What you should know before coveting a family farm…
Read this before you get any farm or livestock animals.
It is Tuesday. So far since Sunday, we have:
Completed a partial deep clean of the chicken coop (ending up in me covered in chicken crap and filth.)
Mucked out the goat pen (all Mom)
Wrangled some very pregnant goats and a stinky buck to weigh them and trim their nails (I helped a little!)
Completed a third attempt at installing a drainage system in our goat pen (this was all Mom and Dad)
Photographed the goats for the website
Spread 2 tons of rock at the fence line around the pool
Seeded the yard and installed erosion control blankets on the muddy areas around the pool
Started on the bridge over the drainage ditch(also all Mom and Dad.)
Cleaned the rabbit hutches and cleared out rat traps and poison that I put in our unused hutch to get rid of the rats that were breeding
Killed a copperhead that caught me by surprise while I was collecting eggs in the chicken coop
Purchased and added rocks to a dry river bed that is under construction (built to channel the drainage water around the newly constructed pool)
Picked up a satin rabbit buck from a colleague to introduce him to my young doe, and delivered him back home.
Disposed of a dead rat next to the swimming pool, visibly a result of my earlier poisoning efforts.
And as I’m writing this, it is only lunchtime on Tuesday (and I also have a part-time job.)
I’ve talked about it before… People come to visit and they glamorize this lifestyle it in their heads - “Wow, it must be so awesome to have this.”- but when push comes to shove it’s really not for everyone.
While the glimpse is bucolic, the bulk of your time is spent cleaning up lots of poop, trimming nails, hoofs, and feathers. Hours spent changing water, feeding, wrangling, constant repairs and modifications to accommodate different needs, personalities and stages of life, and knowing that mistakes and negligence can kill your animals, and the reality that even if you do everything perfectly, you still have to deal with a lot of death.
Because this is livestock and that’s just how it is.
So to anyone looking in from the outside, thinking that acreage and a variety of animals looks appealing, remember the amount of blood sweat and tears that goes into rearing any creature through its full lifecycle. In our case, we have about 55 animals on the property. So think about the amount of heart and care you put into your dog or cat. I’m not sure what the multiplier for that would be, but I can tell you that there are many days when the emotions run high - all kinds of emotions!! We get to be together as a family, feel the reward of building things, watching life start, caring for animals that depend on us, play with lots of babies, and get a work out in through the process. No, we don’t work out - yes, we do shovel and lift all day. It is rewarding, it is difficult, it can be sad but mostly it is happy - if you like to be sweaty and dirty!!
I bow down to farmers everywhere. My little tiny family farm just gives me a glance into what a larger scale might be like. It’s an incredibe lifestyle, ridiculously hard, absolutely rewarding for your body and soul, but financially seriously high risk and difficult. It takes a certain kind of person - respect... absolute respect to all the farmers out there doing this, simply for the love of it.
