In the Beginning...
My husband and I started our small farm back in 2001 when we got tired of eating flavorless fruits and vegetables. We had moved to a semi-rural area of Virginia so we thought sure we would be able to find an abundance of 'farm stands' out where we lived. We quickly discovered that people either had their own gardens or just got their stuff from the supermarket. Not a farm stand to be found, and farmer's markets weren't an option since the nearest one was 45 minutes away and neither one of us liked getting up early on the weekend. Both of us had grown up eating fresh vegetables from a home garden, and I had spent a summer working on a family friend's farm as a "mother's helper" when I was a teenager, so it seemed like a logical next step to start producing our own. That way we could ensure that we were eating good quality food since we were using only organic practices. We started with an old house on 10 acres and had a modest fruit orchard and garden planted within the first two years. We had also built a chicken coop and were raising a flock of chickens for eggs and meat.
It wasn't long before we decided that we couldn't justify spending money on meat from the supermarket that was tasteless and often injected with various things we would rather not eat. Our solution? To raise our own meat of course. I wanted sheep, but our current pastureland was occupied by a couple of horses and had horse fencing, which wouldn't keep sheep in or safe, so our next task was to start clearing some of our woods for pasture.
This led to the acquirement of 4 Nigerian Dwarf goats to keep the brush down while we were clearing land to make pastures for the sheep we hoped to have. We also acquired a couple of pigs - nature's rototillers - to help clear where we wanted the pastures to go. The goats had the added bonus of producing milk that we could drink and use to make cheese, yogurt and ice cream, and the pigs gave us our own pork. A year later we added 4 ewes and 2 rams to our small farm. And then it was a couple of Angora rabbits, and a few Cashmere goats, and then some turkeys...
Keep in mind that we were both working full-time, and I was working in software development for a major insurance company, so my job was more than just a normal 40-hour work week. At this point, our farm was just a "hobby", but even hobbies run out of room when you start breeding and producing lambs and kids. The solution? A bigger farm of course!
Fast forward to 2015 and one farm and two houses later. Time has moved on, and we ended up getting rid of the rabbits and cashmere goats since we had finally learned that we couldn't do everything ourselves, especially while we are still working full-time. I was still in software development but had moved up a few rungs on the ladder and now managed a software development team of 70+ people and my husband had his own business. We still had the sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys and pigs. We had close to 10 times the number of sheep and goats we started with, and the farm had become an actual business, albeit a part-time business. I have been talking about "retiring" and running the farm full-time for over 5 years now, but a good income and a challenging but interesting job is hard to walk away from. My parents both passed away, and both passed rather unexpectedly, so there was a real sense that time is finite. What did we do? We bought a bigger farm, but a farm where we could make our own hay, and design and set up the pastures the way we want. Translation - the farm is all in hay and there is no fencing at all.
Summer 2016: We have owned the new farm for over a year, and have finally moved in. We have pastures up in the back and have moved the horses and ewes over to the new farm. We still had the old farm, and all the goats and chickens were over there. My husband gets sick and it takes the doctors over 3 months to figure out what is wrong. In the end it was Lyme Disease, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and Ulcerative Colitis all at once.... that is what you get for fencing in overgrown grass and trees, I guess. Needless to say, with him seriously ill, all progress on the new farm stopped.
January 2017: The doctors had a hard time getting my husband stabilized in terms of his joint issues so he was still limited in what he could do. In my career, I had reached the last rung in the ladder that I would ever reach. I was eligible for early retirement, and I have been talking about quitting my job and running the farm full-time for almost 10 years now. What did we do? I took early retirement from my corporate career and decided to run the farm full-time with my husband. We are in our early 50’s and are just starting to farm in earnest as a full-time business. Welcome to farming from the middle...reflections on the trials, tribulations, and rewards of starting to farm full-time in middle age...
