Caring for farmers. Caring for myself.
Real Farmer Care began as an idea to offer self care and well being support for farmers. It is also a personal touchstone and a reminder to care for myself as a farmer.
I didn’t always want to be a farmer. Like many who discover that a love of food and the outdoors are two important ingredients to being a farmer, farming as a livelihood wasn’t a clear choice for me early on. As a child, I was constantly bubbling with energy and driven by a ravenous appetite - running wild and free on the land and foraging for an earthy carrot or a sun soaked strawberry whenever my belly rumbled. This felt entirely natural to me so continuing down a path as a farmer would have made complete sense. But even in those beautiful experiences growing up on a farm and learning farming through osmosis, my desire to become a farmer had not yet been discovered. That came much later, and reluctantly, too.
During my childhood, my father was always in motion - whether sowing, planting, cultivating, irrigating, harvesting, haying, sugaring, lambing, feeding, butchering, researching, inventing, trialing, teaching, speaking, writing - the only moments I recall him being relatively still occurred when he was writing. Even then, with his soil stained pointer fingers hurriedly tapping out sentences on his Brother electric typewriter, he exuded an intensity and a curiosity that could hardly be considered calm and motionless. I thought of his busyness as normal, and something to emulate even. But I often felt lonely and sad, as if his constant movement was blurring who he was, who I was becoming, and it wasn’t allowing for the stillness needed to cultivate a deeper, more resonant connection between us or a felt sense of being clearly seen and heard. Of feeling understood. Of feeling known.
It wasn’t until I was an adult, after many years of trying to get away from the frenetic activity of farming, and I had children of my own, that I started a farm in Colorado and finally became a farmer. I wanted to give my boys the beautiful experiences of my youth - of roaming wild and free, of satisfying hunger with a fresh snack, of caring for vulnerable seedlings and baby animals, of learning about the delicate impermanence of things, of feeling connected to nature, of being cared for by community and held by the land. These are the ingredients that I found made up my desire to farm, and a longing to gift this beauty to my children. And even with this clarity, I was still reluctant. With two young boys to raise, I knew my own patterns of constant movement and busyness, and I was afraid that the insatiable appetite and needs of a farm would take me away from being present with my boys, and present with my needs. And unsurprisingly, that’s exactly what my farm did. But I also intuited that this approach to farming - giving so much of ourselves with very little outside support and resources for farmer care and well being - wasn’t sustainable longterm, at least not for me, and definitely not as a mother of young children.
It was late March in Colorado - the mesa has just turned bright green and the irrigation ditches were flowing fast and powerful from the snow run off. I needed to plant peas. I had just put my 9-month old down for a nap and my 3-year old son Bode was playing contentedly with his train set. The freshly prepared raised beds were only a short walk away from the house. When I came back inside to retrieve my water bottle and check on Bode a short while later, he was no where to be found. I quickly ran through the house calling out his name and then ran outside to get my partner Robbie to help me find him. A horrible dread was expanding in my chest. Robbie had been working on redirecting the network of adjacent field ditches and so we ran out to the fields to search and called out his name into the persistent Chinook winds of spring. My mind was an ugly mess of unthinkable images of a small boy wandering out to the field to find his dearly loved father, but instead accidentally falling into the deep culvert with fast moving water below. And drowning. Just as my 3-year old sister Heidi had drowned. A fleeting thought that was unfathomable, and also utterly agonizing. After what felt like an eternity of excruciating what ifs, we went back inside the house and there was Bode - innocently oblivious to our frantic search and curled up completely sound asleep on his little blue embroidered ‘Bode’ couch. My heart exhaled. In my frenzied panic, I had run right past him. I will never forget that intense and overwhelming feeling of love AND relief. But this experience also brought me a little too close to the actual horror my parents must have felt when Heidi drowned on the farm. I was lucky, and tragically, my mother and father were not.
I often wonder if my parents had had more support - whether emotional, physical, financial, familial, spiritual - either during the early days of building their farm in the remote woods of Maine or immediately after Heidi’s death, if things would have turned out differently for our family, and for our farm. Maybe? Maybe not. And I will never know in this lifetime. All I know is the imprint that those experiences left on my heart and soul. Beyond the family farm tragedy, lives a desire in me to ensure farmers can receive the care and support they need to endure not just the unthinkable tragedies and injustices of life, but the small, silent, less noticeable, and seemingly inconsequential ones too. The ones that slowly add up over time to become too much for any one person to carry alone.
The need for more organized self care support and emotional well being resources for farmers is great. Without being able to take the time to really slow down, to seek support, to receive care, to allow ourselves to be seen in our struggles, to be heard in our fears and doubts, there is little room left to be present with our needs and others. How are we to sustain the constant movement and activity of this work that asks so much of our bodies without space for real rest and repair? How are we to protect and care for the land for future generations if we don’t value and give ourselves that same level of care? How are we to grow and heal from trauma and tragedy, especially generational, if we rarely talk about it and bury it away in our hearts?
Real Farmer Care was born out of these questions and a desire to create a larger support system of care and resilience for farmers. My hope is that I am not alone in asking these questions, and that others also desire to create change in this space too. What began as a tiny dream in January of 2020, has now blossomed into a network of 239 farmer recipients, each with their own unique experiences and stories about the essential need for support and care as a farmer. I love connecting with these farmers and my favorite question to ask them is, “What does care and support look like to you?” And if I take the time to really listen to their responses, I find that I can more easily make space to slow down, seek support, and care for myself too.
To learn more about Real Farmer Care and meet the 239 farmer recipients through their photos and stories, please visit the website and follow @realfarmercare.
Thank you for this post, it has felt difficult to find honest and realistic representations of farming as a woman with little ones and I so appreciate reading about your experience with it!!