I have a lot of work to do on this blog, but I wanted to get started on it.
About two weeks ago I found out that first, there are cut backs at my teaching job, and second, my teaching job is probably going to evaporate within the next five to 10 years. I'm fifty, so I have some decisions to make.
For almost 10 years my husband and I have been operating a business called Meadow Rise Farm. You can search us on Facebook and find our page. We grow organically-raised vegetables and sell them at farmers markets here in north central and central Ohio.
My choice right now is to either quit farming and find another full-time job, which would entail driving an hour where I could do what I'm doing now, or, develop the farm business.
I know where my heart is. So I'm going to listen to it.
We're going to develop the farm.
It'll take time. Some things might happen sooner than others. I wanted to blog about this from the beginning, so I could keep track of events, as well as what I'm thinking and feeling about it.
Some wag once said it's a "recession" when the economy is bad and people start losing their jobs. It's a Depression when you lose yours. Well, it's been kinda depressing around here. I teach at an OSU regional campus (Mansfield), and enrollment has been dropping for the last 3 years. Suddenly THIS year the decision has been made to cut back on the number of classes taught by the non-tenured faculty, of which I am one. I teach first-year composition, upper-level composition, introduction to fiction, and occasionally other classes, such as next spring's Environmental Citizenship.
But the writing on the wall, according to administration, is that the Governor and the board of regents want students to take more college credit before we see them, which is being done increasingly in a number of ways, including dual high school credit, placement exams, MOOCs, etc.
As a result, eventually, students may enter college with up to a year's worth of credit. In some ways, of course, this is good, in that it will save students a lot of money. The reason I think it's a bad idea, aside from its effect on my job, is fodder for another post. The bottom line is that I'm highly motivated to start developing myself in other directions.
I've been kicking ideas around for years, but I always put my priority on my "regular job." Plus, it takes money to develop a business, farm or otherwise, and that's what I DON'T have right now.
But I do have nearly 10 years experience selling at farmers markets. We have name recognition. So I'm following up on ideas with potential partners and researching grant possibilities.
My first idea is to bring up a partnership idea with a good friend. He has land and equipment and experience using it -- on a bigger level than I do. I'd like to work with him to develop a few acres into sweet corn, potatoes, and winter squash (maybe melons). These crops take a lot of space, and it's hard to work into the acre of ground that we grow on now.
If he provided the ground prep, soil amendments, and planting/cultivating, then we'd supply the seed, specialized tending (such as organic control for ear worms), harvesting, and marketing. I'm going to work on numbers and such and discuss it with him, I hope on Sunday.
The other venture is grander and will take at least two years to get going -- grass fed beef. My dad rents 60 acres adjacent to our farm to another guy who does a conventional corn-beans rotation on it. I want to find a grant to help me set it up for pastured beef. I need perimeter fencing, a water system, and shelter. I know that EQIP grants have helped others do this, so I'm going to investigate. I've spoken with another good farmer friend who knows cattle but doesn't have enough land to do what he wants to do.
I'm not interested in making tons of money. My thought is that we can all help each other to develop more sources of revenue, so that this network of mutuality can help all of us make it. My first partner can grow organic hay that we could buy, and he'd be able to sell more than to just us. There's a huge demand for organic hay and straw.
My idea is that although we'd be individual farms, we could also form a partnership. I'd like to call it Dayshine Farms, because we'd commit to sustainable growing based on RECENT sunlight. Thom Hartmann wrote a book called The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. The premise is that we are dependent on dwindling supplies of cheap, abundant, easily-accessed fossil fuels. (Fossil fuels=ancient sunlight -- decomposed plant material). But if we could develop on-farm ways of growing, then we would not be dependent on fossil fuels for diesel, fertilizer, and certainly not pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, etc., all of which are by-products of fossil fuel.
Of course, we'd still use gasoline to get it to market. But maybe eventually, not even that. My 2nd partner is such a great natural engineer, so I'm going to suggest he consider getting into bio-diesel production, at some point, so we can even dispense with the fuel for the tractors, and then maybe the truck. Our joint name, DayShine, would reflect that emphasis on renewable resources.
Other schemes -- a grant for a high tunnel for winter production. Contacting large-scale wind power companies -- windmills go well in pastures, and no one lives close enough to complain about them. That would be a source of local power and also income for us, since they usually pay rent. I'd just have to make sure their access agreement wasn't egregious. Again, more homework, but you have to dream first, yes?
So, this is long enough for an intro about all the directions my mind has been wandering. It's a start.
We're Breaking Ground. : )
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