legs, when he lost his grip and went over backwards onto the concrete floor.

“I heard something crack,” he said.

He lay motionless on the barn floor, gradually realizing that he was seriously hurt.

“I’ve always refused to carry a cellphone with me,” Blake said. “I might rethink that now.”

After what he estimated was at least 20 minutes, he steeled his nerves against the pain and began crawling to the front of the tie stalls, where he was able to use first the metal bars of the stalls, then the milk line, to drag himself the length of the barn.

Emerging into the calf barn, he looked out the door just in time to see the car of his wife, Christine, disappearing down the driveway as she left for work.

After remembering to turn off the hot water to the pipeline washer, which he said he couldn’t leave running, he dragged himself out onto the steps, where he sat for a while and tried to figure out how he could make his way from the barn to the house.

“There was an empty 15-gallon fuel can next to me, and I used that and a garden fork to lean on,” he said.

Using the makeshift crutches, he slowly made his way across the driveway, down two or three steps, and into the house, where he called Christine at work.

She wanted to call an ambulance immediately, but he insisted that she drive him to the hospital in her car.

What about the cows?

At the emergency room at Stephens Memorial Hospital, medical personnel were taken aback by the extent of his injuries.

“I had an X-ray and an MRI, and while they were looking at it, Christine heard one of them say, ‘Come take a look at this!’” Blake said.

“They told me I was too busted up for them to be able to help me there, and they sent me down to Portland (Maine Medical Center) by ambulance.”

He had fractured both his pelvis and his hip. The socket that holds the ball joint of his hip was split in two through the middle, he said.

While plans were being made for Blake to have surgery the next day, he was thinking about the farm, worrying about his cows and how they would be milked and fed.

The 40 animals that make up his breeding stock are milked for about 10 months a year, with a break during the last two months of gestation.

At feeding time, each cow receives a different measure of grain, depending on where she is in the breeding cycle and how much milk she is producing.

It’s information that Blake normally keeps entirely in his head, but now had to pass on to his older daughter, Courtney, who, along with Jeff Springer, a former employee and dairy farmer from Waterford, stepped in to do the milking on the day of the accident.

At the hospital, he did a mental run-through of the lines of stalls, recalling which cow was in each and what its feed requirements were.

“I remembered all 40,” he said.

Emphasis on family

Blake grew up in the home where he still lives, and took over the farm from his father at the age of 22. He said he had always planned to farm, but he thought he would probably keep beef cattle rather than dairy cows.

That switch never happened, although he does raise a few beef cattle for family members each year. Despite the commitments and challenges of keeping a dairy herd, he has continued the family tradition.

“You know, they say the best way to make a small fortune farming is to start with a big one,” he joked.

“I’ll do it ’til the day I drop,” he said.

In family farming, the emphasis is on family — especially in times of adversity.

Blake’s brother, sister, and a cousin, all of whom live nearby on a property adjacent to the Chandler Hill Road farm, have been helping since the accident.

Blake’s daughter, Courtney, who lives in Bethel, continues to head up the milking brigade during her father’s recovery. She knows her way around the dairy barn, having done the milking once a day on a regular basis for several years, until her daughter, Harper, was born two years ago.

Her sister, Mallory, who, with her husband, Ben McLeod, recently returned to live on the farm, was less familiar with the process, but was eager to help.

“My youngest daughter never milked a cow in her life, but she’s milking now,” Blake said, adding that Mallory had also created a computerized schedule for those who have volunteered to help with the chores.

‘What goes around comes around’

Blake’s broken hip and pelvis were repaired using “one round plate and a bunch of screws,” he said. With the classic stoicism of a farmer, he got off the prescribed pain medication as soon as possible.

“The doctor came in the next day and said I was ahead of anyone else he’d ever worked on,” he said, attributing his ability to heal quickly to being in good shape from a lifetime of hard work on the farm.

Blake’s doctors have told him it will be eight to 12 weeks before he can bear his weight. That’s a lengthy sentence for someone not used to sitting still for long, but he has been cheered by the many visits and phone calls he has received as he recovers.

He and Christine have both been overwhelmed by the support of family and friends, including people they grew up with, fellow farmers, and even customers who visit the farm to buy raw milk, including Laurie Gilbert of Greenwood, who, Blake said, has been showing up every morning to milk the cows.

“Geoff Gaudreau, Scott Hynek, Patrick Moore — there are too many to list them all,” he said of friends who have been helping at the farm.

Freeman Corriveau has been indispensable, both for his dedication and for his knowledge of the farm’s operations.

“Freeman knows how to do everything I do,” Blake said. “He knows all my routines.”

For Corriveau, helping out at the Blake farm is a matter of both friendship and payback.

“I had my own near-death experience last November,” he said, when a dump truck tire he was repairing exploded in his face, sending him to the hospital and putting him out of work.

“Brian helped me out for a month when that happened,” Corriveau said. “What goes around comes around.”