Beginning Farmer?

We're taking a class right now with Purdue University called "Beginning Farmer - How to Plan, Support and Grow your Farm" and we've already seen the benefit that we wanted to get out of it. We needed this to force us to talk about the future and come up with common goals for The Edge of Liberty.

But the thought that goes through my head as we're in break-out discussion groups is - are we really beginners? We've been working on an ever-expanding garden on our residential property for almost twenty-five years. The day we finished expanding it to exactly 4,444 square feet is the day we named it Batshit Crazy Farms.

A tenth of an acre barely qualifies as a farm, but the amount of organic food we were able to produce using raised beds, square foot gardening, succession planting, inter-cropping, and vertical growing methods quickly became over-whelming. It didn't help that our adult sons graduated college and moved out, creating more chicken food than we had chickens to feed.

We tried giving it away and often resorted to a weekly game of ding-dong-ditch leaving vegetables at our neighbors' doorsteps. It wasn't until we set up a weekly farm-stand with an anonymous donation honor box that we felt that our efforts were worth it.

The joy we felt at sharing the fruits of our labors with our neighborhood from our home garden inspired us to start The Edge of Liberty story.

In 2016, we had an opportunity to purchase four acres at the end of our subdivision which was about to be rezoned commercial. We didn't want to lose the rural feeling of our neighborhood by having so much traffic and asphalt where corn fields and goldenrod should be. We didn't have a plan for it other than to just stop the city from progressing northward into our little bit of heaven.

We invested in a brush mower and cleared an area. We spread wood chips to stop the regrowth of the persistent yellow rocket, blackberries, wild rose, and feral grapevines and to try to get some organic material there to break down the rock hard clay soil. The next year we grew pumpkins and melons there but the lack of fencing and the lack of decent soil made it a near-futile effort.

We've never been quitters, so we used the money we made from our farm-stand to invest in fencing and cattle panel trellising and set out to take this little patch of land to the next level. We knew that the pandemic would be the source of food insecurity in our community and we wanted to make sure that we had enough to support our neighbors in need. We concentrated on planting squashes and sweet potatoes to provide the most food value along with things we knew sold well at our farm stand, but by mid summer it became clear that the lack of irrigation was our next hurdle.

We did our best using water we brought from our home and collected from the shed roof from the rare rain showers, but it became clear we needed to do something more. The property was sloped away from the garden, so run off would head to the far corner, flooding our neighbors yards whenever it rained. In September we found a guy with a bulldozer who carved out a beautiful catch basin that has slowly evolved from mud puddle to something that could almost be called a pond. We hope that the thaw and spring rains will bring it all the way to true pond status.

The next challenge is figuring out how to get the thousands of gallons of water we're retaining in that pond to the garden almost five hundred feet away without electricity. We also don't know how to properly distribute it to the planting rows that after three years of sheet composting are no longer made of rock hard clay but have gorgeous black soil. We also don't know how we're going to pay for it all, or how we'll ever make back that investment. We need a better place to store the tractor we purchased than in our garage a mile away. We need a gathering place for the people who will be visiting weekly to work on their plots in our community garden. We need a permanent structure to move our farm stand out of our neighborhood and out to the more accessible location right off the main road. We need a way to extend our season with covered growing spaces beyond what we can achieve in our small greenhouse at our home.

All of these challenges are things that a farmer would know how to overcome. They're complex business challenges that no matter how many years of gardening experience we have, we're ill-equipped to address without education and networking. There is so much we need to learn if we're ever going to be 100% self-employed doing what we love.

So yes, we're beginners at running an agricultural business; and that's the real difference between being a gardener and a farmer.