OFI 1008: Building A Successful Agricultural Lifestyle, One Letter At At A Time

If you have been listening to the show, especially my Tuesday episodes, for some time than you have likely heard me talking about documenting the importance of the growth and progress on your farm or in your agricultural enterprise. This is very important to both your success and to your marital health, if you happen to have found yourself partaking in that enterprise.

The speed of progress in the world of farming can be very slow. Think about it. If you buy your first heifer tomorrow, even if she is already bred, you are not selling a calf for 17 months, if you sell it as a feeder. If you are carrying it over that first winter and selling it directly to a customer as finished beef, you are 29 months away from your first revenue.

It can take a lot of time to see results in this lifestyle, and that requires patience. Patience is a virtue, and it is a particular virtue that many of us, including me, don’t have a lot of laying around.

Because things move so slow, and you are progressing towards your goal of full-time farming at what feels like a snail’s pace you might not recognize all that you are actually accomplishing. We are all going to be starting at different points, but as an example when Autumm and I got started we had 25 acres of land with a house on it. There were no fences, no irrigation, no cultivation, no livestock pens, no shelters and nothing but weeds. With our starting situation, it would take years until we were grazing cattle, and even longer until we had developed the customer base and marketing that would allow us the profit that we were looking for from the farm.

However, hidden in this molasses in January type of movement was progress. The problem is that you might not see that progress if you have no context. When Autumm and I first bought this farm in 2011 we took a class through the University of Idaho Extension Service called “Living On The Land”. There were actually portions of this class that focused on keeping your marriage healthy through this experience. Their advice was to take before and after photographs, every year, so you could get perspective and actually see the progress that you had made.

Autumm and I did this, although I will admit, we didn’t always do this with the purpose of providing ourselves perspective. As excited new farm owners, we shared our farm and lives with folks on Facebook. This turned out to be a great tool for providing us this perspective because Facebook automatically provides you memories of photos that you posted a year or two or 10 ago. So often, Autumm or I will get one of these reminders and we will see the farm with no fences or just dirt where pastures now grow. And this perspective will really give us a picture of just how far we have come, and it will take away some of that impatience.

Before and after pictures are great, but they cannot capture everything that is going on. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but sometimes not one of those words describes what was going on behind the scenes. Or, maybe there was no camera there for something very significant.

Let me give you an example. A couple of years ago, at this time of year, I was in Boise attending to some rental house business one afternoon when my phone rang and it was Hattie on the other end. I could hear the excitement and breathlessness in her voice. She was walking up the driveway after being dropped off by the school bus, and she saw that one of our does was kidding and needed help. She had never assisted in parturition before, and neither Autumm nor I were there to do it. So, it was all up to her.

Hattie ended up delivering two kids who both lived and thrived. She did it all by herself and figured out a lot along the way. This was unbelievable progress. 50% of the reason that we bought the farm when we did was that Hattie was about to turn 5 and start school in the city, and we wanted to raise her the way we had been raised. So, to have our 12 year old now brave enough and knowledgeable enough to recognize dystocia and then assist in the delivery all by herself was proof of concept! It was very exciting.

Obviously there was no camera there to capture this moment, and no picture could have explained all of the background of why this was such a big moment of progress for Autumm and I. So, how would that be captured? I actually did capture this in a couple of ways. First, is something that is unique to me and just a handful of other people. I of course bragged about this moment on the podcast. So, my record of this moment will be floating around cyberspace forever, as far as I can tell. Or at least until Cyberdine Systems becomes self-aware and the machines take over. Sorry, we watched Terminator this weekend.

The other way that I captured this moment was that I wrote a letter to my relatives about what Hattie had done. I was obviously very excited. Actually, I think I wrote a group email to a couple cousins, aunts and uncles. Either way, the moment was captured, and it is sitting there for me to reflect upon. This significant victory that we will always have, even the podcast goes under and we have to sell the farm.

If you go onto Bing and do a search for ways to document your progress, keep a positive attitude and maintain your mental health you will find a ton of articles about journaling and why this is so beneficial for you. I have no doubt that journaling is extremely beneficial, but have you ever really tried it? I am sure there are some of you listening who journal daily, and it has become a habit in your life. To you I say, I am jealous!

I also have daily habits, but too many of them are bad. Caffeine, junk food, television, etc. So, I am devoting a large amount of my time and effort to limiting my bad habits. Developing new, good habits is a wholly different animal. And yes, I realize that there are people who shed the bad habits by developing the good habits, and I understand that. I’m not sure that I am one of those people however.

Let me give you an example from my life. When we still lived in Boise, and I was working as patrol officer for the Boise Police I started bike commuting to work. I absolutely loved it, and I miss it terribly to this day. There are times in which I miss it so much, that it is tempting to consider getting a job in town again. It would be a natural reaction for you to think that I loved bicycle commuting so much because it involved bicycling, and I could only fit in my love of bicycling on a daily basis going to and from work. And….you would be wrong.

During the summers, on an almost daily basis, Autumm wants to go for an evening bicycle ride on a loop that we have familiarized ourselves with. Every time we take this ride it is beautiful, we have great conversation, I burn calories and I feel great when we are done. And every time she asks me to go, I resist. It is unbelievably difficult to get me to go, and to pull that hour out of my day. But, when I was bicycle commuting I was getting up an hour earlier than I needed to, dressing in layers of warm clothing and embracing single digit temperatures on my way to work or on my way home, depending on the shift I was on. And, if something happened and I had to drive to work that day, I felt like a complete failure.

It was not the bicycling that pushed me to commute in this fashion. It was the dual purpose or the efficiency. For some reason, in my brain going on a bicycle ride that I have done a hundred times before seems like a foolish thing to do, and I can think of a million better things to be doing with that time. But, doing the same ride over and over and over again when it is taking me to work gets me excited, and I can’t stand the thought of missing it. When I can really add up the positives and realize that I am achieving something beyond just personal wellness, I can get very motivated.

So, what does this have to do with journaling? I can’t get myself to journal just for my own, personal wellness. But, I can get myself to write letters and emails to my friends and family documenting all of the same thoughts and events. I do so, choosing my audience carefully, depending on what thoughts I will be sharing, but this works. I cannot sit down to fill out a journal. I have two or three that I have purchased, written in for a few days and then abandoned. But, I will make time in my day to sit down and write a letter to a family member or friend.

Writing letters to friends is like bicycle commuting to work, it goes well beyond personal wellness. It updates people on what you are doing, it fertilizes relationships that perhaps had been laying fallow because that is what happens as we all get busy, it documents the important moments in your life and it provides you a way of gaining perspective when you look back on these letters to see where you were then, and where you are now.

I am a big believer in writing actual letters. I like to do things that not a lot of people do, and not a lot of people write actual letters any longer. The email has supplanted the actual letter, but for what you are wanting to accomplish the paper letter is far superior. I am a big fan of the podcast and blog, The Art Of Manliness. Back in 2009 they did a great article on letter writing called “The Art Of Letter Writing“. I encourage you to check it out.

I started doing this with my step-father some years ago. When my mom remarried, she married a quiet man. Chuck was the kind of man that when he spoke up on something, you stopped and listened, because you knew what it took to get him talking. After my mom passed away I really wanted to maintain my relationship with him, but I lived in Idaho and he was back in California. Telephone calls were awkward and brief because Chuck was not a talker. I only visited 2-3 times per year, and those visits didn’t involve much more conversation than the telephone calls. And, not only did Chuck not have a computer or smart phone, but I seriously don’t think he had ever used either one of these two pieces of technology.

So, rather than have an awkward and forced telephone call every couple of weeks, I decided to limit the telephone calls to special occasions which came often enough. Between Christmas, New Years, Easter, 4th Of July, my birthday, Chuck’s birthday and Thanksgiving that made seven telephone conversations and 2-3 personal visits per year. I had more to say to Chuck than I could get across to him in this way. After all, it was he and his father who inspired me to have my own farm and raise cattle, and now that we were finally accomplishing that goal after a short 20 years, I wanted to tell him about it. So, I started writing him actual letters.

I would write Chuck a letter about once per month, and it was very easy for me to do. Way easier than sitting down and putting something down in a journal. And when we next spoke or saw each other, he was say something to me about the letter, and I would know that he had read the entire thing. Writing these letter to Chuck inspired me to write to more friends and family members, and this habit continued to develop.

You may be saying, “that is great but how does this help you document your progress? You are writing them and just sending them off”. That is a fair question. I write them on my computer, and I save them in a file titled “Letters” before printing them out to be mailed. If you follow my recommendation and check out the post on “The Art Of Manliness” you will see that they suggest composing your letters by hand. That definitely takes more effort. I have not reached that level yet. But, if I do I will scan those letters before sending and keep them in the same file as a pdf document. This is very easy to do with just a smart phone, and you can do the same.

I will leave you with a book recommendation and a bit of a book review that will help to sum up why this is such a great practice. I am just about to finish Neal Peart’s great book about a motorcycle odyssey and so much more. You may recall me talking about Neal as the world’s greatest drummer from the band Rush in episode #763 with Ely Boulds.

Racing car Ferrari 275S/340 America Barchetta by Scaglietti (1950) in historical classic car race Mille Miglia, on May 19, 2017 in Gatteo, FC, Italy

HOLLYWOOD, CA – DECEMBER 06: Rush star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Hollywood, California on Dec. 6, 2016.

After the tragic deaths of his daughter and wife in the same year, Neal took off on the most epic of motorcycle journeys when he did not know what else to do to try and heal himself. During this trip he wrote a lot of letters to friends and family about what he was experiencing and what he was going through. Those letters chronicled his journey and that time in life. And, they eventually turned into the book that I am listening to called Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road.

The letters that Neal wrote during this journey did a lot to provide him perspective. He was not a farmer, but you see the parallels. When he did not believe he was making any progress in dealing with the tragedy that he had gone through he could look back on the letters to find out how he had changed. This gave him the perspective to see that he was making progress.

And, as a bonus these letters make up a very significant portion of the actual book. So, at the same time he was maintaining relationships with friends, he was helping himself heal, he was giving himself perspective and he was writing a book. That is something that I can get behind because it served so many more purposes than just self wellness.