Northern Farmer

I tell you, the weather just doesn’t get much better than this. Sunny, low sixties, no wind, trees turning color, wow! Flood waters continue going down, I went and checked one fence today but couldn’t quite get up my nerve to attempt repairing it yet. I swim like a rock so it can wait a day or two yet. There’s alot to get done before winter here, it’s going pretty good and I got figured we should be prepared sometime around the middle of May at this rate. All that hay to get home yet, am I ever behind.

Tommorrow evening we’ll be cutting up a lamb that got butchered today at a friend’s farm. He raises sheep, geese and chickens. And makes a good living at it, fulltime! It’s nestled in the hill country west of here and I always enjoy going over there. Just a small farm.He’s got himself quite a nitch market for goose eggs in the Twin Cities. He has a little workshop where somehow he blows the eggs out, has special egg cartons and sells them to ethnic crafters down there. They’re for those Ukrainian, (spelling?), Easter eggs. The geese wander around a pasture and for laying eggs he just uses some old used barrels with half of one end cut out, with the barrel laying on it’s side. Plus nobody gets in his yard without him knowing it, they sure do make a racket.

One of the most interesting things for me is seeing small farms thriving such as his does. It’s places like his that I’m most at home. A person doing totally what he wants to in life and knowing it too. As far as the lambs, most of his go right into the regular sheep market, but his home sales are growing, he raises close to a thousand White Rocks for butchering from early spring until late fall, has a couple of hundred laying hens in an old traditional chicken coop, plus the nitch market of the goose eggs. He has one little tractor and almost no equiptment that would be draining money from his operation. Used to be farmers in the area would maybe snicker a little about his farm, but you know, I don’t think very many do anymore. You get right down to it, he’s probobly making more profit than most larger modern farms here. He has no debt, he worked for years on a job but built up his dream operation and he’s quite a ways from”retirement” yet. I love reading about things such as my friend’s farm,(and ours), on the New Farm web site, but it’s even more interesting when a person sees it for real. And he also has the most important ingredient that makes an operation such as his successful, faith in our Lord. I think I see a pattern in this.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 10th, 2005 at 8:30 pm and is filed under Northern Farmer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.