Farm selection

These families who have farmed for years do not have this problem.  They inherit farms.  The try to decide when the are growing up if farming is what they want to do or whether they would rather try to stretch their wings in the rest of the world.  Sometimes it is a combination of the both.

So, farm selection would be easy and one dimensional if my children were 3.  Find a farm we can afford, in an area we like, figure out how to put 6 kids in a home there and buy the thing!  Oh, but that would be dull and boring!  Nope!  My kids are mostly grown and interested in participating to varying degrees.

Problem 1 – 4 adult children, 2 teenage children, 6 grandkids:  pleasing everybody – including the parents

Problem 2 – NO farms in our school system.  Hollers do not make good farms!

So, the family meeting system:   Family meetings just seemed to grow out of family dinners.  We would meet up for dinner a couple times per week and discuss life, enjoy the grandkids and the noise, tolerate the mess, and proceed.  I wish I had recorded some of the earlier family meeting/dinners.  Everybody throwing out ideas of how we could do this farming thing, who seemed interested in cows, chickens etc.  What do we think about this farm, what about the school district, is there enough cleared land, how to we all get moved there.  Oh the questions and the answers were endless.

Of course we will not be able to make everybody happy and I feel less constrained to do so at the moment.  Having had a considerable amount of trouble coming to terms with moving from a house that is newly built by our own design in the part of the world that feels like home to me – I have spent a great deal of time praying.  Well, honestly, whining to God and asking Him if this was what He REALLY wanted me to do.  So, after months of back and forth, stress, worry – I have FINALLY managed a peace about the whole thing.

My peace comes from this process.  God causes all things to work together for the good of those that love Him who are the called according to His purpose.  So, I try to rest in the fact that if I am doing anything that He is calling me to do, He will work it together for my good.  So, my beautiful house is on the market.  If I get an actual reasonable offer in this market, in our area, I promise you that God has caused that to happen.  If I get an offer, the house is sold and we are moving – somewhere!  And, if I know God is in it, I can trust Him to work out the things that don’t just fall together, the frustrated teenagers, the logistics of moving 4 families to a property to do something new, the new dynamic to our growing family.

We have leased some property from my sister and we are currently trying to learn how to farm.  It is a process and an hour drive from home.  But it is a start!  Did that make everybody happy?  No, of course not.  But, it is a step.

So, today, after babysitting some grandkids, packing an overnight bag, gathering the teenagers and picking up the hubs from work – we will drive an hour to begin the hands on process of learning to run barbed wire fencing.  It can’t be that hard – right?