On Community

We have recently been encouraged by the kindness of good friends and total strangers, both. Thank you, all, for your comments, shares, good wishes, and prayers.

We wrote about our struggles with the wet weather in part because we feel we have a relationship with many of you. We consider you friends, and friends need to let each other know what is going on.

We also shared because we know that many of you aren’t familiar with the risks of farming. Each year we take our blood, sweat and tears, as well as most of our remaining money, and we bury it in the ground.

We hope and pray that everything works out so that we get all that money we buried back. And we also hope that the blood, sweat and tears fertilize it and make it yield an increase. That increase or harvest is what we convert to money over the winter and the next summer while the next set of crops grow. This money is what we use to pay the bills, fix things, take a small salary, and save a little to bury in the ground the next year.

When one of these harvests are small or non-existent, we tighten our belts. That’s part of why we don’t have all our eggs in one basket. If the corn doesn’t yield well, we still have the other things to fall back on. But when more then one of the harvests are affected, things get scary.

Some of you have asked what can be done for farmers who are struggling. I’m not sure what we can do for commodity farmers (corn and soybeans, etc), but I plan to try to find out.

For market farmers, you can do the following:

1. Eat local. Buy food/products from your local farmers when they are at market or selling through a roadside stand. Feel free to ask questions about how they grew it and whether they grew it. That’s okay. But do buy if you can.

2. Be understanding about why our prices are sometimes higher than you would like. I’m as frugal as the next guy. But a small family farm cannot compete with big corporate farms, just due to the economy of scale. We are very sure that the food we sell is better quality than what you can buy in the stores, so remember that when you’re comparing prices. And keep in mind the law of supply and demand. When most of the peach trees freeze in the polar vortex winter of 2019, peaches are going to cost more.

3. Share the love. Tell your friends about us. If you liked the lamb you bought, spread the word. Give our handmade goods as gifts to friends and family. Donate our produce to the local food pantry so there is healthy food available. Check with a friend to see if they want to share bulk purchases of meat with you.

4. Pray (or whatever you do) and tell us you’re rooting for us. A kind word goes a long ways.

I told a friend earlier this week that a no-plant spring is like being tied to the railroad tracks and watching the train approach, but very slowly. 1-2 mph, maybe. For now, you can only hear the whistle in the distance and see the puffs of smoke afar off. Nothing is happening right now. But you know darn well it’s gonna hurt like crazy later.