Becoming a Farmer
Stepping into this year the doors were thrown open for me to approach my farm business full-time for the first time. And I was ready to do it with the eagerness I’d placed on the top shelf, out of reach, since I was a kid. Disappointment washed over a small bit of each aspect of the future when the necessary cancelations began rolling in for all of the events, fairs, festivals, and a single non-farmy “vacation” I had been trying to plan for several years now. This pandemic has disrupted everyone in unfortunate ways though I know I’ve been one of the lucky ones. Employed, healthy, with access to all the fresh air I need. But I’d be masking some honesty if I didn’t admit my slight chagrin.
The most unfortunate cancelation, according to my family anyways, was my college graduation. With time now to ponder the alternatives life’s handed down in exchange for that special walk across the stage, I feel luckier than ever.
Right around peak craziness this winter, I opened a curious email from a national agricultural organization. Its contents addressed coronavirus and the travel involved for shearers. Included in the email were formal documents for “Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers.” Colin and I had already discussed how we wanted to proceed with shearing during these times. Animal welfare would take precedent to the pandemic and the logistics of physically distanced shearing weren’t too much of a hassle. But me, an essential worker? No no, I was spending most days in a small barn lambing out our little flock and slowly designing an amateur website in the dark hours of the morning between sleepless lamb checks. Exhausted, changing my clothes less than frequently, and probably smelling of lanolin. Surely I shouldn’t be considered essential. But as spring came on and shearing picked up, the seriousness proved itself to us. We did have to present our documentation crossing some state lines, took extra precautions fueling up at gas stations, and omitted social elements from shearing stops. I felt indescribable fortune for this freedom and steady income while muting the inescapable anxiety for my and Colin’s safety.
Masked and with hand sanitizer-stocked trucks, we’ve made it through. There’s a durable sense of composure I’m wearing as we head into the fall season. Not only have we been working around a contagious virus, but even I seem to forget that we also started a brand spanking new business just eight months ago. We’ve charged head on into a whole new realm of time management when the end of lambing duty 24-hours a day transitioned straight into scheduling and shearing thousands of sheep. Weeks have gone by in flashes as Colin and I worked together and apart across ten states to successfully launch this new segment of our business. And somehow, it’s all come together.
Some of the ewes from one of our best days of shearing this spring.
I’m not sure what the marker is for a successful fresh-out-of-college job. I do know that my stars aligned, and I set out on a flawlessly custom path during this new normal. My business venture was deemed essential and left me swamped (a good kind of swamped) with work. Some unknowing foresight pushed me to work overtime on my studies, so I finished coursework for my degree in December and moved back home before anyone had a hint that campus would be shut down and emptied out in the next 90 days. My alma mater boasts rather high post-graduation employment rates and a majority of their student’s internships turning into job offers. Agricultural job opportunities have been hurt less so than many other kinds of work, but I still witnessed plenty of my peers unable to pursue much after graduation in May. By mid-February I was missing campus, my favorite professors, the “senior semester” I opted out of by cramming too many credits into each one before. April crashed in and all of that died down so my head could fill up on travel routes and shearing schedules. I’ve already said it but I’m going to say it again. Something greater than gratitude swelled in me, collected in my achy joints and sore back, and answered all the “what-ifs” pestering me at the start of the year.
The rampant rollercoaster of a journey I rode entering college is almost comical to think of now. I can recall clearly the statistics recited to me again and again as a freshman. “More than half of you will change your major. Change your whole area of study before you graduate!” Not quite the case for me, but the message resonates today. At seventeen, emerged in meat production and processing as if my life depended on it, I was set on studying meat science. But the drive shifted in me after a petered-out application effort and a rejection letter from a dream school showed up in my email. I settled on something simpler. There was no plan, I only knew I couldn’t consider anything other than agricultural studies of some kind. Staying closer to Vermont was easy and I could keep my small flock by dedicating every weekend to return home. Best of all, my options were cheaper and with a very general “something to do with farming” goal I felt better piling up a less substantial amount of student loans.
College was a dream come true, even with practically zero direction. My thoughts were like a ping pong ball flying between dairy science then food systems then animal nutrition and back to the true star of the show; sheep. By the end of my first semester I hadn’t exactly made up my mind except to go down a broad tract of study called “animal industry” with a minor in agricultural education for good measure. Kids who love animal agriculture as much as I did take up a special place in my life. Somedays I try interrogating myself to determine if this farm is just a means to an end so I can recruit and foster all the budding agriculturalist youth out there who have as little access to farm experiences as I struggled with. But that’s a subject for another day! I approached a fifth and final semester regretting how quickly I worked through my degree. The overstuffed semesters were perfect for me, a bookworm at heart. That fact only intensified the regret while coming to terms with a completed academic career right around the bend. At the same time, my entire farm would have to be dispersed if I were to pursue more education. Too many irons in the fire to consider that option.
Have you ever pushed your emotional self into the past, in an entirely cliché way, to a childhood passion you wanted to carry into adulthood? December blew in and I moved out of my college dorm. Waiting for me in Vermont were twenty something bred ewes and my partner in all of this, Colin. A veil of uncertainty clouded my bliss. Could I, with Colin’s help of course, create a future with sheep? It was a hard shove back to my adolescent self, explaining to my dad how I “just knew” animal agriculture was what I was meant to spend my life working on while mixing up a bottle of milk replacer for my first bottle lamb that kept me going. That promise to my dad, who passed away days before getting to see his daughter finish her first semester of college at the top of her class, was the spark that kept the fire lit beneath me. That was a promise to myself. I had no idea all those years ago that I wouldn’t go off to one of the big research institutions I thought had all the answers to modern agriculture. There was no hint of the perfect opportunities and networks I would be presented with at my small, New York college. And there was no way of knowing I would run into, and somehow captivate the attention of another almost-dairy-farmer but actually sheep-crazy first-generation shepherd dreaming of growing a legacy in the rocky soils of the northeast. The idea of staking a life in this stuff took ahold of me back then and all I can figure is that it hasn’t left me since, even with occasional boughts of doubt and readjusting of plans.
Every day is not a perfect dream. Shearing is tough, dirty work. Building up a business from scratch promises so many responsibilities that knock that charm right off the title of “farmer” (don’t get me going on insurance, accountants, filing I don’t know how many different papers and forms with too many different state departments). The beautiful souvenir I hold, during the good days and the bad, is that no one knows just what’s to come. Had you told seventeen-year-old me that I’d be self-employed before I could sit down at a bar and get a beer, I would have laughed. But here I am, coming off of an unbelievably successful shearing season with a farm plan that’s been brewing in my head for years finally unfolding.
I feel for all the college freshman and my peers who are returning to campuses now. We’re stuck in an unprecedented challenge that leaves a lot of questions unanswered. There’s nothing I can offer to sooth the potential anxieties around one’s health. But I do know
Me with my first leased sheep named Lily.
the stress of facing a foggy future with uprooted plans. Ripples of chaos will always cross the maps we paint for ourselves. Grounding myself in a single, broad idea that fulfills a deeply rooted wonder in me has moved me along to just the right destination.
I still head out for morning chores and think, “Is this it?”. Tending my sheep and shearing others. The tasks feel too simple some days. Breath, don’t rush, and continue on. More than anything else I’ve learned so far is that there’s always more, always some unknown, ahead.