There’s nothing easy about farming. It’s a life of hoping for rain and worrying about rising costs and trying to determine the best time to sell. We lamb ewes in the cold and plant milo in the wind and seem to feed hay in all kinds of weather. And to make it all work, my grandparents and parents all had jobs in town as well.
It has meant sacrificing things like fancy vacations, having to do chores before opening Christmas presents, and someone smelling like manure at basically every family dinner.
And as I snapped this picture of my dad and my little boy, it hit me.
The reward for all of this, I think, has been the family it built. Rarely is there a day two of us aren’t discussing the price of a commodity or how to breed a ewe or what we think about something farm related. We all come together at least once a month to do something farm related. We are all a part of something; all invested in the farm and in each other. We take the time to teach toddlers things like the difference in bulls and heifers and how to identify all the crops growing in the field.
And although we care about the milo yield or raising the ewe to win her class at Reno, turns out maybe the farm has really been about the family all along.
Always a Farm Kid 