Hard Work

I assume that some people read this blog because they are attracted to the idea of moving to the country and living the simple life—having a big garden, canning vegetables, raising chickens and goats, making cheese, baking bread, and otherwise dwelling in idyllic pastoral splendor. I think the current term for this is hobby farming.

Hobby farming is a fantasy for quite a number of people who have grown tired of the life in crowded suburbia. There are enough people who dream about a life of simple country leisure to have spawned several magazines devoted to living La Vita Rural. Be forewarned that the ones I have seen, particularly the slick and glossy ones, paint an overly romanticized and sanitized version of the rural lifestyle. The odds are that the people who publish those magazines prefer to write about country life rather than live it.

A typical article in one of these magazines might be about the joys of raising miniature Nubian goats. The accompanying photos show an attractive middle-aged couple leaning against a white painted fence gazing at their flock frolicking in a green clover-filled pasture. The woman is wearing freshly shined boots, gleaming white jodphurs, and a white linen blouse. The man looks like he stepped out of an L.L. Bean catalog. You get the impression that they spend much of their time sitting on the veranda sipping gin and tonic as they enjoy their slice of heaven.

I’m here to tell you that it’s not like that at all. If you really want to get back to nature and live the rural farming life, be prepared for hard work and dirt. 

Take the joys of raising goats. I have met several of people who raise goats. That seems to be a really popular thing to do around here. (That and raising llamas and alpacas. Go figure.) I even know a couple that is breeding miniature Nubian goats. They do not look like they stepped out of Better Homes and Gardens magazine; they look like stepped out of a National Geographic article about the life of peasants and peons in East Buttcrackistan. 

What these rural glamour magazines do not depict is getting up at 5:30 in the morning when the temperature is 20 degrees to milk your nanny goats. They do not tell you about the joys of shoveling goat poop, carrying heavy containers of goat’s milk for pasteurization, and all the other gritty work required to raise goats. The goat farmers I’ve met do not wear shiny leather boots. They wear big rubber boots to keep their pants out of the mud and goat shit.

Back in the day, there was one magazine devoted to country living—Mother Earth News. I used to love reading the old Mother Earth News. The great thing about the magazine is that it never gave me the impression that homesteading or hobby farming was like living in a sanitized high-priced gated community. Two images always came to my mind when I read Mother Earth News and thought about living the lifestyle. The first was walking around with grubby bare feet in a commune somewhere in the hills. The second was any place in the undeveloped Third World. 

What else could anyone think when the articles were about building a house out of straw bales, heating your dwelling with composting cow manure, and the joys of living in a yurt? Mongols live in yurts. If living in a yurt is so great why did the Mongols work so hard to conquer the known world in the 13th Century? It’s because living in a yurt sucks. The Mongols knew that. The reason they went on their rampage is because they envied the lifestyle of the civilized world and wanted to live better. Living better did not include living in a yurt. 

I aspire to live the simple country life, and I have a big garden even by Fannin County standards. It gave me a great deal of inner satisfaction to look over my garden last summer and see all that I had grown. It was even more satisfying to eat fresh vegetables from the garden.

Obviously, I enjoy gardening, but I have no illusions that it’s easy to have a big garden. The fact is, it’s hard work. For example, a couple of days ago I spent five hours preparing my garden for spring planting by spreading bucket loads (that’s a tractor bucket) of manure and compost over the soil and rototilling it in. I have a big walk-behind rototiller, and muscling that puppy up and down the rows was a challenge. My lower back kept telling me, “Hey bro’, this sucks. Are you sure you don’t want to sit down?” Thank God for Motrin and a couple of stiff drinks. 

When I was finished I did not look like the people you see in the glossy hobby farming magazines. With my work boots, bib overalls, old t-shirt, beat-up baseball cap and blue bandanna wrapped around my head to catch the sweat I looked like an Oklahoma dirt farmer in the Great Depression. Add to that the fact I was dirty and grimy and gimping along with a sore back. Think of Pa Kettle playing the part of a zombie on The Walking Dead, and you’ve got the picture.

This is my long-winded way of suggesting that you look before you leap into your fantasy of moving back to nature.