Getting Started
A question I get asked a lot while giving tours is “Did you go up farming?” Most people are surprised when my answer is no. Even more so when I say I grew up in New York City. We did have a little backyard that some summers my dad would grow some vegetables. That garden and the local petting zoo was the closest I got to farming as a kid. I also didn’t want to grow up be a farmer when I was a kid. My big dream was to be on Broadway. Every day after school you would find me at the dance studio. I even started college as a dance major. That is until my bad knees made me change course. It’s funny the way life will throw curve balls at you.
I had a scholarship in college that required me to have volunteer hours to maintain the scholarship. A couple weeks into my freshman year I found a volunteer opportunity that I fell in love with. Once a week we would drive an hour upstate and work on an educational based dairy farm. It was run by a group of nuns and the mission of the farm was to provide educational opportunities to children. It was a working farm with a bustling farm store that made the best cheeses you would ever taste. Of course, they used us young college kids for grunt work like hauling hay into the hay loft, fixing fences, digging up the potato harvest etc. I worked hard for the magical moments that happened in between the manual labor.
We got to help with milking all the cows. I was disappointed to learn at first that they used machines to milk but at that point I had never hand milked a cow before. Looking back now I can’t imagine how they would do it any other way with all those cows. I got to watch a goat give birth one morning. I had never seen a birth before, and it was the most amazing thing to witness. We also got to spend time with any baby animals on the farm during our lunch break. When our group got back the to college dorm at night, we were exhausted. We would get funny looks in the lobby because we smelled so bad, but we didn’t care.
After college I stopped thinking about farming. I got a “real” job, got married and had a couple kids. It wasn’t until my kids were born that my husband and I started to consider a different type of life. We wanted our kids to grow up knowing where their food came from, the hard work it took and what went into that food. My once-a-week work on the farm in college might have been fun at the time but I really wasn’t learning much about animal husbandry or planting schedules. I was just doing what I was told and not really asking questions. My husband and I we went on this adventure blindly. If I can do this anyone can. People ask me where to start, and there as so many different ways, but my best advice is just do it. Find a famer and ask if they need help. Most will need help. Offer your time helping in exchange for their knowledge. Follow some YouTube channels; they are offering their knowledge for free! But in the end just do it. Buy your first set of chickens or plant your first seed. You will never feel ready, and you will never know everything. If you keep waiting until your ready you will never do it.