You hear so much from these new farmers talking about their “quality of life” being the catalyst for their new career. The number one reason we quit is because life immediately sucked. I’ve heard it said that “Family farming is hard on the farmer’s families.” Seems opposite of what the goals might be setting out, but it turned out to be true in our lives. The One Reason Why We Aren’t Turning Our Homestead into a Small Farm: Quality of Life It is my hope in doing so that you might be able to glean from our experiences and be prepared for what lies ahead of you should you choose to go forward with plans to start a family farm. Much ado is made about leaving your day job behind and I know many, many of you have this goal in mind. Much ado is made of becoming part of the ground swell, join the movement, and becoming a local farmer. I’m talking about quit-your-day-job, leave-the-rat-race, make-a-full-time-living-off-the-land kind of business here. Sure, there may be ways that we can earn a few extra dollars here and there. Instead, I’m going to simply tell you the reasons why we aren’t turning our homestead into a business again. I’m not going to play the blame game, though I really, really want to justify it and feel like less of a quitter. I’m not going to get into what led us to begin this work. I made sure to circle a few fun things that would never sell at the market but might be interesting to try. I pushed through it and felt the emotion (just like I am to write this now… it’s been sitting in my drafts for weeks, and I can’t bring myself to finish). All the anxiety, frustration, and weight of failure. Earlier this week, when I sat down with the first seed catalog of 2017 that arrived in the mail, there it all was again. Sure we weren’t selling and I didn’t need to plant so much for fall, but something had to be done with the 800 pounds of tomatoes I grew! I couldn’t let the weeds pull nutrients from the soil and go to seed making my garden work that much more difficult next year. Every time I would go outdoors I would have a panic attack and break down. I thought it would be over when we buried the gardens in hay mulch last month. It continues to be hard on our marriage, the failure continues to take an emotional toll on me. It has been a roller coaster ride of emotions but I’m without-a-doubt certain that we did the right thing. And I am NOT a quitter, so I won’t lie, for me, quitting has been harder than the workload. But it was harder on my family than I ever imagined it would have been.
What happened in the weeks that followed was exactly as much work (non-stop, all-day) and exactly as much stress (I lost 20 pounds) as I anticipated.
I was as ready as I could be for whatever the summer threw at me. I started the season with a Command Center, numerous spreadsheets, and Trello.
I’m naturally well-organized and had a binder full of plans and charts. I listened to the entire season of the Urban Farmer on Permaculture Voices, and every other podcast I could come across, taking notes all the while. There are numerous resources available about how you can make an incredibly decent living on an acre or two of vegetable production and I spent last winter devouring as much as I possibly could on both the growing side and the business side of the enterprise. We had the open, tillable land, we had the high tunnel, we have a good location, we had an opportunity, and we took it. We never intended for that little enterprise to be anything more than supplemental income which is what made it different from this time around.Īs I announced back in June, we were transitioning our large family gardens into a Market Garden where we would sell our produce to local folks in the city.
A few years ago we started a raw milk herdshare that we quit for a number of reasons I won’t get into here. This isn’t the first time that we thought we’d try to make money off the extra land we have since moving here. ~Dave WillisĪbout a year ago we decided to try turning our homestead into a business. Health, your family, or your character is not real success. Any success that happens at the expense of your