LAST CALL AT THE BARn

Fire, flood, drought, disease, debt and disaster. Sounds like the first line of a poem but is, in fact, a synopsis of my farming career. And it is time to call it a day.

Most of you will already know that we have had a disproportionate amount of things happen to us since we moved here in 2013. While it's normal to have challenges, we have had to fight for the survival of the farm following a major incident around 3-5 times a year. That's an exhausting way to live. It chips away at your resilience. It's time.

We haven't really been able to recover from the 2016 fire. Financially, we are still struggling to find a resolution with the big corporation whose device started the fire and have recently taken on HUGE personal debt (again) to keep going. The personal cost to us for uninsured loss has been catastrophic and there has also been an almost daily battle just to get the things we were entitled too. Emotionally, we are still struggling - mainly with the personal resource required that continually fighting and repeatedly having to relive the fire every time we call or email the people who should be making this right! I would like to live this year in a way that doesn't require medication to keep me going. And schedule...we are still rebuilding when we should be farming. It's time.

On top of that there have been additional and significant changes occur, all of which came together and totally disrupted our existing business plans. These events left us looking at a million different scenarios focused on both keeping the business going and folding it. Eventually we realized that all of the options were crappy! Getting out is now just as hard as keeping going as we have invested so much in new websites, business cards, t-shirts, equipment, seed, etc. We have sold CSA shares, event tickets, etc that will all need to be refunded. But going on is next to impossible too regardless of the plethora of ideas for change we have run. We find ourselves caught between a rock and a hard place. It's time.

When you realize there is no preferably way to proceed, that there is no sensible plan or easier path, it becomes quite liberating. It's at this point you can let go of thinking about the business and just focus on what is right for your family. I am not strong enough to do what needs to be done to rewrite the business model and find people to get on board with us at this point in the season. Ian is drained with the battle too. He is the strongest, most resilient and reliable man on the planet, he's my absolute rock, so to see him bruised, battered and battle weary hurts my heart. Our kids don't really care! Not because they are heartless human beings but because they have become emotionally self-sufficient  due to us being so removed by the trauma, toil and tragedy of the farm. That's not ok. It would be one thing to continue if I believed that things would get better, but I don't. I cannot knowingly continue to fail them at this crossroads in pursuit of farming. It's time.

I am not special or more entitled than any one of you reading this. I can only expect the same from life that everyone else gets. I am not a religious person, or particularly spiritual. My life is fairly black and white usually. But I do now believe that for whatever reason, this was not meant to be. This is a sudden decision in as much as we were talking to chefs and customers about the season just 48 hours ago. However, we knew this year was our 'do or die' year. The year we had to turn things around and here we are at the end of January with every last option snatched from our reach. And it's frustrating because it should have worked! Our business plan and financial forecast showed a strong year, but fate it beyond our control. It's time.

There are lessons to be spoken and commentary to be made. There are 'thank yous' to be said. But not now, we just have to reel for a little bit before we can collect our thoughts and strength and let all our farm supporters how much we have appreciated them. It's time.

Whatever doesn't kill us......right?

There is a blog post written that I was going to post just after Thanksgiving that will now go straight to the archives because it seems so incidental now. Why? Because just over a week ago, our house burned down. Thanks to a charging cell phone left on a chair, everything we own is now is in a dumpster and the house is beyond salvageable. I had to stand and watch, completely powerless, as our home and belongings went up in smoke. Tuesday afternoon, the day of the fire, we left the farm with the clothes we were wearing and nothing else.

Once again we find ourselves in crisis mode. It seems that we go from one to another and it leaves so very little time to appreciate the good times in between. There is good shining through this latest challenge though and that's the way our community is rallying around us. To be honest, I don't completely know what's happening out there is the real world, but I know there are efforts, primarily  led by Laura, to try and help us. I am eternally thankful. But a little detached from it all. Partly because of the limitations on our internet use due to the loss of electronics and wifi and partly because I just can't face opening facebook or any other social media platform right now. I can see that there are 357 facebook notifications for me but I just can't go through them. It's not that I'm ungrateful, it's that I'm unable. Undoubtedly my communication shut-down a coping strategy that I will be out of soon. I don't know if I will ever respond to every message, tag or comment but know that we appreciate every single word you all have written and every effort you have made. You've delivered clothes, money, food and your support to us in abundance which we are so grateful for. I thought we would have been ok as we have insurance, but in truth we would have really struggled without your generosity. Insurance companies move slowly and only cover a percentage of what you loose and apparently I'm not great at covering the basics in a crisis. The night of the fire, the emergency response volunteers gave us $150 each to go to Walmart and buy a few clothes. I believed that I was shopping super smart. I thought I had picked up Jessica a few items of clothes that would mix and match really well to create the illusion of multiple outfits. I also thought I had made smart purchases for myself, clothing that I could wear to the farm but that would look ok away from the farm too. However, Wednesday morning came and Jessica went to school looking like Super Mario and I looked like the angry teenage son of a lumberjack in ill-fitting jeans, a Marvel t-shirt and plaid hoodie which I wore all day button up wrong!

I would love to talk about what happens next and how we will rise from the ashes, but all I know right now is that are living in two RV's on the farm for the foreseeable future and demolition of the house will begin shortly. After that I just don't know. I have to catch up with farming and the farm business. We were suppose to be in planning mode for next season. I'm wondering how we rebuild a house and our lives while managing the farming season too.  Farm events are probably off the cards for next season, which was going to be our main focus, as the house is right in the middle of the farm and the place will be a building site for most of the summer events season. We're considering just picking one thing (farmers markets or CSA or something) and concentrating on that. We're also toying with the idea of establishing a farm cooperative to have more people involved in the running of the business, but that comes with challenges too. Maybe we'll hand the farming operations over to a Farm Manager, assuming we can find someone that enjoys being underpaid and over worked. We'll let you know as soon as we do.

Once again we are fighting for the farm and calling on our most resourceful selves to continue. If I'm honest, it has crossed our minds to leave this place; to rebuild and sell. In three short years, we have faced more adversity than some people deal with in a lifetime and we've questioned our ability to continue this quest.

In the meantime though, farm life goes on. Eight goats have been born in the last 20 hours, sadly three goats didn't survive. Five chickens and a duck have been killed by a raccoon and we're expecting a litter of piglets anytime, but there we go, that's the reality of farming. If anything in our lives is consistent, it's the unpredictability of what happens day-to-day on the farm. I'm now off to my neighbours to use her laundry as the few items of clothing I own are covered in blood, poo and placenta.

It never rains but it pours

The title of this post has both literal and metaphoric purpose.  As I sit at my kitchen table typing this blog, it is literally pouring down with rain (hence I'm blogging instead of completing the outdoor tasks Ian asked me to do today).  But it is also a reflection of life on the farm at the moment; once something goes wrong, everything seems to tumble down around you.

Regular readers of this blog will know that we've had quite a good transition to homesteading life.  We have worked hard, made sacrifices but achieved a lot.  That changed recently.  The major story is the fruit cage falling down under the weight of the snow.  This collapse triggered a lot of other things that have thrown us off track.  Firstly, the work that has gone back into rebuilding it.  The biggest thing to overcome was an attitudinal barrier for me.  The first day after it collapsed, I went around undoing all the cables that are for training the fruit trees and bushes along.  I'd only finished installing these 3 weeks earlier.  My arms ached tightening them all up and now they were aching again undoing them.  It was really hard to overcome the mental challenge of doing it all again!  Thankfully, Ian and I work well under pressure and have banded together, erected flood lights and laboured through the dark, snow and rain to rebuild the frame.  One week after the collapse, the entire 20,000 sq. ft. frame is back up.  We still have to replace the netting but it's a little less soul destroying seeing the fruit cage now.

The time wasn't the only cost of this rebuild.  We had to replace some of the timbers too.  Unbeknownst to me, the price of wood fluctuates depending on the US construction market.  Of course, timber is way more expensive now than when we purchased it the first time.  We still need to buy more concrete and other materials, I think the remedial work will cost us around $1500, which we can ill afford.  We are also really behind our schedule, we should have moved in animals and begun planting this week but everything has been put on hold.

I also have to acknowledge the friends that rallied around to help us, especially Kyle and Shenade Ingram.  Kyle came and volunteered his time to help demolish, paint and rebuild for four days.  Shenade collected Jess from school and cleaned my house.  Thank you Ingrams!

The dishwasher died about a month ago.  Followed by the tumble dryer.  Followed by numerous other seemingly little things that all add up to one big headache.  I've spent this week trying to focus on the silver lining.

Fruitcagegate: Although devastating at the time, thankfully it was empty (apart from the chickens who miraculously escaped death by crushing).  If this happened in five years time, it would have destroyed $1000's of dollars worth of fruit trees and bushes.  We are now able to make a more accurate risk assessment for the rebuild and take steps to ensure we are never in this position again.

The dishwasher is turning out to be a blessing in disguise.  I quite like washing up.  I stand at the sink looking out of the window planning and musing about farm issues.  Two deer wondered passed the window today which was just beautiful to observe and was a reminder as to why we chose rural life - far nicer to look at marauding wildlife than gangs of marauding youth!

The other upside is the closeness it evokes within the family.  With one of us washing and another drying, we are literally close in the teeny weeny kitchen space but also we talk.  Lauren and I have been chit chatting about friends, school, the farm and even politics.  I think we'd forgotten to do a lot of talking as she turned an Internet obsessed teenage and I became busier.  But now we find ourselves in a small space discovering pleasures in each others company again.  I now relish this time without distraction.  Even Jessica is learning the value of helping with chores and asks to help dry the dishes after breakfast.  It's heartwarming to see the girls take responsibility for helping.  We're not going to replace the dishwasher and might use the space for an extra cupboard or even try and remodel the existing kitchen a bit.

The tumble dryer is another story.  I've been trying not to use it for a while now and dry the clothes on the line whenever possible.  And that's the thing. 'Whenever possible' turns into when it's raining, when I'm short of time, and a plethora of other excuses.  I'm learning that as long as I'm organized, I can dry clothes indoors when the weather is bad.  A clotheshorse in front of the wood burning stove is amazingly effective.  Tumble dryers are expensive to run so we're saving a fortune.  We've decided not to replace the tumble dryer either.

The offset of all this is my time.  I've talked about this before I think but my previous reliance on modern luxuries like dishwashers & tumble dryers was driven by convenience.  It's hard to manage a frugal lifestyle and a full time job!  But now this is my job.  When you consider the cost of going to a job (fuel, childcare, convenience items and easy food), I believe I'm saving us more than I could earn.  And that monetary value will increase as my homesteading role extends to growing and produce.  Somebody said I was a housewife which a disdainful and patronising tone last week, which made me laugh.  Well I'm not sure there are many housewives that can operate the kind of power tools I can or have the carpentry skills I'm acquiring, but whatever.  I know the value of my time here on the homestead may not yet be making us financially better off but all our lives are richer.

Housewife, eh?

As for the other things that have failed, broken, given up, well it's nothing we can't manage really.  It's amazing how creative you become when you walk away from a throw away society and mind set.  And so it's time.  This is it.  The point in my transition that I have truly become a homesteading hippy. :-)

Cathy and Ian, circa 2064, probably. :-)

Diary of a disaster, day 2.

Yesterday (Tuesday) was horrid.  I'm certainly feeling the effect in my aching body this morning.

After I got home from taking the girls to school in the morning, the cage had collapsed further.  The top layer of netting and snow was on the ground.  My concern was that I could only find 20 chickens and had to assume the rest were under the collapsed structure.  I spent the next 2 hours trying to locate them.  Some were out on the lot and some had walked into little hiding places under the net.  I found the last five after two hours of searching.  They were trapped in little air pockets.  I can't believe they all survived and feel so relieved.  I did however managed to almost get myself trapped rescuing the last chicken when the wood that was holding her little air pocket gave way and came crashing down on top of me.

Ian came home from work at the point and we set to work clearing.  One of the myriad of emotions we were experience was embarrassment about the collapse.  We reflected that part of our error was to try and save the entire cage the night before by clearing snow from the top.  If we had just cut the nets and let the snow fall through, we would have lost some netting but saved the rest of the structure.  However, during the clearing process we found the root cause of the collapse.  One post and it's concrete base had lifted out of the dirt suggesting that it was the ground that gave away first, not the structure.  This made Ian feel a bit better as the architect and builder of this project.  We were also finding that not much of the wood had broken, and so can be reused.

His relief soon ended when as we started to put the outside layer back together.  Ian dropped a piece of 2x6 lumber from the top, right onto my head as I was bending down.  A quick trip to the walk-in clinic for the all clear and then back to work.

We have now got almost half of the outside posts back up and the snow cleared off the netting.  I will carry on today clearing and prepping for the rebuild.  Ian has gone back to work.

Yesterday was certainly hard but we learned our lessons and have done enough to see a way forward.  There were certainly some tears, anger, frustration and self loathing flowing throughout the day.  It's so disheartening to see all the hard work lying on the floor and knowing that we have to do it all again but we feel relieved that it can be saved.  I wouldn't exactly refer to this as a 'Phoenix from the flames' moment but there is a small spark of fire.

We were extremely touched by the outpouring of support from people.  Although there is not a lot people can do until we make it safe, we had lots of offers of help during the day.  You really get to know who your friends are during challenging times.  Thanks you to all that contacted us yesterday with offers of help and words of support.  We will always remember how your kindness picked us up and motivated us to keep going.

The post that came out of the ground bringing the rest of the structure down.

Repairs underway.  Believe it or not, this is progress.

In the cold light of day....disaster!

We knew there was snow coming but we had no idea how much.  On Thursday, we were complacent about the impending snowfall that was forecast to start Friday.  We had endured heavy snowfall last November and survived with just the old barn lean-to roof as the only casualty.  Besides, the forecast predicted the snow would turn to rain on Sunday.

When the snow kept falling, we started to get a little worried on Monday.  We spent the day clearing snow off the poly tunnel and the barn.  By Monday night we had a few broken beams in the fruit cage.  We cleared snow off the bays until our freezing hands could take no more.  Still we were watching the forecast and the promises that the snow would turn to rain.

It's Tuesday morning as I write this.  The fruit cage/chicken run has collapsed.  We feel physically sick.  Of course, a majority of this project was made from reclaimed materials, and some of them can be salvaged.  But there were significant cost incurred with things like concrete, wood, netting, etc.  The real kicker is the time that went into this project, not just ours but the numerous volunteers.  Bear in mind that this was a 20,000 sq. ft. fruit cage; a lot of blood. sweat, tears, money and time were invested.

And of course, the time for finishing construction and starting farming is upon us.  Our seed order arrives on Thursday!

Today is not a good day to be a homesteader.