If you’ve ever listened to an episode of The Beginning Farmer Show (that’s the podcast) you’ll know that I have a lot of hard lessons learned along this farming journey. In fact I had so many that during the almost 150 episode run of the show I featured one every week! I have broken tractors, lost animals, had freezer breakdowns, created more work for myself, and so much more. To be completely honest those things can really make you question what you are doing on the farm!
The latest breakdown of note on the farm (besides the tiller that seems to be a goner) are the leaf springs on the farm truck (aka “Ethan’s mode of transportation”). Once pieces started falling out on the road I knew that it needed to be taken care of. Needless to say, taking care of something like leaf springs on a nearly 20 year old truck with 337,000 miles on it ends up exposing more issues … as in we need a new truck box/flat bed! Those things that may technically just be a “part of life” can get you down when they seem to pile up on the farm!
There are somethings that keep me going though when it comes to the typical ups and downs of farm life … actually I should say there are a lot of people that keep me going! Recently I was test driving a used Suburban owned by a gentleman who happened to be a pig farmer as well. Of course the conversation quickly drifted away from the ins and outs of that particular Suburban and onto the topic of pigs, more specifically raising pigs.
You see, I will probably raise and finish somewhere are 150-175 pigs this year and the gentleman I was talking to will probably do somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000!!! He talked about why he loved his system of buildings, computer controlled water/feed systems, ventilation computers, manure collection, and even the fact that people take away his manure for free and then spread it on their fields. Of course there were a lot of differences in our systems, our styles, our markets, and well … basically most things other than the fact that we were both raising pigs and both of us were genuinely interested in doing the best job that we could.
In the end though the biggest thing that I walked away with from that conversation (we ended up grabbing a different Suburban … a 9 passenger instead of an 8) is that if raised hogs in the same way that gentleman did I would feel like I was missing something. I’m not really talking about all the differences of our farming methods, rather the interaction with our amazing farm supporters! Being able to talk with the people that are purchasing, preparing, sharing, and eating our pork is one of the main reasons we farm the way we do.
That was a long post to say this … keep track of the good things that keep you going!
