I’ve never made my living farming or raising cattle, though I’ve done both.
Neither did my dad, though he spent a lifetime doing both.
Maybe I should clarify what I mean by “making a living.” We generally think of it as earning the money we need to live from day-to-day. If that’s true, neither Dad nor I ever made our living just by farming.
But we did make a life of it, Dad more so than me.
Dad grew up working his parents’ farm, while Grandpa was gone “making a living” building roads and schools.
Dad left the family farm during World War II, served in the South Pacific, then studied agriculture at Southwest Missouri State until going to work in agriculture.
He was on the way to making a life, but he wasn’t yet making a living on the farm.
Before he bought a farm of his own, he rented places with a few acres and began building a herd of Jersey milk cows, all the while making his living as an artificial insemination pioneer. What he was working toward, though, was making a life for all of us on the farm. That came about in 1957, before I was 10 years old.
Meanwhile, Mom was the one making our living through her job as a medical technologist, while also making a life on the farm.
Until I left for college, I knew no other life than that on the farm, milking cows night and morning, chopping sprouts in winter and putting up hay in summer.
Though not technically living the farm life after college, as a country newspaper editor I lived next door to it and remained a part of Dad’s enterprises, as well as mine.
On my present 5 acres for more than 30 years, I’ve yet to make my living farming; but with two steers to raise every year, chickens to tend and pastures to manage, I have made a life of it.
You might call me a “hobby farmer,” but that’s no more true for me than it was for Dad. We differ only in the scale of our farming, and it was never about making a living for him, either. It was about making a farm life for his family.
Same here. In my heart I’m the same as when I milked those Jersey cows night and morning.
I have friends with more land and cattle than I’ve ever had, but I’m not sure they’re making a living at it, either. I tend to think most of us are in the same business of just making a life of it.
Call it “hobby farming” if you like, but it’s not really hobby. It’s just who were are, farmers at heart, no many how many acres or head of cattle we don’t have.
A former feature writer for Ozarks Farm and Neighbor, Jim Hamilton is a retired newspaper editor/publisher. Hamilton was reared on a small dairy farm in Dallas County, Mo. Contact Jim at [email protected].
