This past weekend, we plowed our first two rows on the property.  I am not ready to call it a farm.  There is too much still left to do.  Whether I feel the need to prove ourselves to ourself or to other farmers is unclear, but there is definitely a little more hoeing to be done before I name our place a farm.  Maybe once we find the farm’s name…

But, I should back up a bit.

In 2010, Steph and I knew we wanted to do something that involved a few acres, probably 5 to 10.  We went on the spring farm tour that year with a bit more purpose than in previous years.  A couple, good friends who are starting their own farm in eastern Washington, toured with us.  We went from farm to farm, noting things we liked, and things we did not.  We had been volunteering at another farm in the area, but the folks we had been working with there felt their own calling for New England.  They had left the area a few months prior, and left us with a feeling that we needed to find direction.

Our Washington friends, Ginger and Stacy, went all over with us on Saturday, braving some rather wicked storms (which we learned later spawned at least one tornado), but not as much on Sunday.  So they were not with us when we visited our last farm for the tour, Coon Rock in Hillsborough.

After touring the farm, at some point, we both looked at each other and knew we were in sync.  There was a lot about this farm we liked.  A few weeks later, we came back and volunteered (sorting through mostly bolted broccoli raab, and later slaughtering both a pig and goat the farmer was going to eat later.) Again, we knew there was something here we liked.

Over the next couple years, experience shifted our focus from just homesteading to looking at maybe drawing an income from farming.  I continued to volunteer at Coon Rock fairly regularly, learning also how to butcher chickens, slaughter turkeys, and really understanding the value of a sharp knife in a way I had never appreciated before.  When you take a life, take it clean, and a sharp knife really helps.

A few months before the previous blog entry was written about why I want to farm, we found out Steph was pregnant.  We knew we wanted a little more than one income, but wanted Steph to be able to stay home, and farming seems to have that potential.  Later after the baby was born, several readings of several Wendell Berry essays led to the belief that farming was something that could grow to offer our child a different view on how to live a life well, not constrained by conventional boundaries, but still rooted in honest values of hard work and worth.

The long and short of it is, we figured we needed land, more land than we had been thinking before would be better.  We thought it would take a couple years to find and figure out how to finance what we were interested in.  This was around summer of 2012.  Two months later, in the NC Ag review, a piece of property was listed for $2500 an acre for 40 acres in Oxford, NC.  This was well under the price per acre we’d seen anywhere else, giving us a glimmer of hope we could afford it, so we called up the folks who had it listed and went to look at the property.

Turns out we cheated.  We took our baby with us, who was cute as a button and very charming.  The folks selling the property seemed to like the idea of the land being a family farm, so were willing to wait on talking to other people (they’d had several calls between ours and our visiting the land) to give us a chance to figure out how to buy it.  We started an interesting process that bounced us between the farm credit services (Ag Carolina in this area) and the FSA, which I won’t write about in detail here, but Ag Carolina was sufficiently happy with us that they took the risk on loaning us the money for the property.

So, the short of it was that in January, we bought 45 acres in Oxford.  About a year and a half ahead of schedule.  Then, we started working on selling our house in Pittsboro, which we thought was going to take possibly a year.  We never actually got it on the market.  A tentative listing on zillow was enough to get attention, and on Mother’s Day, a couple gave us a verbal offer, we were under contract that week, and moved out about 4 weeks later.  It was a rough ride, but wow!  What a blessing!

So, we missed the summer growing season, and now are faced with a bunch of challenges (like how to clear enough of the 45 acres to farm), but happily tucked away in a rental a mile from the land that we have.  All ahead of schedule.  Woot!

And so, this weekend, we broke ground with two tentative rows that we hope to use to save some tomato seed lines we are fond of, and get started with selling some produce while we start renovating the rest of the land.  We’ve a way to go before we are farming for household income, but are well on our way.

This blog entry was submitted to Gene Logsdon’s blog for a series they were doing called “Why I want to farm.”  The original is here: http://thecontraryfarmer.wordpress.com/2011/08/09/why-i-want-to-farm-chris-geddings/

This is somewhat edited in an attempt to fix awkward grammar and misspellings.

When I was in my teens, my paternal grandfather, Grandad, announced to me that tomatoes no longer had any flavor. He remembered tomatoes from when he was young. What you could buy or grow in your garden today simply did not compare.

My maternal grandparents had a place in the North Carolina mountains. In my teens, their income was a mix of a civil service pension and periodic tax work. They also did some subsisting off of their 40 acres, where they had a few fields and some pastured livestock.

I grew up around chickens, rabbits and gardens. At my Dad’s we always had fresh eggs, though never quite got the rabbits going well. At my Mom’s we had eggs and ate her chickens from time to time. The gardening was never very extensive, but it put some interesting things on the table on occassion.

My goal in life up until college was getting into college, and once I got there, I had some rather profound “what now” moments. School was shaky, but I never had a problem working. From before my first taxable employment working in the tobacco fields, I could always go out and get things done. I did get through college, somewhat by the skin of my teeth. Then I got a decent job, but I was always a bit unsettled. Unsettled and not really able to tell you why. Could have been just because I was in my 20′s, I suppose, but I like to think I was looking for something I am now finding.

A few years ago, I met a girl, a rather fantastic girl, who told me at some point “I want a cow.” I thought that was a fantastic idea. I had been gardening for several years, and was getting better and better at keeping plants alive. The more the girl and I talked, the more we wanted to unhook a bit both from the conventional job market and modern life. We both are hard workers, but not so sold on the notion of trading so much of our time for things. Neither are we sure the selling of our time is ending up in what we’d consider a fair and equitable exchange for those things we’ve obtained.

So, we started making soap. We are still making soap, and now trying to figure out how to turn that into a revenue stream. We are expanding the garden dramatically, experimenting with making more things grow. We are looking for land — trying to figure out how to put down as much as we can and pay it off the rest as quickly as we can. We are keeping bees, and reading as much as we can about livestock and pasture management. We started volunteering at a bunch of different farms, and have found one whose general model we want to follow, though we’d like to stay smaller. We’ve got a plan, the first life plan I’ve had since I was a teenager, and are taking serious steps to make it happen.

In this, we’ve found a better way to eat. We’ve found work that makes us feel better about the lives we are living, even if the day to day of it has a lot of blood, tears, sweat and snot. With every step we make, the idea of unhooking a bit from “jobs”, finding a way to make our home work for us, and give us more time to spend with each other strengthens our purpose and makes us more confident in the next step. And, now, with a baby on the way, we want this path even more strongly. It just feels right.

What we do now may be gardening, and what is next is may be homesteading, or maybe farming, but most definitely we are building a life together based on the value of what we can do with our hands (or with a little help from critters.)

Recently, my wife and I went to a local event called “Tomatopalooza.” It was an odd series of events, but the short of it was I had stumbled across this affable fellow who grows tomato plants near by… and to understate, he *loves* tomatoes. He gave me a bunch of plants which I got in the ground late in the season, and told me about this event. As I was wandering around, tasting 166 different varieties of *tasty* tomatoes, I was struck by how different my life is these days, how different tomorrow will be, and how I wish my Grandad could taste some of the tomatoes I now grow.