The Christmas tree in his tidy white farmhouse northwest of Chapel Hill is decorated with Holstein ornaments. Small plastic squares hang there as well -- the ear tags from his wife's favorite cows.

Nutter is co-owner of Maple View Farms, his family's sprawling dairy operation in Orange County's rolling hills.

He seems hardened to the cold of a walk-in refrigerator where he gestures at neatly stacked glass jugs of milk. Selling it locally has kept him in farming, he says.

Nutter recently received a lifetime achievement award from the Orange-Durham Cattlemen's Association, in part for innovative marketing. It was a huge surprise, he says.

He's modest that way.

He'll turn 80 this year and has lived in North Carolina since moving the family and farm from Maine in 1963. He's become a bit more Southern, friends and family members say, though he retains a faint Yankee accent.

"You can tell pretty quickly that he's not from around here," said David Lewis, a neighbor and fellow farmer who spoke at Nutter's award ceremony. "The first time I met him, I just went up there to pick up some bricks, and he was curt and abrupt and very businesslike. And I was young and impressionable and didn't know any better."

Thirty or so years later, Lewis says, Nutter has mellowed.

And he's generous. You can often see his tractors and employees plowing or mowing for neighbors, Lewis adds. "If you're choosing neighbors, he's the one you want to have," he said.

Nutter, a fifth-generation farmer, has worked on a farm all his life. At 79, he's only semi-retired.

Why is he still working?

"I don't know anything else," he says.

Muffin Brosig struggles to explain her father's drive.

"You don't farm unless you love it," she said. "You don't work that hard for the money that you get from farming. You have to love the farm. And he does. He loves the land; he loves the animals."

Brosig, who runs the milk company office, grew up working side by side with her father. Her brother Roger Nutter runs the milking plant. She talks about riding on tractors alongside her father as they worked. "He was able to teach us a lot about life," she says.

Brosig is proud of her father's willingness to make big changes late in life, especially the move to bottling milk under the farm's own label.

Nutter says he and his family realized in the mid-1990s that they couldn't make a living selling milk to a cooperative.

So he and co-owner Russ Seibert decided to start selling directly to consumers.

A bold undertaking

Setting up his own label was a daring move.

"The investment is huge; the regulatory process is daunting," says Marti Day, cooperative extension dairy agent for Orange and three other counties. "They paved a path that had not been traveled before, and they're brave pioneers for doing it."

While direct-to-consumer bottling is fairly common in Northeastern states, Day says, Maple View was one of the first North Carolina dairies to try it. Others have followed, largely because of the Nutters' influence, she says. Fluctuating milk prices and rising fuel costs combine for a challenging environment, she says -- three Orange County dairy farms have closed in the last two years, leaving 15 still operating.

Nutter acknowledges he may be an innovator but quickly adds he's just done what he had to do.

And he doesn't mind doing things a bit differently. He decided, for instance, to open the Maple View ice cream store -- on the first of January.

"Why? Because that's when we got ready," he says.

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