From the Farm: Lessons in Resilience
As with many farmers, I think our entire farming career could probably be described in a chronological series of natural disasters.
The year, coyotes discovered our chickens, our ‘free range’ chickens turned into free coyote food. When we caught on and locked the chickens away, the coyotes continued sneaking up and started feasting on the lambs. What a devastating feeling!
I remember the year that our sole livestock shelter (which we used as a barn) blew down in an unprecedented wind. As beginning farmers, a massive bill to re-build left us spinning, unsure how we could go on.
Drought two years in a row caused our pastures to dry up and our hay fields barely produced. Normally, with hay to sell above our needs, we had to purchase feed for our livestock on top of all the costs of equipment and land. At the time, we started selling off our flock to pay for all the bills.
Then, the nightmare winter when our breeding ewes started dying with absolutely no symptoms preceding. Several autopsies later, we found out our sheep had been infected months earlier by Liver Fluke, a parasite in the liver. Because we caught it late, no treatment was available but wait and see who would make it.
More recently, our first year on the turkey farm, our baby turkeys caught a fungal infection in their first days of life. After consulting with the vet, we realized there was very little we could do to control the damage. We did what we could and couple weeks later with daily death counts in the dozens, we lost a good chunk of our flock – quite a discouraging way to start our turkey farming career.
I could go on – but I think you’ve got the picture. A lot can go wrong when your life is dependent on the weather, unpredictable markets, and other erratically changeable forces of nature.
With the crazy worldwide events of late, ‘real life’ begins to remind me strangely of our farm life and I find myself pondering all the lessons in resiliency that we have learnt during our 12 years on the farm.
A key to us keeping sanity during tough times is realizing how little we really can control, and accepting the fact that we can’t force a higher power to send us the weather (or money for that matter) that we want, or - with any amount of ranting - force people act the way we want them to. Letting go, and adapting in the midst of challenges, as crazy as that sounds, gets us through.
Accepting death, also becomes an inevitable part of our farm life. Although wonderful new life emerges on the farm every year, we also experience our share of loss. In the last year, we watched a favourite ewe pass on after a hard labor, experienced an accident when our old guard dog got under the wheel of the tractor, and my son’s pet rabbits were killed one night by the dogs - all along with many other losses. Embracing the inevitability of death doesn’t mean we become hardened to it, but it means we can accept it when it happens.
I believe hard times also develop character, creativity and resourcefulness like nothing else. When our livestock shelter blew down, we got creative and rebuilt with used materials. When hay got expensive, we decided to diversify and start raising pastured pigs. And when coyotes started killing our lambs, we got some excellent guard dogs that have continued to protect us and our family for years.
Although this all sounds easy in writing, I struggle with these concepts every day, when our crops need rain, or have just drowned out, or when massive, unexpected repair bills pile up. I don’t think this kind of resilience happens all at once, but the more adversities we go through - with an open mind and soft heart - the stronger we get.
Although the world is pretty bleak at the moment, the farm continues on with all it’s joys and challenges. I am thankful that as a family, we generally can maintain lively and cheerful spirits. I think the farm has taught us intuitively that better times come from the hard, joy comes along with sadness, some things are meant to pass away while other things live on - And most importantly, we are not meant to orchestrate everything.
