Family Friendly Farming - Creating a Farm Life Your Children Will Treasure
By Joe Saltin, Acres USA, June 2000
In a family farm operation, everybody has a niche to fill. At Polyface Farm, we believe that diversifying responsibilities allows us to make many decisions at once, increasing the number of decisions made. We all have something different to offer, and every child’s talent is different. We have to appreciate their talents and create opportunities for children to express their natural abilities rather than saying, “Well, I raise chickens so you are going to raise chickens.” Let the children express themselves.
Rachel is our artist, she cooks, quilts, and makes crafts. She makes grapevine wreaths and potpourri. Teresa
and I can’t draw a stick man, but Rachel was drawing at age 3. We put in a flower garden so Rachel can have her flowers which she dries. This allows her to feel needed, wanted, and part of the family operation.
Daniel is our outdoorsman. He developed an interest in tapping maple trees. We built a pan and he bought a book about backyard maple sugaring. He designed a little oven himself, and he makes doughnuts, which he sells at the farmer’s market for $4 a dozen. He takes 1 gallon of maple syrup and turns it into $200.
The idea is to allow children to express themselves. Many Acres U.S.A. readers know about Daniel’s rabbit enterprise, which is now pretty large, with about 75 breeding does. He started as a 9-year-old, and he innovates. He raises mangel as a substitute winter forage for the rabbits and has a racken (rabbit-chicken) house with the rabbits above and the chickens underneath. Synergy and symbiosis occurs between the rabbits and chickens.
Starting children early is important. Teresa and I want them to earn their own money. Rachel makes her zucchini bread and pound cake and has regular customers at the farmers market. We don’t believe in Social Security to take care of us as we get older. We want our kids to take care of us if we get infirm. We don’t believe in allowances; we don’t think kids should get anything just for breathing. The beauty of letting children have their own enterprises that are separate from ours, and they are really their deal, is that they generate their own income.
Sustainable farmers talk a lot about diversifying the landscape. We need to take that concept into our infrastructures — machiner, buildings, everything — and think about multiple uses. One of the worst things we can do is to saddle our children to either payments or models too burdensome to abandon. Specifically, things like confinement animal facilities and big, single-use pieces of machinery — the kind you owe a lifetime mortgage on. Those things enslave the next generation to continue the same thing their parents did. When that happens, the kids want to go because there is no flexibility in the model.
The problem is that these capital-intensive infrastructures — single-use machinery and buildings — are too complicated to retrofit. Even when they become obsolete and don’t make any money, when they are boring and no longer fun, we still have to get up every morning, go out and keep the thing running. There is too much emotional and economic inertia in it to change the paradigm.
Small, sustainable family operations want to use uncomplicated, diversified machinery. We use machines that can load logs, gravel, compost and hay. Maybe we load logs slower than a guy with a $50,000
knuckle-boom loader, but that’s single-use equipment. I load logs with my truck, then take them to the band saw to make value-added lumber.
ACCEPT IMPERFECTION
Getting to a more basic, soul level, I’m going to address an important issue all parents have to face, especially the dads, because this is more a dad problem and not so much a mom problem. Pause a moment and consider how many of us either have or are fussy dads.
My dad was a journeyman pattern maker, and I still have his toolbox and handmade wood tools. They made wooden patterns to pour carburetors. Can you imagine carving molds for steel pieces out of wood? He was a woodworker par excellence. He could make grandfather clocks, furniture — you name it. I couldn’t do any of that. Daniel is a much better carpenter than I. But do you know what is one of the most gratifying things in my life? My father never once complained about my 87-degree angles. He never complained about something 2 inches higher on one end. How many chicken pens would I have experimented with using my rudimentary carpentry skills if I was afraid while building the first one that if it was just a little out of square I’d get fussed at? Bless his heart, he never complained. Because there is one principle and that’s function; if it works, that’s good enough.
Dads, we have to let our children go out in the shop and bend nails — yes, waste nails and maybe our favorite board. I’ve seen 30- and 40-year-old sons who don’t feel the liberty to take a board off the lumber pile without asking dad. That’s a tragedy. I know it’s a dad problem. I’ve watched guys my age inherit farms in their 20s and lose them in 10 years. I’ve watched innumerable guys my age who really would like to have stayed on the farm but didn’t. And I’ve watched lots and lots of parents of my parent’s generation who had children and none of them are on the farm. Separate dad and mom and ask, what happened? Mom will tell you, “He was too hard on them. Nothing ever pleased him.” If they did a good job, that was expected. You’re supposed to do a good job. But boy, bend a nail or drive over a windrow wrong, or plant that row of corn a bit crooked, and you listen. I hope we all take this to heart. It is such a critical lesson. I know there are exceptions, but most of the time at least one child will stay on the farm if they feel they’ve got a fair shake. It starts young.
It has to be fun, too. It can’t be all work. Why do people not want to farm? It’s drudgery, it’s dirty, and it’s noisy. But we go to the woods and create pastures with pigs. Instead of bulldozers, you just let the pigs go in — these are honest-to-goodness bush hogs — and you can plant small grain in there. If you don’t think it’s fun, you haven’t had a 12-year-old boy take a 5-gallon bucket, stick it over the snout of a pig, grab on to the bale, jump on that 300-pound pig and go, “high-ho silver” down through the corn. Let me tell you, it is fun, it’s exciting. It’s a whole lot more fun to do tillage and environmental work this way than it is watching how dad acts after going down there with a tractor and running a stump through the tire.
MAKE IT BEAUTIFUL
A farm has to be beautiful. Here is a little rule of thumb. If you take people around your farm and you have to apologize more than three times, you’ve got serious problems. If you’re embarrassed about it, think about what your kids feel when their friends visit. Our farms have to be beautiful, aesthetically pleasing places where our children love to entertain. If it is smelly, dirty and noisy, and a dead animal gets hauled out by the barn, and the tomatoes have blight, it’s a problem.
Kids get turned off to sickness and disease; they really don’t like it. Watch a child when you’ve tried to save a calf and it dies, or they watch a cow go down, or your child’s first garden has five corn plants and three get blown over in a windstorm. It’s not fun. It’s devastating. I know we don’t need to shelter them from all the tragedies of life, but in the big picture, you can take some bumps in the road if that’s not the norm.
CREATE OPPORTUNITIES
We use portable electric fencing on some land about 11 or 12 miles away to run stock cattle. This is something that Daniel has jumped on as an opportunity to expand our land base. And there’s room
to grow. The agriculture/economics department at Virginia Tech has just released a study that says in the next 10 years, 70 percent of Virginia’s farmland is going to change hands. It’s the beginning of an opportunity that we haven’t seen since Pa Ingalls took the family out the Oregon Trail. All this unused land owned by people who don’t know what to do with it. The average turnaround age for a farmette is five years. This is creating unprecedented opportunities, but the model has to be there in order for our children to have the desire, the savvy and self-confidence to tap these alternatives. We have 100 cows on 1/4 acre a
day; it’s aesthetic, it’s pleasing, it’s fun, and it intensifies the production on that acreage.
Daniel is interested in aquaculture and fishing. So we’re building ponds that give us water pressure anywhere on the farm, a focus for Daniel’s interests. Ten year ago Teresa and I quit making major investments or changes for ourselves; we are making them to open up opportunities for our grandchildren.
That’s how we need to think. We are already through with our kids; they have tons of room and salaries
galore on the farm. We’re thinking about the grandchildren to come.
CREATE A LEGACY
As a culture, we have this idea that we send kids off to school to get as smart as they can be to go 1,000 miles away from home to earn enough money to put us in nursing care when we get old. My vision is I just want to age and have the grandchildren fighting over who is going to get granddad for a day. Wouldn’t that be neat?
Stephen Covey wrote the book which, next to the Bible, everybody ought to read: The Seven Habits of
Highly Effective People. One of the habits is that you start with the end in view. We have to think about what kind of a model the kids are going to have, not when they are 18, but when they are 2 or even before we have them. We have to think way down the line. If my end in view at 80 is grandchildren running around my feet, vying for who is going to spend the day with granddad, I don’t start that when I’m 80. I started that 20 years ago. In fact, it started a lot sooner than that with my dad and mom. It’s a rich legacy.
I mentioned aesthetics. How about sick cows drinking out of the pond. You go by and see cows with their nostrils up over the water. Then you wonder why they are sick and you’ve got to put them through the head gate. Then dad gets kicked and loses his religion in the head gate, shooting the cows up with Ivomec, which makes the meat bad, but it kills all the bugs. We have to do it when the cows are drinking out of a toilet bowl. I was driving down the road once, and I watched cows in a pond. A cow was drinking out of one end and peeing out the other. And your kids are going to bring their friends home to watch that? We have to think about what we are doing. We have a fenced-out pond. Canada geese come and lay their eggs. The kids get to go up and pick up those little goslings and put them back. The joy of watching that, the discovery, the awe and the reverence for nature it creates. Think of the difference this creates in the mind of a child compared to a day spent dosing the cows. This creates a child who wants to be there.
How do we transfer this awe and reverence to the children? We study nature, asking, How did God set this up? We’re not asking some white-coated, post-holedigger- degreed person with some Monsanto grant to tell us what’s wrong with our cows — to listen to them you wonder how a cow existed before Monsanto and Merck pharmaceuticals. Go out and talk to the cows. Now I’m not talking about some mystical, metaphysical thing, but you can tell a lot by going out there on a 5-gallon bucket. These days, everybody looks at their cows at 40 miles per hour from a pickup truck — that’s how we farm. And if there is any problem, we buy the solution in a bag.
FIND A WORKABLE SYSTEM
Our cows leave their calling cards, and we run the egg-mobile behind the cows. You have a biological pasture sanitizer, turning all the crickets and grasshoppers and parasites into cash, and keeping the cows out of the head gate — which keeps dad’s religion from being lost. It really does completely change the paradigm.
We have a feather net — portable electrified poultry netting. One person works seven hours a week on 3 acres and nets $15,000 a year through intensity of production. We sell about a thousand dozen eggs a week at $1.60 a dozen — pretty decent cash flow. Is there enough there for the next generation?
You had better believe it. The chickens are happy; it’s beautiful; it’s aesthetic.
DIVERSIFY PRODUCTION
Polyface Farm also has an apprentice program for young people to learn farming principles. Our first goal was just to make a living. The Drucker Cycle says in five to seven years an enterprise is either successful or fails. Ours was successful, and became lucrative. Once you make it, then you look toward expansion. The kids allowed us to expand. But we didn’t want our children to feel obligated to maintain our level or type of production. How do we open the door for flexibility, for them to realize there are more options than to do the same thing their whole lives? One of the ways was the apprenticeship program. This provides camaraderie, an opportunity for our kids to teach, and assistance so the kids are free to pursue other interests.
If you are going to have a building, then keep generating cash through it with multiple uses and species. Each species’ manure concentrates a different enzyme. In our bedding pack we have rabbit and chicken; if we clean out a stable to two, we’ve got horse; and then there’s pig and cow — five different manures, all with concentrated energies and enzymes. We make compost with “pigaerators.” Pig aerobics — the pigs go into the bedding pack after the cows come out. It’s fun and sure beats a windrow compost turner. We call
them pigaerators because the pigs go in and the compost comes out.
The idea is that the building is used for additional cash flow. Roll the wire up and you put cows in, you put pigs in, lambs, rabbits, pheasants, whatever. The point is that you use it for a lot of different things. Then you have the kind of enterprise that the children can be a part of; this is another key principle.
BE GENEROUS WITH PRAISE
It dawned on me recently, when I saw a statistic about how much time young people spend watching television and video games, how little opportunity there is for parents to praise kids for a job well done. But when that child is out there tending chickens or a garden spot, or pounding in some nails and they finally get one in, there are countless opportunities in a day to praise them and say, “Good job, keep at it, that’s great.” Think of the difference when there are opportunities to praise kids.
We home school, and I can’t imagine not having those six hours a day to praise my children for accomplished tasks and jobs well done, for commitment, for perseverance, for personal integrity and strength of character. I wouldn’t give up those hours for anything. Our children are a special source of pride. People kept telling me when Daniel was little, “Oh, he’s great now, but you wait, he’ll be a pistol, you won’t be able to control him, and all kids go through rebellion.” But they were all wrong; it doesn’t get any better than this. And it’s not because I’m a great dad, it’s because we have time. People who say it doesn’t matter how much time you spend with your children, it is just the quality — it isn’t true. All we have is time. If we can invest it in these kids and allow them to have projects that provide opportunities to praise them, they will develop team spirit and involvement in the enterprise.
A TASK-ORIENTED MIND-SET
We pay our kids and we make sure we tell them exactly where the money came from — eggs, chicks or whatever. They tow the line. Rachel can raise a set of chicks, I guarantee you, better than anybody I know. One of the things that makes a difference is turning the work on the farm into a game. I’m working on a new book, Family Friendly Farming, and 10 chapters will be 10 commandments for making your kids love the farm. Basically it is loving what you do. In the natural system, kids want to do what mom and dad do. It is only in a really estranged, weird culture that kids don’t want to do what mom and dad do.
One thing that works with kids is to never have them do a task for a period of time. Nobody should get paid for putting in time. It completely changes the tasks if instead of saying, “Go do this for an hour,” we say, “Do this, and when you are done, you can play or get a treat.” This isn’t about cutting corners; the task still has to be done up to par. What a different psyche it gives the child, and they become task-oriented instead of time-oriented.
Daniel was about 7 when he and a neighbor friend were building a fort. The neighbors came over and just carried on, “Man, that Daniel, he won’t stop for anything. He won’t even stop for lunch.” Well, we taught early on that you finish the job. He was in diapers and I’d be digging post holes and we’d get thirsty. I’d say, “Daniel, we’re not going to stop for a drink until we get this post hole in. We’ll reward ourselves
with a drink.” He could hardly understand English, but that taught completion of job, perseverance to the end, reward only after it’s done. Work and then play.
You’re going to pick beans? Turn it into a game of can I finish this row before you? Whoever finishes first gets an ice cream cone. You turn these jobs into a game and it takes the drudgery out of it. It’s all very child-friendly and fun.
We’ve created farms so dangerous that when the children are small, we push them aside. Who is going to send their 4-yearold up to the confinement swine facility to check the pigs? There are 50 fans running, augers, PTO shafts, and we don’t want the kids to go up. So the kids don’t go up there, while dad and mom just keep going up there. The kids get involved in ballet, arcades and little league. The kids get about 13 or 14 and they’re lost because we haven’t fostered a child-friendly paradigm.
A CHILD-FRIENDLY FARM
We have pastured poultry. This is all fun. It’s work that children can do and you don’t have to worry about them. We dress our birds on the farm. There again, butchering chickens — what drudgery. Not for us. I gut them and Daniel, when he was 7 or 8, did all this other stuff. You know what his goal was? His objective was to cover dad up. So the whole morning turned into a game where I’m trying to stay ahead. Now he can cover me up three-fold. That task turned into a game that created fun and joy.
People come from around the country to learn how to butcher. Camaraderie and community spirit builds as all these hands work on task. It’s like recreating the old threshing room, the communal idea of working together in community, which creates an invigorating social structure. Instead of being isolated, the children are actually the center of a whole network of people who enjoy working together, who come together for a common cause, a common vision with a reverence for life. When it’s over, it’s over; there are sprint times and rest times. It is one of the beauties of this kind of farming that it is not the same thing day after day.
When the chickens are done we can put turkeys in the pens. When it gets cold outside, we bring the chickens into the hoop houses and we run a pigaerator through. In the spring, we can grow tomatoes in the bedding to get multiple uses out of the hoop houses. We are stacking additional enterprises on the farm.
Here’s a common scenario. Mom and dad run the farm. One of the kids says, “I’d like to be on the farm full time.” Dad says, “This farm will produce one salary but it won’t produce two.” Ever heard that? Yes, all over the place. So the kid goes off to college and gets a job. Now we fast forward. It’s Thanksgiving, and the kids are all home, and dad says, “Your mom and I are slowing down a little. I don’t get off and on that tractor like I used to. I’d like for you to come back.” And the kid says, “Well, there was a time I wanted to come back, but I’ve got four promotions. I have 10 people working under me and a 401K plan. I’ve got four weeks of paid vacation and paid medical. The kids are involved with soccer and little league. I have too much invested to back up.” Now we fast forward 10 more years and mom and dad are about 80, 82, maybe one of them is gone. What happens to the farm? That scenario gets repeated how many times around the countryside? What we need now are paradigms for additional enterprises.
SUSTAINABLE FARM SYSTEMS
What we have are poultry, cows, pigs, turkeys — multiple stacking enterprises. They are all complementary, symbiotic and synergistic. We’ve taken that acre of land and instead of producing $200 or
$300, we produce $4,000 to $5,000 per acre. There are new, complementary enterprises so the next generation can build white-collar salaries on the land and infrastructure that mom and dad have.
Eighty percent of the capital in American agriculture is owned by people over 60. What we need are partnering-type techniques to let the next generation access that land base. So we have multiple uses, multiple benefits off of that existing land, a link to the land and to the customer and retail person. These people will look your children in the eye and say, “I sure hope you keep this tradition, because our family depends on you for our health.” Can you imagine what that does, to give a child a sacred calling? They don’t say mom and dad aren’t doing anything important. No. It inculcates them early with a sacredness and reverence for a ministry and a mission, a life worth living. A sacred call, a sacred duty — let’s not deny them that. A big vision, a wonderful presentation, a statement, and a life of conviction that we are something, we believe in something and we are passionate about something.
We go to the farmers market and show people the difference between our egg and the fecal egg. We want to draw lines of distinction. It is not just a matter of shades of gray; there is right and wrong. We draw that distinction. We call them “our eggs” and the “salmonella eggs”; it’s very clear. Rachel takes her zucchini bread to the market, and one can imagine what it does for her when someone says, “Oh, are you the Rachel’s Famous Zucchini Bread that fed my garden club last week? They all loved it.” What do you think that does for her? Do you think she’s going to want to quit making zucchini bread? No, indeed, she wants to go till up the “back forty” in zucchini. This is a noble cause.
SHARE THE RICHNESS
So often we farmers sell ourselves short. We do not allow our children access, philosophically and emotionally, economically and aesthetically. We don’t transfer this sacred baton to them so they get the big picture. If we devote ourselves to excellence, then that is a noble calling. We can devote ourselves to beauty as landscape architects, as nurturers of the creation that God has entrusted to us, rather than as rapists and pillagers of the land.
We have bad days, and it is not all perfect. But as we devote ourselves to excellence, with the end in view, the sun does come out. We can keep that reverence and that awe open for them and create financially rewarding opportunities so that when the kids are 18, instead of saying, “Man, I’m out of here,” they say, “Leave? This is paradise on earth, why would I ever want to leave?”
We can talk about soil, genes or marketing, but if we don’t take a holistic view to create a paradigm that’s aesthetically, emotionally, and economically enhancing enough to romance the next generation into farming, we are wasting our time. Teresa and I are creating young, virile, enthusiastic spirits to overtake that countryside and to take off where we leave, where our parents leave, and to protect that niche of God’s creation for generations to come. That’s creating the farm our children will want. That is the ultimate sustainability, the ultimate reproduction, the ultimate rejuvenation. It’s the farm of the 21st century. It is beautiful and everybody can play a part.
In a family farm operation, everybody has a niche to fill. At Polyface Farm, we believe that diversifying responsibilities allows us to make many decisions at once, increasing the number of decisions made. We all have something different to offer, and every child’s talent is different. We have to appreciate their talents and create opportunities for children to express their natural abilities rather than saying, “Well, I raise chickens so you are going to raise chickens.” Let the children express themselves.
Rachel is our artist, she cooks, quilts, and makes crafts. She makes grapevine wreaths and potpourri. Teresa
and I can’t draw a stick man, but Rachel was drawing at age 3. We put in a flower garden so Rachel can have her flowers which she dries. This allows her to feel needed, wanted, and part of the family operation.
Daniel is our outdoorsman. He developed an interest in tapping maple trees. We built a pan and he bought a book about backyard maple sugaring. He designed a little oven himself, and he makes doughnuts, which he sells at the farmer’s market for $4 a dozen. He takes 1 gallon of maple syrup and turns it into $200.
The idea is to allow children to express themselves. Many Acres U.S.A. readers know about Daniel’s rabbit enterprise, which is now pretty large, with about 75 breeding does. He started as a 9-year-old, and he innovates. He raises mangel as a substitute winter forage for the rabbits and has a racken (rabbit-chicken) house with the rabbits above and the chickens underneath. Synergy and symbiosis occurs between the rabbits and chickens.
Starting children early is important. Teresa and I want them to earn their own money. Rachel makes her zucchini bread and pound cake and has regular customers at the farmers market. We don’t believe in Social Security to take care of us as we get older. We want our kids to take care of us if we get infirm. We don’t believe in allowances; we don’t think kids should get anything just for breathing. The beauty of letting children have their own enterprises that are separate from ours, and they are really their deal, is that they generate their own income.
Sustainable farmers talk a lot about diversifying the landscape. We need to take that concept into our infrastructures — machiner, buildings, everything — and think about multiple uses. One of the worst things we can do is to saddle our children to either payments or models too burdensome to abandon. Specifically, things like confinement animal facilities and big, single-use pieces of machinery — the kind you owe a lifetime mortgage on. Those things enslave the next generation to continue the same thing their parents did. When that happens, the kids want to go because there is no flexibility in the model.
The problem is that these capital-intensive infrastructures — single-use machinery and buildings — are too complicated to retrofit. Even when they become obsolete and don’t make any money, when they are boring and no longer fun, we still have to get up every morning, go out and keep the thing running. There is too much emotional and economic inertia in it to change the paradigm.
Small, sustainable family operations want to use uncomplicated, diversified machinery. We use machines that can load logs, gravel, compost and hay. Maybe we load logs slower than a guy with a $50,000
knuckle-boom loader, but that’s single-use equipment. I load logs with my truck, then take them to the band saw to make value-added lumber.
ACCEPT IMPERFECTION
Getting to a more basic, soul level, I’m going to address an important issue all parents have to face, especially the dads, because this is more a dad problem and not so much a mom problem. Pause a moment and consider how many of us either have or are fussy dads.
My dad was a journeyman pattern maker, and I still have his toolbox and handmade wood tools. They made wooden patterns to pour carburetors. Can you imagine carving molds for steel pieces out of wood? He was a woodworker par excellence. He could make grandfather clocks, furniture — you name it. I couldn’t do any of that. Daniel is a much better carpenter than I. But do you know what is one of the most gratifying things in my life? My father never once complained about my 87-degree angles. He never complained about something 2 inches higher on one end. How many chicken pens would I have experimented with using my rudimentary carpentry skills if I was afraid while building the first one that if it was just a little out of square I’d get fussed at? Bless his heart, he never complained. Because there is one principle and that’s function; if it works, that’s good enough.
Dads, we have to let our children go out in the shop and bend nails — yes, waste nails and maybe our favorite board. I’ve seen 30- and 40-year-old sons who don’t feel the liberty to take a board off the lumber pile without asking dad. That’s a tragedy. I know it’s a dad problem. I’ve watched guys my age inherit farms in their 20s and lose them in 10 years. I’ve watched innumerable guys my age who really would like to have stayed on the farm but didn’t. And I’ve watched lots and lots of parents of my parent’s generation who had children and none of them are on the farm. Separate dad and mom and ask, what happened? Mom will tell you, “He was too hard on them. Nothing ever pleased him.” If they did a good job, that was expected. You’re supposed to do a good job. But boy, bend a nail or drive over a windrow wrong, or plant that row of corn a bit crooked, and you listen. I hope we all take this to heart. It is such a critical lesson. I know there are exceptions, but most of the time at least one child will stay on the farm if they feel they’ve got a fair shake. It starts young.
It has to be fun, too. It can’t be all work. Why do people not want to farm? It’s drudgery, it’s dirty, and it’s noisy. But we go to the woods and create pastures with pigs. Instead of bulldozers, you just let the pigs go in — these are honest-to-goodness bush hogs — and you can plant small grain in there. If you don’t think it’s fun, you haven’t had a 12-year-old boy take a 5-gallon bucket, stick it over the snout of a pig, grab on to the bale, jump on that 300-pound pig and go, “high-ho silver” down through the corn. Let me tell you, it is fun, it’s exciting. It’s a whole lot more fun to do tillage and environmental work this way than it is watching how dad acts after going down there with a tractor and running a stump through the tire.
MAKE IT BEAUTIFUL
A farm has to be beautiful. Here is a little rule of thumb. If you take people around your farm and you have to apologize more than three times, you’ve got serious problems. If you’re embarrassed about it, think about what your kids feel when their friends visit. Our farms have to be beautiful, aesthetically pleasing places where our children love to entertain. If it is smelly, dirty and noisy, and a dead animal gets hauled out by the barn, and the tomatoes have blight, it’s a problem.
Kids get turned off to sickness and disease; they really don’t like it. Watch a child when you’ve tried to save a calf and it dies, or they watch a cow go down, or your child’s first garden has five corn plants and three get blown over in a windstorm. It’s not fun. It’s devastating. I know we don’t need to shelter them from all the tragedies of life, but in the big picture, you can take some bumps in the road if that’s not the norm.
CREATE OPPORTUNITIES
We use portable electric fencing on some land about 11 or 12 miles away to run stock cattle. This is something that Daniel has jumped on as an opportunity to expand our land base. And there’s room
to grow. The agriculture/economics department at Virginia Tech has just released a study that says in the next 10 years, 70 percent of Virginia’s farmland is going to change hands. It’s the beginning of an opportunity that we haven’t seen since Pa Ingalls took the family out the Oregon Trail. All this unused land owned by people who don’t know what to do with it. The average turnaround age for a farmette is five years. This is creating unprecedented opportunities, but the model has to be there in order for our children to have the desire, the savvy and self-confidence to tap these alternatives. We have 100 cows on 1/4 acre a
day; it’s aesthetic, it’s pleasing, it’s fun, and it intensifies the production on that acreage.
Daniel is interested in aquaculture and fishing. So we’re building ponds that give us water pressure anywhere on the farm, a focus for Daniel’s interests. Ten year ago Teresa and I quit making major investments or changes for ourselves; we are making them to open up opportunities for our grandchildren.
That’s how we need to think. We are already through with our kids; they have tons of room and salaries
galore on the farm. We’re thinking about the grandchildren to come.
CREATE A LEGACY
As a culture, we have this idea that we send kids off to school to get as smart as they can be to go 1,000 miles away from home to earn enough money to put us in nursing care when we get old. My vision is I just want to age and have the grandchildren fighting over who is going to get granddad for a day. Wouldn’t that be neat?
Stephen Covey wrote the book which, next to the Bible, everybody ought to read: The Seven Habits of
Highly Effective People. One of the habits is that you start with the end in view. We have to think about what kind of a model the kids are going to have, not when they are 18, but when they are 2 or even before we have them. We have to think way down the line. If my end in view at 80 is grandchildren running around my feet, vying for who is going to spend the day with granddad, I don’t start that when I’m 80. I started that 20 years ago. In fact, it started a lot sooner than that with my dad and mom. It’s a rich legacy.
I mentioned aesthetics. How about sick cows drinking out of the pond. You go by and see cows with their nostrils up over the water. Then you wonder why they are sick and you’ve got to put them through the head gate. Then dad gets kicked and loses his religion in the head gate, shooting the cows up with Ivomec, which makes the meat bad, but it kills all the bugs. We have to do it when the cows are drinking out of a toilet bowl. I was driving down the road once, and I watched cows in a pond. A cow was drinking out of one end and peeing out the other. And your kids are going to bring their friends home to watch that? We have to think about what we are doing. We have a fenced-out pond. Canada geese come and lay their eggs. The kids get to go up and pick up those little goslings and put them back. The joy of watching that, the discovery, the awe and the reverence for nature it creates. Think of the difference this creates in the mind of a child compared to a day spent dosing the cows. This creates a child who wants to be there.
How do we transfer this awe and reverence to the children? We study nature, asking, How did God set this up? We’re not asking some white-coated, post-holedigger- degreed person with some Monsanto grant to tell us what’s wrong with our cows — to listen to them you wonder how a cow existed before Monsanto and Merck pharmaceuticals. Go out and talk to the cows. Now I’m not talking about some mystical, metaphysical thing, but you can tell a lot by going out there on a 5-gallon bucket. These days, everybody looks at their cows at 40 miles per hour from a pickup truck — that’s how we farm. And if there is any problem, we buy the solution in a bag.
FIND A WORKABLE SYSTEM
Our cows leave their calling cards, and we run the egg-mobile behind the cows. You have a biological pasture sanitizer, turning all the crickets and grasshoppers and parasites into cash, and keeping the cows out of the head gate — which keeps dad’s religion from being lost. It really does completely change the paradigm.
We have a feather net — portable electrified poultry netting. One person works seven hours a week on 3 acres and nets $15,000 a year through intensity of production. We sell about a thousand dozen eggs a week at $1.60 a dozen — pretty decent cash flow. Is there enough there for the next generation?
You had better believe it. The chickens are happy; it’s beautiful; it’s aesthetic.
DIVERSIFY PRODUCTION
Polyface Farm also has an apprentice program for young people to learn farming principles. Our first goal was just to make a living. The Drucker Cycle says in five to seven years an enterprise is either successful or fails. Ours was successful, and became lucrative. Once you make it, then you look toward expansion. The kids allowed us to expand. But we didn’t want our children to feel obligated to maintain our level or type of production. How do we open the door for flexibility, for them to realize there are more options than to do the same thing their whole lives? One of the ways was the apprenticeship program. This provides camaraderie, an opportunity for our kids to teach, and assistance so the kids are free to pursue other interests.
If you are going to have a building, then keep generating cash through it with multiple uses and species. Each species’ manure concentrates a different enzyme. In our bedding pack we have rabbit and chicken; if we clean out a stable to two, we’ve got horse; and then there’s pig and cow — five different manures, all with concentrated energies and enzymes. We make compost with “pigaerators.” Pig aerobics — the pigs go into the bedding pack after the cows come out. It’s fun and sure beats a windrow compost turner. We call
them pigaerators because the pigs go in and the compost comes out.
The idea is that the building is used for additional cash flow. Roll the wire up and you put cows in, you put pigs in, lambs, rabbits, pheasants, whatever. The point is that you use it for a lot of different things. Then you have the kind of enterprise that the children can be a part of; this is another key principle.
BE GENEROUS WITH PRAISE
It dawned on me recently, when I saw a statistic about how much time young people spend watching television and video games, how little opportunity there is for parents to praise kids for a job well done. But when that child is out there tending chickens or a garden spot, or pounding in some nails and they finally get one in, there are countless opportunities in a day to praise them and say, “Good job, keep at it, that’s great.” Think of the difference when there are opportunities to praise kids.
We home school, and I can’t imagine not having those six hours a day to praise my children for accomplished tasks and jobs well done, for commitment, for perseverance, for personal integrity and strength of character. I wouldn’t give up those hours for anything. Our children are a special source of pride. People kept telling me when Daniel was little, “Oh, he’s great now, but you wait, he’ll be a pistol, you won’t be able to control him, and all kids go through rebellion.” But they were all wrong; it doesn’t get any better than this. And it’s not because I’m a great dad, it’s because we have time. People who say it doesn’t matter how much time you spend with your children, it is just the quality — it isn’t true. All we have is time. If we can invest it in these kids and allow them to have projects that provide opportunities to praise them, they will develop team spirit and involvement in the enterprise.
A TASK-ORIENTED MIND-SET
We pay our kids and we make sure we tell them exactly where the money came from — eggs, chicks or whatever. They tow the line. Rachel can raise a set of chicks, I guarantee you, better than anybody I know. One of the things that makes a difference is turning the work on the farm into a game. I’m working on a new book, Family Friendly Farming, and 10 chapters will be 10 commandments for making your kids love the farm. Basically it is loving what you do. In the natural system, kids want to do what mom and dad do. It is only in a really estranged, weird culture that kids don’t want to do what mom and dad do.
One thing that works with kids is to never have them do a task for a period of time. Nobody should get paid for putting in time. It completely changes the tasks if instead of saying, “Go do this for an hour,” we say, “Do this, and when you are done, you can play or get a treat.” This isn’t about cutting corners; the task still has to be done up to par. What a different psyche it gives the child, and they become task-oriented instead of time-oriented.
Daniel was about 7 when he and a neighbor friend were building a fort. The neighbors came over and just carried on, “Man, that Daniel, he won’t stop for anything. He won’t even stop for lunch.” Well, we taught early on that you finish the job. He was in diapers and I’d be digging post holes and we’d get thirsty. I’d say, “Daniel, we’re not going to stop for a drink until we get this post hole in. We’ll reward ourselves
with a drink.” He could hardly understand English, but that taught completion of job, perseverance to the end, reward only after it’s done. Work and then play.
You’re going to pick beans? Turn it into a game of can I finish this row before you? Whoever finishes first gets an ice cream cone. You turn these jobs into a game and it takes the drudgery out of it. It’s all very child-friendly and fun.
We’ve created farms so dangerous that when the children are small, we push them aside. Who is going to send their 4-yearold up to the confinement swine facility to check the pigs? There are 50 fans running, augers, PTO shafts, and we don’t want the kids to go up. So the kids don’t go up there, while dad and mom just keep going up there. The kids get involved in ballet, arcades and little league. The kids get about 13 or 14 and they’re lost because we haven’t fostered a child-friendly paradigm.
A CHILD-FRIENDLY FARM
We have pastured poultry. This is all fun. It’s work that children can do and you don’t have to worry about them. We dress our birds on the farm. There again, butchering chickens — what drudgery. Not for us. I gut them and Daniel, when he was 7 or 8, did all this other stuff. You know what his goal was? His objective was to cover dad up. So the whole morning turned into a game where I’m trying to stay ahead. Now he can cover me up three-fold. That task turned into a game that created fun and joy.
People come from around the country to learn how to butcher. Camaraderie and community spirit builds as all these hands work on task. It’s like recreating the old threshing room, the communal idea of working together in community, which creates an invigorating social structure. Instead of being isolated, the children are actually the center of a whole network of people who enjoy working together, who come together for a common cause, a common vision with a reverence for life. When it’s over, it’s over; there are sprint times and rest times. It is one of the beauties of this kind of farming that it is not the same thing day after day.
When the chickens are done we can put turkeys in the pens. When it gets cold outside, we bring the chickens into the hoop houses and we run a pigaerator through. In the spring, we can grow tomatoes in the bedding to get multiple uses out of the hoop houses. We are stacking additional enterprises on the farm.
Here’s a common scenario. Mom and dad run the farm. One of the kids says, “I’d like to be on the farm full time.” Dad says, “This farm will produce one salary but it won’t produce two.” Ever heard that? Yes, all over the place. So the kid goes off to college and gets a job. Now we fast forward. It’s Thanksgiving, and the kids are all home, and dad says, “Your mom and I are slowing down a little. I don’t get off and on that tractor like I used to. I’d like for you to come back.” And the kid says, “Well, there was a time I wanted to come back, but I’ve got four promotions. I have 10 people working under me and a 401K plan. I’ve got four weeks of paid vacation and paid medical. The kids are involved with soccer and little league. I have too much invested to back up.” Now we fast forward 10 more years and mom and dad are about 80, 82, maybe one of them is gone. What happens to the farm? That scenario gets repeated how many times around the countryside? What we need now are paradigms for additional enterprises.
SUSTAINABLE FARM SYSTEMS
What we have are poultry, cows, pigs, turkeys — multiple stacking enterprises. They are all complementary, symbiotic and synergistic. We’ve taken that acre of land and instead of producing $200 or
$300, we produce $4,000 to $5,000 per acre. There are new, complementary enterprises so the next generation can build white-collar salaries on the land and infrastructure that mom and dad have.
Eighty percent of the capital in American agriculture is owned by people over 60. What we need are partnering-type techniques to let the next generation access that land base. So we have multiple uses, multiple benefits off of that existing land, a link to the land and to the customer and retail person. These people will look your children in the eye and say, “I sure hope you keep this tradition, because our family depends on you for our health.” Can you imagine what that does, to give a child a sacred calling? They don’t say mom and dad aren’t doing anything important. No. It inculcates them early with a sacredness and reverence for a ministry and a mission, a life worth living. A sacred call, a sacred duty — let’s not deny them that. A big vision, a wonderful presentation, a statement, and a life of conviction that we are something, we believe in something and we are passionate about something.
We go to the farmers market and show people the difference between our egg and the fecal egg. We want to draw lines of distinction. It is not just a matter of shades of gray; there is right and wrong. We draw that distinction. We call them “our eggs” and the “salmonella eggs”; it’s very clear. Rachel takes her zucchini bread to the market, and one can imagine what it does for her when someone says, “Oh, are you the Rachel’s Famous Zucchini Bread that fed my garden club last week? They all loved it.” What do you think that does for her? Do you think she’s going to want to quit making zucchini bread? No, indeed, she wants to go till up the “back forty” in zucchini. This is a noble cause.
SHARE THE RICHNESS
So often we farmers sell ourselves short. We do not allow our children access, philosophically and emotionally, economically and aesthetically. We don’t transfer this sacred baton to them so they get the big picture. If we devote ourselves to excellence, then that is a noble calling. We can devote ourselves to beauty as landscape architects, as nurturers of the creation that God has entrusted to us, rather than as rapists and pillagers of the land.
We have bad days, and it is not all perfect. But as we devote ourselves to excellence, with the end in view, the sun does come out. We can keep that reverence and that awe open for them and create financially rewarding opportunities so that when the kids are 18, instead of saying, “Man, I’m out of here,” they say, “Leave? This is paradise on earth, why would I ever want to leave?”
We can talk about soil, genes or marketing, but if we don’t take a holistic view to create a paradigm that’s aesthetically, emotionally, and economically enhancing enough to romance the next generation into farming, we are wasting our time. Teresa and I are creating young, virile, enthusiastic spirits to overtake that countryside and to take off where we leave, where our parents leave, and to protect that niche of God’s creation for generations to come. That’s creating the farm our children will want. That is the ultimate sustainability, the ultimate reproduction, the ultimate rejuvenation. It’s the farm of the 21st century. It is beautiful and everybody can play a part.
