Friends of the Farm

I’m having a day of gratitude. But first, you need to know some back-story. It’s been a rough week, frankly, fretting about our resources around here. Any small business has a lot of rough bumps in the road to navigate, and especially so in farming. The past several months, in particular, have been quite challenging for us. While it might seem to some that we should be getting rich from the farm products we sell, nothing could be further from the truth. Providing animals better living conditions, better food, more attention – all resulting in better food – costs so much more than it does to produce anything within the industrial food system. It is impossible for us to compete with their pricing, or come anywhere near it without implementing the same practices that they do, and at that point, why bother? We are so grateful for everyone who has purchased eggs and herd shares from the farm so far, and we know that there are those who, like us, recognize that sustainable, humanely produced food has a higher price tag than that put out by BigAg.

So did Gidget

Despite that, it’s still been a struggle, and even though the farm is now contributing toward its own costs, George’s paycheck from his full-time job off-farm still has to help subsidize our operation here. If you’ve only been reading for awhile, you might not know that I had a full-time job in IT when we initially moved out to the country, but I was downsized out of my position due to my ongoing health issues. So to say we run a tight ship is an understatement, and a laughable one! But we are trying to hard to continuously maintain and improve our animals daily lives, despite our limited resources, and that’s why, back in May of this year, I posted up a Wish List of items we need for the farm. I explained that we would barter for these items, either with eggs, or jewelry-making supplies, or our technical skills. It’s kind of been sitting dormant ever since, but I remained ever-hopeful.

And as it turns out, that hope was not misplaced. I was delighted to receive an email from a couple who had some sections of fence to offer us, and they requested some eggs in return. We have those! They even delivered the sections last night, and they are such nice folks. We were delighted to meet them! We now have some more fencing in order to expand our goat’s pasture area. They really are friends to the farm, helping out like this.

As soon as we can get some posts, there will be a caprine celebration due to their additional (unsupervised) outdoor space. Why do I specify “unsupervised?” Because we take our goats on walks, you see. It’s a Balki Bartokomous thing. But we do have a vision of large fenced pastures, with separate paddocks, so that we can do rotational grazing.

Yay! Fencing! 😀

So, thank you so much, D&B – I’m keeping you anonymous here, but you know who you are. We said thank you last night, but I’d like to say it here again: thank you so much, and we really hope that you enjoy the eggs! It is experiences like this that can really bring some brightness to an otherwise stressful week. 🙂

As a side note to that stressful week – if you tried to visit the site on Tuesday and were unable to reach it, we do apologize. You see, our internet service was out due to some squirrels chewing on the line (yes, seriously) and it took a few hours to get that remedied. We had been hosting our websites out of the house, but those have now been moved to an outside location, such that if our service is interrupted again, we won’t suffer a website outage. We appreciate your patience and persistence in coming back to find us!

Have a great weekend, everyone!

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