Tuesday, July 23, 2013

The Farm Life Versus the Urban Life

Anne Buchanan compares her sister's life on the farm to her's:
I had to take a sick baby goat to bed with me last night,’ my sister said. ‘I found her lying in a corner of the greenhouse barn getting ready to die.’ ’Did she make it?’ I asked. ‘Yep,’ said Jennifer. ‘I tubed her and gave her some electrolytes when I brought her in, fed her and wrapped her up in a towel, and took her up to bed. She peed all over me around 5am, so I brought her downstairs and put her in the barrel with the two boys. It’s a bit crowded, but they’re all going out to the barn today anyway.’
Jennifer and her husband Melvin work Polymeadows Farm, a small goat dairy farm and dairy plant in Vermont. They are currently milking about 120 goats. During kidding season, twice a year, the newborns spend their first night in a barrel of hay in the kitchen. This is important during Vermont winters, but also in summer, so that Jennifer knows the kids are healthy before they go out and join the rest.
My sister and I live very different lives. She’s a dairy goat farmer and I do genetics research at Penn State University in the middle of Pennsylvania. I spend much of my day at a computer in my small office, or sometimes in the genetics lab that I manage, and she spends her days outdoors, haying, watering and graining her goats, bottle-feeding the babies, milking the dams, or in the dairy plant making cheese or yogurt and bottling milk.
The first line of the third paragraph works for my sister and I, also.  She's got her life in the big city, and I've got the life on the farm.  I haven't brought any calves into the house (although somebody did guess that I did when I asked what she figured I'd done that night with the newborn calf [I'd dragged it across the pasture on a tarp]), but I have hauled them to the barn at my house in my Ford Focus.  Buchanan's whole story is pretty good, especially the description of the seasonality of farming.  That is what I like the best about farming.

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