Family Farm Friday #98: Fourth Generation

Almost 60 years ago, my grandparents bought a farm.  They spent money.  They spent time.  They made sacrifices.  They irrigated, plowed, and fed sheep and cows.  They planted our tree row, got our lambing barn, and raised their children.

When my grandfather died at 45, leaving behind my grandmother and two teenage sons, everyone told her to sell the farm and move to town.  A single, working mother trying to raise boys simply could not manage a farm.  But they didn't know my grandmother.  She stayed put and went to work.

My dad took up the baton for the second generation.  He gave up a lot in order to keep the farm going. He never go to play sports in high school.  He did not get the chance to spend summers bouncing from basketball camp to State 4-H to Washington, DC.  He did not have the ability to go on post-college trips to Costa Rica or Italy.  He stayed home and worked his ass off to be sure that farm continued.  He was overlooked for promotions at work because he was simply not willing to leave home.

When he married my mom, she was drug right into the fun as well.  She talks about how she gave up a teaching job on the California coast to become a farmer's wife in New Mexico.  And after years of making lamb bottles and plugging holes with the pick up when we're moving cows and making sure every breathing creature on the place has clean water and (more than) enough to eat, I think she'd tell you it's been better than California.  Most days, anyway.

When my brother and I were children, we were quickly brought into the farm business.  My Gran taught us to write checks.  She taught us never to put up land as collateral for a loan.  My parents talked to us about the struggles of having jobs in town to help support the farm.  We knew what it meant when it did not rain and a crop did not make.  We understood what was lost when a ewe or a cow died.  And, maybe most importantly, we understood the importance of that farm.  The land, it's story, well...it's in our blood.

The Boy from Texas jumped right in.  Fortunately for me, he had his own farm background.  He has become quite the sheep expert in the time we have been together.  He's worked on balers and helped sort ewes and branded calves.  He happily posed for wedding pictures in a wheat field.  He understands the importance of the farm to me and over the last few years has developed similar feelings himself.

And now, the fourth generation has set foot on that same soil.  He doesn't know the history of the place yet.  He's not driven a tractor or gotten a lesson on docking lamb tails.  He doesn't realize that the dirt he plays in is the same that his great grandfather plowed, and his grandfather sowed wheat and his mom ran a swather.

But one day, if we do anything right at all, he will.  This land will be in his blood too.  And maybe one day, it will be the fifth generation sitting in the middle of a wheat field wearing baby Carhartts.