How Do You "Do"?

     People ask us all the time, "So what do you all 'do'?"  "Do you each have different jobs on the farm?"  "Does everyone have assigned responsibilities?"  Yes and no.  Though the division of labor is by no means set in stone and we all help each other out, the tasks on the farm have fallen out to each one of us according to our skill sets.  Here is an overview of who normally does what and how it all fits together.

     Mama is the backbone of the operation, without question.  She attends to marketing, finances, record interpreting, public relations, custom orders, and many other areas of the business that I don't know the jargon for.  She is also the sounding board for all our crazy ideas, which can be quite taxing.

Daddy is the founder and chief administrator who does the research and buys all the toys. He teaches history full time at Crest High School, but manages quite a bit in his spare time.  All of our equipment, from fencing to processing to mowing and toting, is thanks to him.  He developed the design for our chicken tractors and the recipe for our homemade organic fertilizer.  He mows ahead of fence lines when we tell him to with our newest toy, the BCS walk-behind tractor.  He is our foody, or should I say, our "meaty;" he tracks down recipes for all the cool stuff we do with our meat and runs experiments on the grill like a mad scientist.  He also listens to as many of our crazy ideas as he has patience for, and tells us whether they will work or not; more often than not, he's right.


   

      If Mama is the backbone of the farm, then Hannah is the right arm.  She oversees most of the outdoor work, which mainly consists of animal moves.  We rotate all our animals through the pasture and the woods behind portable electric fences; the chickens live in wooden houses inside the electric fences so that they are protected from the hawks and owls.  Laying hens move every other day, broilers move every day, sheep move twice a week, pigs move when they have used up their forage (they have very large pens and move every couple months), and the dogs move whenever they end up in the way of a chicken fence.  Hannah weed eats ahead of the new electric fences if possible and tells Daddy to mow if not; then she sets posts, runs the wires, tightens everything up, and moves the animals into their new pen.  It is quite a process.  She also monitors animal behavior and nutrition, breeding and birthing, and body condition; she could tell you off the top of her head when a calf was born, how long a sheep limped before we figured out what was wrong with her foot, and when the next pregnant sow is due to farrow.

     I am the floater and Hannah's chief assistant.  I pitch in with whatever needs to be done at the moment, from helping Hannah trim the sheep's feet to washing eggs for Mama while she sorts out a bulk order over the phone.  I also keep the deep freezers organized and defrosted, monitor our stock of frozen meats, keep up the blog (yours truly), and pack up the coolers on market mornings.

     Seth is in training for pretty much everything.  He accompanies Mama to the farmer's market, helps move animals, dotes on any baby animals, tends the neighbor's cats, and very patiently bears his three sisters' contradictory orders.  It is not uncommon for us all to be sitting around the table discussing a pending task, whereupon Seth will grin and say, "I know: 'Let's make Seth do it!'"

      Caroline's area of expertise is discipline.  She keeps the gardens religiously weeded, records all of our sales and expenses, rations the winter food supply, and trots out through the woods at the same time every morning to open nest boxes, feed the pigs, and make sure all the animals have water to drink; you could almost set your clock by that straw hat bobbing through the backyard just after sunup.

     Last, but by far not least, is Nathanael: the big one.  He is the muscle.  He is quite busy just now attending school to become a lineman, but we call on him for anything we girls are not equal to.  He saws down trees, lifts especially heavy things, researches everything under the sun, and tells us how to do things in more timely and efficient ways.  His hidden talent is pig whispering; if a pig of any size or temperament is afraid to cross the space from an old pen into a new one (pigs have a legendary respect for electric wire), leave it to Nathanael to coax her across.

     There you have it.  That, in brief, is what we "do."

     Anne Marie