Unearthing the Dream

Each Monday at Noon I'll be posting over on the Farm Dreams site as "The Aspiring Farmer". Every other weekday you'll find posts on homesteading, cheesemaking and more. Here's a glimpse at the first post. If you haven't scoped out the new site yet, go check it out!

The Aspiring Farmer Blog


We’re closing on a farm in two weeks. Wow. That’s a huge deal. So how did we end up owning land and a house in rural Tennessee?

At 26 years old I hadn’t dedicated much thought to the future. I had a good job, paid off my student loans, lived in the biggest city in America, and was generally pretty carefree. That was two years ago.
 
It was around then that I set my sights set on marriage. Once the prospect of matrimony became a reality I felt a strong sense of responsibility to take my family’s future into deeper consideration. The chief concern in my mind was knowing that we would lead happy and fulfilled lives. The normal 9 to 5 (or 8 to 7 in my case) wasn’t cutting it and I knew it would only get harder to leave if we didn’t cut the cord soon.
 

To Kill a Roasting Bird

I walked down the dirt road to the processing room with camera in pocket, eager to document our first experience of transforming a living animal into something recognizable as "dinner". I love taking pictures and envisioned shooting beautiful and arresting images of the process. They would be respectful of the animals giving their lives to feed us, while at the same time, unflinchingly direct and honest. 

Err...right. When all was said and done, that camera didn’t come out of my pocket until the very end of the day, after I had washed all of the blood from the killing station and taken a good reflective break in the brisk air outside. The photos I took were rushed and sheepish - some even frantically blurred. With the camera in my hand, I suddenly felt like a voyeur, cheapening the solemnity of the act we had just participated in. I was embarrassed to even pull the camera up to my eye and shot blindly at the machinery, deciding that would be sufficient.
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Will the Small Farm "Boom" Go "Bust"?

Small Farm Explosion, courtesy of www.plbg.com
This question’s been posed to me by numerous existing farmers and aspiring farmers, and I think it’s a great question to ask. Any entrepreneur should contemplate those big picture questions before leaping into a new venture. My response is that we’re only at the tip of the iceberg. This trend will be sustainable in the long-term. I honestly think that the resurgence in knowing where food comes from and who produces it will stick around forever.
 
Why? Because it’s the right answer to a very serious problem. Our society is completely detached from its food system and it’s a food system that has been proven time and again to create illness and serious health problems among the populace (see this article and its bibliography).
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