I quick summary of our journey so far:
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September 2010 - Jamie and I attend the Southeast Nebraska Diversified Ag tour and fall in love with the idea. At this point, we are living comfortably in Lincoln and just putting the finishing touches on our home that we had spent the last two and a half years remodeling, inside and out.
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October 2010 - I have been obsessing over the idea of farming ever since the tour and have been searching high and low for opportunities to buy or rent land. In doing so, I stumble across a listing in the
Center For Rural Affair's Land Link. I call the landowner and we have a brief conversation, the sticking point for me was that he (and his family) had no interest in selling the land in the future. He called me back the following week to see if I was still interested and he seemed downtrodden by the fact that he still didn't have anyone to rent his farm. So, I agreed to come out and take a look at the place. It was very rough. No one had lived there for 2 years so the entire farmstead was covered in 6 foot tall weeds. There was an old farmhouse, a granary and machine shed and a couple other small outbuildings but that was about it. I should also mention that the farm was off-grid, meaning it was no longer hooked up to the local electric utility and all of it's power came from a wind turbine and a gas generator. He was about 85 at the time so we slowly made our way around the farm and had a great conversation in the process. Long story short, he didn't need the income from the farm but he was very passionate about how he wanted it to be used. Which just happened to be the same way we wanted to use it. After our initial meeting, I ran home to find Jamie and as soon as she got off work, I brought her back out to the place. It was 160 acres of pasture and alfalfa on gently rolling hills. The views were beautiful, as you could see for miles and miles in every direction. The best part was the allure of having access to all this land in exchange for a little sweat.We shook hands and agreed to move out in March of 2011.
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February and March 2011- What a life changing period of time. During these couple of months we bought our herd of shorthorn cattle, moved out the farm and found out that Jamie was pregnant with our first child.
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March 2011 to September 2012 - We experience more in this period of time then you can ever imagine. Talk about school of hard knocks... We learned so much about farming, about living and about ourselves. And part of that was realizing that we wanted our children to have the opportunity to grow up around their family, as we did. Plus, we wanted to help rebuild our local, rural community and it seemed wrong to do so anywhere but where we grew up, to invest in the community that invested so much into us.
To learn more about our experiences during this time, you'll have to peruse Jamie's blog
A Girl on a Farm
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September 2012 - We moved! But there's a twist, because we moved from 160 acres in the country to .16 acres in the town of Deshler, NE. No that decimal is not a typo, we didn't move to sixteen acres, we moved to sixteen hundredths of an acre. Or to phrase it another way - our farm was now 1000 times smaller than it was. To be fair, we actually gained acreage as we are now renting 185 acres of pasture from my family. However, that pasture is 25 miles away and nothing but grass and some fence. So the dynamic is very different then it was before. With no farmstead, we were forced to make a tough decision and ultimately decided to get rid of the hogs and poultry. Luckily, we were able to find a small pasture down the street to keep our sheep.
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October 2012 - We were still bringing stuff back from the farm and going to Farmer's Market in Lincoln when we visited the Farmers Market in Davenport. We had heard about
Harold Stone of
Stone's Thoreau and the exciting things he was proposing for Davenport but we hadn't met him. Of course, after a brief conversation it was clear that our visions were very much aligned and that a collaborative effort would be greatly beneficial for all. More to come on that very soon.
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November 2012 - We finally moved the cattle and hay from Unadilla to Alexandria (blowing two transmissions in the process...). Now I am in the process of setting up fencing to keep the cattle on soybean stubble so I can feed them hay through the winter. Because our cattle are grass-fed and organically raised, I couldn't put them on cornstalks like most producers in the area do. Which brings up the fact that some decisions will have to be made regarding our farm and how it will change to fit our new circumstances. I'm not sure exactly what path we'll take to get there but I know we're headed in the right direction.
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