What Am I Doing Here?
I know I am not alone in asking myself this question. Anyone who breathes air has asked themselves this any number of times throughout the various stages of their lives but lately I’ve been asking myself this not as the great existential question, but as a bit of a mental house cleaning and preparatory question for the start of a new and fresh year. In addition, another question has been surfacing a lot in recent months (ok, years) that I have been doing a rather decent job of ignoring, but will not seem to be banished completely. Am I a farmer? And why do I feel the need to own that title?
When I bought the farm in 2017, I was green. I knew that I was in love with the work of farming and the challenges of animal husbandry. I was committed to no time off, no vacations, no trips to the coast or weekends of rest, but I did not realize the work that would come before I could get to the work I loved. I didn’t anticipate that I would spend two years just cleaning up the place and making (expensive) lists of needed household repairs and then realizing those lists were woefully inadequate and would need constant and interminable revising.
I didn’t realize how much I would need to learn not just about apiaries, sow gestation, tom turkey rivalries and electric fence hazards; but about farm truck transmissions, well pumps, broken frost free pipes, electrical wiring, water heaters, tree felling, pump house construction, water lines, trenching, siding installation, wood shed design, roof leaks, and how long it takes to make a 1100 sq. foot house a consistently dry and warm place to live.
So in the past four years, while I have been laboring to repair and maintain a house, remove rotting outbuildings and trying to create a workable and sustainable infrastructure for good animal husbandry, I keep hearing the question arise in my brain. Am I a farmer? Because I’m not growing anything but a rather small kitchen garden. I’m not raising my own grain or even growing fields of waving ANYTHING. I don’t even have a green house. I have no feed storage bins. My tractor has no implements. My poultry live in a converted and very leaky hay barn that needs burning to the ground. My property has no fencing. After a day job, school in the evenings (I’m studying to be a paralegal, which is really taking away from the farm dream but we’ll save that for another post), and all of the necessary repairs and cleaning the property has required, my meager contributions to “farming” have been ridding my pastures of invasive weeds, improving the quality of native grasses and forage for future ruminants, and frost seeding clover and other legumes.
Which brings me back to the question of what am I doing here? This is not the work I imagined. And if I spend five minutes on Instagram I’m flooded with images of “check out my cool new microgreen tray cleaning station!” and “another batch of piglets being born in three weeks!” or “time to start more seedlings in the greenhouse for spring transplanting!”. In short, I feel like I am falling behind. Behind on being able to call myself a farmer.
This has required some disciplined quiet introspection and forced honesty on my part but what I have concluded is that perhaps I have wanted the title of “farmer” because it puts my life and its work into a simple category that makes sense to me and maybe to others. It gives me an identity that I want others to see. It is how I want others to view me. I know we all seek approval from others and it can be hard to find our own identity without fear of what others will think. But when I realized that I was worrying about “keeping up” so others will deem me worthy of the title “famer”, I felt this sense of relief suddenly arrive. A realization that I do not have to keep up. There is no one out there with a scorecard watching my every failure and shaking their head at how clumsy I am at insulating pipes or fixing a mower blade. Chances are there isn’t anyone even reading this post! It’s really just me.
So perhaps what I am doing here is just being me. I’m being a good steward of the land. A protector. A caregiver. I give care to the land so it will care for me in return. I nurture it and think of its needs before my own. And by doing that I not only make this little plot of ground my own while I am here, but in return it sustains me and brings me joy. It reminds me to live in the present moment and that life will end at some unforeseen point in the future no matter what I do or what title I give myself or hope others will give me. Maybe I am not a farmer. But I’m alive. And I’m doing my best to make my little corner of the world a better place. Farmer or not.
Addendum …
So the past two weeks have been a rather condensed series of household and property debacles that have led to a few epiphanies that I thought were worth tacking on to the end of this post. Last week the farm got a serious helping of snow, which made for a lovely white Christmas but was then followed by several days of freezing temperatures that made hauling wood, feeding poultry, and getting to and from my day job a special challenge.
The pipes froze, the bathroom flooded, my steep gravel driveway turned into a solid sheet of ice that required 4 wheel drive and nerves of steel to navigate, the outside pipe on the wood stove clogged and wouldn’t draw air, and then the rain started. It rained. And it rained. And it rained, until the rivers flooded their banks, the freeways closed, and travel anywhere local was a rotten impossible mess. During which the gray water pipe in the house backed up and refused to drain water anywhere but onto my kitchen floor. (Which is still plywood if anyone is taking notes). In short, I’ve spent every day of the last two weeks problem solving and trying desperately to tell myself that this is all coincidence and part of home ownership and that I AM NOT BEING PUNISHED. But after spending more time under the house than in it, countless sleepless nights wondering what will go wrong next and how I’ll manage it, it is increasingly hard not to wish all of these problems away. I tell myself that if I can just get through this phase of reconstruction and repair, I’ll get to start farming and living my REAL life and I’ll finally be happy. This is where the epiphanies come in.
As I’m crawling on my belly under the house dragging pipe insulation behind me and whispering under my breath “just keep swimming, just keep swimming” I realized that this is it. THIS IS MY LIFE. I’m not waiting for happiness or the “real business of farming” to begin. It is already here. I’m living it now. Some days I won’t have running water. Maybe I’ll never have a finished floor. I’ve signed up for a life of endless projects and problems to solve and that isn’t going to change. So if I’m going to be happy, my mindset will have to change. Which is another fun project that along with everything else, makes me farmer. Not later when I’ve got things planned out and I’m breeding birds and moving electric fence, but right now when everything is a mess and I’m cold and nothing works. I’m a farmer right now.
