BROOKS – There’s a black-and-white, Holstein-Friesian cow that lives with a retired horse on the side of a hill in Brooks. Her name is Nonny, and she spends her days lazing around, eating hay and gobbling up pumpkins provided by her indulgent owners, Bill and Carol Hegstrom.

If Nonny were a dog, she’d be 140 years old.

But she’s a cow, and she’ll be 20 on Dec. 18. In human years, that would be about 60. The interesting fact here is that cows have an average life span of five to seven years.

“I think she is the oldest working cow in the state of Maine,” Bill Hegstrom said, and he has the paperwork to prove it.

In her 20 years on Roaring Acres Farm, Nonny bore 13 calves (12 were heifers), was milked three times a day for more than 12 years, and produced more than 203,560 pounds of milk.

At $11 per hundredweight, Hegstrom said, “she made me a hunk of money,” more than $22,000, in fact. And that, he feels, earned her a peaceful retirement.

Maine’s farmers keep most milking cows until either their milk production begins to lag or they fail to produce solid offspring. At that point, they are “beefed,” sold for hamburger and rump roasts.

Maine’s farmers also are not known for their sentimentality over livestock.

But in Nonny’s case, she had some solid statistics, and she was one of the original cows on Roaring Acres Farm.

“She was never great, but she was consistent,” Hegstrom said. “She bred consistently, she never stuck out, she was just always there. Therefore, she lasted.”

So Nonny was given a slaughterhouse reprieve.

“She has earned it,” Hegstrom said. Although she walks slowly now and suffers from cataracts, Nonny sure doesn’t look her age. But she can be a bit like a crotchety old lady, Hegstrom admits.

She’s abusive to goats, doesn’t get along with her horse field mate, and shunned a beef calf that shared her pasture this summer.

Hegstrom is quick to point out that Nonny is no pet.

“She’s the last remnant of the original dairy farm,” Hegstrom said.

After selling the rest of their milking herd in 2002, the Hegstroms decided to keep Nonny and turned to organic hay and vegetable farming.

But she’s more than just a reminder of days gone by.

“She’s a figure in this community,” Carol Hegstrom said. “She’s an icon.”

Nonny is the one who wore the bell and led the others. She was the first at the gate and the first to cross the road from the pasture to the milking barn. People who worked for the Hegstroms 18 years ago quickly recognize her.

The Hegstroms are working toward making their farm an agritourism destination and hope Nonny can stick around long enough to be the centerpiece.

“We’d like to see her become the oldest cow in the world,” Carol Hegstrom said, an honor believed to be held now by Clara, a 24-year-old Holstein-Friesian who lives in a farm zoo in England. Historically, the world’s oldest cow was Big Bertha, also from England, who died in 1993 at age 48.

When Nonny dies, Bill Hegstrom said, he will bury her in one of the special spots on the farm – maybe his grandfather’s pine grove or the hemlock knoll – and she’ll have a stone marked with her name.

Meanwhile, the Hegstroms continue to spoil her, feeding her produce from the gardens and an extra portion of grain on Christmas.

“She’s part of this farm,” Carol Hegstrom said. “We love her.”