Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Away
As a farmer, one thing that you don’t get to do that other people seem to take for granted is travel or go on vacation. We put in hours of work around the farm every day, and obviously it’s not something that you can just drop at a moments notice. In addition, with as varied an operation as ours, it’s difficult to find someone to farm-sit for us. Simply throwing hay and water at animals is easy - simple task and simple labor. Getting under cows and goats to milk is not for the unskilled or the faint of heart.
A few years ago, we made a decision to have a long-term goal of moving further away from civilization. This was for a variety of reasons.
Cities and the people that live there stress us out. Grocery trips are tolerable but stressful chore. Malls are to be avoided at nearly all costs. Traffic is just plain evil.
In addition, we are cold weather people. Even two to three months of hot weather is enough to make us long for colder climes. Part of the issue is that for monetary reasons, we choose to live without air conditioning. To some extent, AC would be counterproductive, as in order to work in the heat, one’s body must be acclimated to the heat. Working and living in the heat is just part of life, unless we are able to live and work in a location where the climate naturally suits us.
About a year and a half ago, we purchased some land on an island in one of the Great Lakes. Isolated, quiet, beautiful, and with a moderate climate that suits us perfectly. Yes, it’s iced in for three months out of the year, but if we can manage to become as self-sufficient as we’d like, that shouldn’t be a significant inconvenience. Coastal land on the island is incredibly expensive, out of reach to all except CEOs and wealthy retirees. But interior land is fairly cheap and plentiful. We don’t need to live on a beach. Being able to drive there in 5 minutes is good enough.
This land is old farmland - cleared forest as is much of the midwest. It was being actively cultivated fifty years ago, but it has largely been let go since then. It has started to grow back into blueberries, junipers, maples, and birches, but there is still a good bit of open space.
This week, we begin our quest to turn this rawness into our new home. We’ll be spending about five days up there, partially clearing the land and partially relaxing. A working vacation, if you will. Reclaiming this land is a fairly long process, as the junipers acidify the soil and make it inhospitable for grasses and pasture legumes. Step one is to remove the acidifying junipers and conifers, and to thin the shading deciduous trees. Step two, slated probably for next year, will be to lime the soil to being the ph up, so that a pasture can be planted.
When we bought our current farm, we bought a near-exhausted hay field with nothing on it. We had a house built, and we built the rest of our facilities ourselves. It is an evolving thing - as our experience grows and our needs change, our farm configuration changes. Our farm never looks the same from year to year. One of these years we hope to be in a more or less final state, able to sit back and maintain what we have rather than continually constructing and reconfiguring.
Sometimes we think we are nuts for wanting to start from scratch again. Then we look at the attractiveness of the location and the basic knowledge we have now that can make the next farm structurally better from day one, and we think it just might all be worth it. We’ve always been ambitious people, even when we don’t necessarily have the energy to follow through with that ambition.
One thing we’ve learned about ourselves is that if we have a goal that we really want to achieve, we’re going to meet that goal one way or another. This year, we’ve got a friend that has some farm experience that is going to watch the farm for us while we start investing our time and labor in farm number two. It is a bit intimidating, but honestly, I’m excited as a little kid. I can’t wait to get started.
Comments
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The new place sounds like a place we’d love too. Sounds less like relaxation and more like work ... but that kind of work is gratifying in that you see results quickly.
How are you planning on liming? I’ve been trying to find time to do some research around here and find a source, or someone who will lime such a small place ... most laugh when I say “7-8 acres”pete in Midland | 6/12/2008 09:28 AM CDT -
You can get pelletized lime in 50 lb bags by the pallet and apply them with a standard residential fertilizer spreader. That seems to be the most efficient way to handle anything less than about 10 acres.
American Farmer | 6/18/2008 07:16 AM CDT
