I’d like to invite everyone to take a journey with me over the next year and a half. It’s a farewell to our beloved farm, and the beginning of a new one. In the course of it, I hope to give y’all a glimpse into the real life of a farm and the practices of sustainable ranching. And I'll share a few pictures of our farm, including some adorable baby lambs, along the way.
My husband and I have a small, organic (not-certified) farm just outside of Austin, Texas. I bought this place after I graduated law school ten years ago. I’ll post about my transition from environmental attorney to farmer another day. For now, suffice to say that I am a student of holistic management and eco-agriculture.
This diary is cross posted at
La Vida Locavore
When my husband, Mike, retired from the Coast Guard in 2002, we started farming the land organically. In addition to the horses (who are basically overgrown lapdogs), we bought cows, sheep, and heritage breed chickens and turkeys over the years. I studied the intricacies of soil microbiology, and we fed the soil with aerobic compost teas, molasses, fish hydrolysate, seaweed, and ocean minerals. My graduate advisor gave me periodic batches of dung beetles, helping us to bring back the mesofauna of the soil.
We watched a transformation unfold. When I had bought this land, the clay soil was so hard that it felt like walking on concrete – and digging in it was truly hard labor. Although the green grass was pretty, having been fertilized and herbicided before my purchase, there was no other life visible on the place. As we detoxified the soil and water, enriched the microbiology, and created habitat through managed grazing, we saw life coming back. Each year brought an ever-increasing population, in both diversity and numbers, of forbs and native grasses, beneficial insects, lizards and frogs, small mammals, and birds. The soil softened, and became soft to walk on and easy to dig. Our animals thrive, gaining greater health every year as the nutrition in the plant life improves.
Mike and I envisioned ourselves living on this farm until we died. But two years ago, a developer came and said they wanted to buy our land. We told them to go away, we wouldn’t sell. They kept coming back with higher offers, and Mike went around humming the country song, Daddy Won't Sell the Farm. We made jokes about how we would set up a farm stand at the front gate and sell to all our new neighbors. And then we discovered the full scope of the development – 2,500 acres, 5 houses to the acre, plus malls and shopping centers, and our farm was smack dab in the middle of it.
Now what? We raise livestock, not plants. The roosters crow, the guardian dogs bark loudly at night as they protect the livestock, the cows moo, and all the animals pose a temptation for trouble making by children and teenagers. In financial terms, our property taxes were certain to skyrocket, while pollution, noise, and light would be a constant challenge to managing the land and animals for true health. We just didn’t see how we could continue livestock farming, in the way we wanted to, in the middle of what was essentially the city. So we finally agreed to sell.
We spent the next year looking for a new farm. We wanted someplace close enough to remain part of the Austin community, but out of the path of development so that we would not go through this again. Finally, two months ago, we bought 165 acres about an hour and a half from Austin. It’s raw land, with nothing but a barb wire fence on it. It’s been overgrazed, sprayed with 2,4-D (a herbicide) for years, and the topsoil is so eroded that it’s littered with rocks from the subsoil.
So now we have our feet in two worlds. We’re still living on our old farm, since we leased it back until we have a house built on the new place. But we no longer own it, and we know that, in the not-too-distant future, the soil and plants that we have worked so hard to nurture will be bulldozed and paved over. It’s a heartbreaking truth that I keep shuttered away in the back of my mind and only occasionally examine in the light of day.
We find ourselves, for the first time, talking about improvements to the farm in terms of whether they would pay off in the next year. It’s a completely foreign way of thinking for us, since sustainable agriculture is all about the long-term outlook. It’s what we have to do in these circumstances, yet it feels terribly wrong and against everything I have learned and love about farming.
So I find myself thinking more and more about the new farm, turning my eyes from this farm even while we still live here. For the new place, I can take that 10 year, 20 year, 50 year outlook that makes sense to me. How will we lay out the pastures so that we can rotate the animals frequently enough to increase the organic matter in the soil and bring back the diverse tallgrass prairie that grew here a hundred years ago? Where will we put the pecan orchard, and which fruit trees will we plant? How big of a rainwater collection system do we need, so that we don’t have to bring in chemically-treated city water for us or our animals? What about solar and wind energy systems?
We have the opportunity to build a sustainable home and farm, and the challenge is invigorating. I hope that this new farm will prove to be the one we will spend the rest of our lives on, and hand to the next generation of farmers when out turn comes. And I’ll steal a wish from Malcolm Beck, a wonderful Texas organic gardener – when I die, I want to be composted, so that I can nourish the soil that I love.
UPDATE: I tried to respond to as many of the comments as I could, but the response to my diary was overwhelming -- in a wonderfully good way! The incredible outpouring of support and encouragement means a great deal to both me and my husband. Thank you!