My wife and I are starting to look into the crystal ball to see our future and what we find is that you must need a special degree in crystal ball reading in order to see anything. At least, I think you have to attend a weekend workshop we haven’t heard about. I bet it is too expensive anyway…
But no, seriously. Farming is somewhere in our future. We don’t know how, we honestly don’t know why, but it feels like it is in our bones and that makes it pretty tough to shake. All of our relatives with experience farming tell us we are crazy. We tell each other we are crazy. Yet it always seems to come up.
People always say it is a waste of our intelligence to farm. Is that the case? Is it that farmers must be too dumb to do anything else or smart people are to smart to want to farm? I think neither. I personally think it is that people have a tendency to be lazy, and what is smart to a lazy person is to do less work.
Odds are we will probably settle someday for a hobby farm of some sort. I would love to farm my dad’s dairy later on, but careerwise, timewise, and wifewise, I have a feeling that won’t be in the cards unless I find a better way to stack the deck. My wife loves goats, I want to have a huge garden and would like to work with sheep and poultry. Don’t let me forget to tell my turkey story from FFA (Needless to say, I hope the next time around I can keep the dog out of the cage).
My wife and I both look back fondly on our growing up around animals and desire for our kids to have the same experience (FYI no kids yet). But our longing to farm goes deeper than our hopes for our children. Our grandparents on both sides farmed, our parents farmed, and we fear we are part of a generation where the homestead farm will dissapear altogether. Maybe it is an antiquated part of American culture, but it is (was?) a good part of American culture. Sure, there were struggles on the homestead farm that dwarf todays worries of 401ks, endless emails, and traffic gridlock, but there was a deep seeded sense of pride and accomplishment in overcoming these obstacles as a matter of necessity, not luxury.
So whether or not we end up on a hobby farm or a production farm, who knows. But what I do know deep in my heart is this: people who have a passion to farm need to have a way to do so. Our communities and governments need to help them along, pairing them up with experienced assistiance and the means to get a good start. We already depend on the rest of the world for energy, and if we don’t change the way we see the desperate shortage of willing American farmers, we will depend on the world for our food as well.
