Travel

Sometimes we need to smash things to pieces. This week we prepare for a big journey as a family, including getting our broken toilet off of our front stoop and breaking it down into the trash dumpster. I realized as I sat down to write this note, that I have not mentioned our family plans. In reflecting on my own omissions I found myself justifying them by telling myself that you, dear reader, was not interested in the personal. And yet so much of what I write here has a touch, if not a large swath of my personal journey. As I thought about it, I realized that underneath all of my assumptions, was the need to shape the image I craft about myself and our farm.

This week has been the culmination of a few weeks of planning and preparing for our entire family to leave our home and farm to travel with Mama (Racey) to the Central African Republic. Lewis, Lovett and I are used to taking Mama to the airport and waving goodbye as she embarks for her work overseas, but this time we will be traveling with her on our first adventure as a family to the African continent. Our preparations have included the complicated packing puzzle of packing for a family of four, away for 6 weeks, as well as preparing our farm and business for us to be away until after Christmas.

I realized in not writing about our adventure that my image of a farm owner does not include travel. Even writing about traveling with my family overseas in our farm blog has been some of the most difficult writing I’ve done so far. All the while, accompanied by the feeling that I’m doing something wrong, what if my readers think that I’m not a “good” farmer? Yet, if my 3 months in bed with sciatic pain have taught me anything, it is that those feelings of fear are the friends that can teach me so much about what I do not see about myself.

In some ways it is certainly easier as a farmer to do everything myself and to perpetuate that craving to feel useful and needed by my business and farm. I have learned however, despite my own resistance to the idea, that the farm and business can do quite well with me confined to my bed. So why not on a different continent?

My challenge over the past few weeks has been to identify all the places where I am needed to make a decision or the answer exists only in my head, and to come up with a simple way to pass that on to the folks who will be in charge while we’re away. Take the storage freezer for example, probably over 200 boxes of frozen meat, all jumbled together in a way that makes sense to the person who put them in there…but what if there are multiple people taking from the freezer, and loading it up? Freezer maps (pictured above) were our best solution. I’ve also learned how to make online help videos for various components of our order fulfillment to keep orders flowing smoothly.

And so we’re off. The freezers are stocked as full as we could make them, Healey and Holly will continue their great work to keep the farm store stocked and keep packing orders for delivery. Benji will take care of the pigs, the cattle are off to their winter home and Chad and Gwen are our management eyes. Thank you to all of you for supporting us in this journey.