Life on the Farm
From the moment that I first visited the farm in the fall of 2016 I knew it felt like home. I’m not sure if it was the peacefulness or the simplicity, the fresh air or the sense of togetherness and family, but something about it was so welcoming and I could envision a life here. I have now lived on the farm for almost two full years and still love it just the same. Do I miss the convenience of living in a bigger city or on the East Coast… of course! But I wouldn’t trade it for this life I now live on our family farm in North Dakota.
Spencer has now been fully running and operating the farm on his own (with help from his uncle and a hired man) for six years and we are just about to enter our second season of farming together as husband and wife. However, this first year together didn’t come without hard times or a steep learning curve. From a slow start of planting due to very wet fields, to the soybean tariffs, to an early winter stopping us from finishing our harvest before Christmas, a lot of things didn’t go as we had planned. But it’s been a year for growing both in our faith and in our marriage. We have learned to love each other through the hard, stressful times and to pray harder for the things that we alone can’t control—like the fact that we are just finishing our 2019 crop harvest in March of 2020!
Many people don’t realize that farming isn’t always glamorous. It’s early morning and late nights for 8-9 months out of the year. It’s meals served with plastic silverware in the combines or tractors (which I like to call meals in the field). It’s dates in the tractor instead of a night out on the town. It’s having to change plans last minute because we still have crops to tend to. It’s having faith that we will be able to get our plants in on time, that God will provide just the right weather, and that our harvest will be bountiful, and we will be able to get it out before the brutal winters hit. Of course it has its perks as well, like three months where we can travel. But it is one of the few full-time jobs that I know of where you have to fully rely on God because you have no real control over the outcome.
I hope through these posts about our life on the farm that you are all able to see what life on a small family farm is really like. Through the ups and downs, I hope to be as transparent as possible and to give you the realistic glimpse of life as a farmer. Thanks for following my simple, sometimes-challenging, always-interesting life as the new girl on the farm.
One of my first times on the farm