A fresh start, doesn’t that sound great especially after a difficult season in your life? Well, here I am wondering how to do just that. Somehow I gave myself a three year break from writing and updating our website without making the conscious decision to do so. It just happened, life that is. I have had so many plans for what our farm should be but we have had to constantly reevaluate. Every season there have been the discoveries of things that work and others that do not. Even more challenging is the fact that some ideas work great for awhile and then the next season they fail. Looking back through the pictures on my phone I see what we accomplished the past three years but it is hard to wrap my head around just how fast that time flew by.
More often than not life can steer you in different directions and you find yourself following a course you didn’t expect. A few years ago this fact may have really bothered me but, now I can appreciate the paths that lead me to try new things and then be brave enough to admit when they don’t work for our farm. Our goal has been to become sustainable, and this challenge guides us to make the hard decisions. We have enjoyed raising pigs and geese,they have been fairly easy to care for but, they take too big of a toll on our landscape. The rising costs of feeding livestock is pushing us to reexamine our choices on a regular basis. Growing food and providing more pastures for our animals has become a bigger priority.
Another major change of focus will be putting more effort into writing and sharing our journey and our FARMILY through this website. I have always included education and community as part of our farm plan and find myself wondering how something so important to me got lost in the process. We have been so busy building and repairing, birthing and burying, feeding and mucking out pens , I lost sight of the purpose of it all. The joy of discovery, learning and sharing it with others is why I started writing in the first place. I got lost in the big picture and forgot to focus on what really matters, including others .
With regards to this blog , I am taking a deep breath and starting fresh, again. For me, nothing exemplifies “starting fresh” better than brand new baby goats. Hoppy, skippy , bouncy , soft and silly kids. New life, it fills you with hope and inspires dreams. I have enjoyed sharing bits of this journey the last few years but now, I am so excited to make writing more of a priority. I hope you will follow along with us as we keep pressing forward and learning new things .
I don’t know exactly what this next season of the farm will bring, but I am pretty sure it will always be an adventure and include baby goats.
The Smith Farmhouse 