People tend to romanticize farming.

But there is as much romance as there is pain in farming.

You are a slave to the land and its needs. Most of the time you’re happy about this, but the days when you want to go to the beach or catch a movie or sleep in you suddenly realize that you are not self-employed. The self-employed can make their own schedule. Your schedule is dictated by the farm. There is also no pretending when you’re farming. You have to deal with the realities in life that other people can pretend aren’t there. You are full of joy at the hatching of an adorable chick…until you realize the chick’s beak is twisted and will slowly starve to death unless you put it down. And that is your responsibility to do.

You also are held accountable for what you do-there is no slacking. When you are too lazy to put the geese away at night, the next morning you are greeted with 50 dead animals because the neighbor’s dog dug in during the night.

You also can become very isolated. You don’t have time to visit friends very often, and over time your city friends tend to disappear because they’re scared of country life. You develop some fellow farm friends, but they’re busy with their own farm. This is one of the reasons we started the farmstay. We can make the farm a very sociable place when it’s typically a lonely place.

There is also a lot of stress about money. It’s hard to make a living by farming-most farmers have second jobs (and third and fourth). The government is anti-small farm which can be scary. We didn’t get into dairy farming because we didn’t want to bring the food nazis down on our heads. There is a lot of worry and stress: Is the sick cow that you’ve put thousands of dollars into going to pull through? How are you going to get that new piece of equipment? What will you do when the pests destroy this year’s crop? What if it doesn’t rain or rains too much?

I 100% believe that the pros are greater than the cons, but anyone who says farming is always happiness, simplicity and peacefulness is not a farmer.

I think with farming you have more sleepless nights and more happy days.