10 Things I Hate About Farming

         Some days, I HATE FARMING. Some days I can't help it! I get hot, tired, and frustrated to the max. So before anybody gets any unrealistic, romantic ideas about what farming looks like....let me just burst that bubble really fast! Here are the top 10 things I hate about farming.

10. Bad Weather

       I am going to call any weather that does not suit me "bad weather" for the sake of simplicity. It feels like we battle some form of "bad weather" year round. The summer usually finds us hoping for rain. We rely on a spring for our water and when there is a drought....we don't have water either. Since we rely on flush toilets and washing machines, this can be hard to get around. Also, our living depends on a pasture. Our cows drop in production when the grass dries up. 

     On the other hand, if we have hay on the ground then rain is the last thing we want. How many times has a pop up rain shower come along and ruined our hay? I don't even want to think about it.

     In the winter we battle the cold and mud. We try to manage our breedings to avoid the worst of it...but someone always manages to get bred to be due in the dead of January. My house becomes a petting zoo when these babies get too chilled or wet or their mother's reject them. Last year I had 16 baby goats in the kitchen for a month! It gets stinky after awhile!

9. Too Much Flexibility

    I know, I know, I said I love the flexibility that comes with the farm. But there can be such a thing as too much. Somedays we spend an hour just rearranging our week to accommodate something. Some days my life is thrown into a whirl because someone needs cheese at the last minute or it is going to rain on our hay or something has to be fixed before chore time.... There is no normalcy sometimes unless I call total chaos normal!

8. Married To The Farm

       Part of the reasoning for dairying seasonally was so that we could visit family in the winter. Dairying is a twice a day and seven days a week job....but caring for the cows is more like a 365 job. Leaving for more than a few days always ends in disaster. Other people don't have time or the intimate knowledge of our animals to catch issues before they become emergencies. And this isn't anyone's fault...it is just a fact. I had the tables turned on me when I house sat for another goat farmer. I lost two bucklings to worms in three weeks. I felt terrible!

      So I have just resigned myself to short camping trips or only part of the family leaves at a time. Someone who knows the animals has to be here....no ifs, ands, or buts.

7. Constant Repairs!

         Things break on the farm ALL THE TIME! We must be hard on stuff. We have four tractors and currently we are borrowing a neighbor's because every one of ours has something wrong with it. When we put a $600 dollar rear tire on, we will at least have one of ours going. 

       I can't tell you how many times we have been bailing hay and the baler has broken or the hay cutter needs new teeth or the rake needs a tire...doubly exciting is when there is hay on the ground, rain moving in, AND the equipment to get it out of the field is broken. Panic ensues for sure!

      I think part of it is old equipment is all we have... like 40 year old equipment. I think the other part is when something gets broken, we don't have time to fix it and every thing is just kind of rigged to work, just barely. Daniel had a tractor without brakes for years...just used the emergency brakes. We have tractors that won't start unless they are rolling down hill. 

       Last July, when we were trying to get the dairy inspected and could not get our milk bulk tank cooling....had one to leak 900$ worth in Freon, well, you can surly imagine my three weeks of daily panic. It takes money to make money, but when you don't have money to begin with....well, lets just say we were up a creek without a paddle until someone lent us some equipment, until we could pay for it.

6. Fruitless Labor

     I asked my older children what they like least about farming. Their response was working hard for no return. Karson grew a patch of corn this year, but we didn't get a single ear. But I am sure the coons had an all night party! Animals we love and care for, sometimes die or are poached by predators. No amount of money can fix the agony of hours of tender loving care just wiped out in minutes due to a hungry fox or coon. One year we plowed and seeded a special grass for the cows, only for the rain to stop falling and not only did the grass not come up, but the whole pasture dried up... Farming is a gamble and sometimes we lose.

See the gap under the black gate? Karson built it that way so the goats could come through but not the goats! :-)

5. Animals On The Loose

     When our neighbor calls and says our goats are on their porch peeping in the windows....I just want to fall through the floor and not exist.

      Even the best of fences aren't impermeable. The landscape is always changing and we as farmers are often not the first to notice! When the neighbors field drainage washes out the soil under our fence, the sheep let us know when they greet us from the other side! Sometimes the fence will erode on our side of the fence and out skip the goats! One year they ate the neighbor's corn and we owed $900 for that little excursion!

       Children sometimes leave gates open or unlocked....trees fall on fences....sometimes cows will just find a weak spot and barrel through. We once had a bull out for weeks that could jump a 4 foot fence with a string of barb wire on top. He must of been a ballerina! When we finally got him in, Daniel decided that bull needed a one way trip off the farm. He built a 7 foot tall corral with posts every four feet. It took three days of construction. When Daniel lure him in to the corral and onto the trailer, he was so big and mad that Daniel thought he was going to flip the cattle trailer! 

        An animal out is a pain for our neighbors and a nightmare for us. Imagine if a car hit one of our cows and someone got hurt or killed?! Animals out even once a year is too much. Fences are an important maintenance job to be sure. But accidents still happen....and I just hate animals out.

4. Cleaning....Lots And Lots Of Cleaning

       Dishes, walls, tanks, milkers, floors, cows, trailers, barns, filthy children and filthy clothes all have to be cleaned, scrubbed, or washed. Cleaning is about 50% of what we do around here. It is redundant and monotonous and the smell is hard to shake.

3. POOP or Manure

      Where there is animals or children, there is manure. Lots and lots and lots of manure...I get it in my clothes when I chore. I get it on my fingers when I trim feet or clean up a critter with scours. I get it in my hair when the cows go splat in the milk barn. When I have sick animals close to the house or in the winter, in the house, my whole life can begin to smell like a barn. 

2. Long Hours

      Farming is going with the flow and making hay when the sun shines. Hours are long when it is time to get the harvest in or we have animals giving birth. Sometimes a big cheese order comes in and we pull an all-nighter to get the order filled. Our day starts around 7 and ends around 9, when everything is ticking properly. Throw in farmer's markets or a run to the stock pen or other day event and the chore hours can extend way into the night. We are doing what we love, so most of the time the hours are filled with interesting things and problems to solve. Sometimes, though, things get out of hand and just overwhelming...and we risk burnout.

1. Poor In Terms Of Money

       Thank the good lord that money is not the reason to farm, because there isn't much of that going around. Life is always a tight squeeze, it feels like. Every month, check by check, sale by sale, we stay alive. Bitterness can creep in though if one expects this type of life to pay like a 9 to 5 job. Health insurance drives many a farmer to get an off farm job and children often leave the farm siting the long hours with little returns. Bad crops, low prices, and disastrous weather monkeys with an already fragile financial status. So many farmers commit suicide when they lose the family farm after too many poor crops. 

        We had to quit for 7 years to pay the debt of our grain bill when milk prices dipped to $10 a hundred pounds of milk....for months on end. When a person is burning through 5 grand a month in grain, there just isn't a way to out budget that! 

       Finances on a farm are tough....blood, sweat, and tears don't always pay. It is a shame, because the family farm is dying out and I think this and the difficulty for new, young farmers to buy land, is why. Farms will continue to be taken over by corporations and our food with continue to be adulterated to its cheapest and most efficient forms. The real cost of today's food will be paid by future generations.           

Money is not the reason we farm but it sure would make things a little easier sometimes!

Fortunately, for us, the drawbacks of this life are far fewer than the joys. We face our share of frustrations and exhaustion and disappointment....but every job has those things. This life is rich in so many ways. We learn new things all the time! Its a labor of love and all I have ever wanted.