EMERGENCY RISK REDUCTION

I recently returned from a visit to my family farm in South Carolina, and was jolted back to the past. Many days of hard work with my siblings on a small dairy. For years, I remember waking up before 5AM, seven days a week. It was just a routine, like we all have. If nothing else, it created a work ethic and that small farm has undoubtedly molded who I now am. The journey has been from a bit of knowledge of farming to a passion for agriculture to an appreciation of the risks that producers take to a desire to support this vital and fragile industry.

In many ways, our family’s experience is non untypical. My dad grew up in rural South Carolina, but his first try at agriculture was a leased ranch in Montana, the home state of my mother. Both left successful careers in business, and said they didn’t want to raise a family in the city. How’s that for a statement in the late 40s!  Ranching in Montana must have been a bit of a challenge, especially for six months of the year. I was too young to remember, but the story goes that Dad walked into their home one February morning at about -30 degrees and said, “Geraldine, we’re moving south.”

Dad bought a 300 acre farm near his birthplace and began the dairy that my brother, four sisters, and I grew up on. As I look back, it was a struggle even during the 60s and 70s. Long days of manual labor on marginal land with a very small milking herd that must have scarcely paid the bills. Certainly we were making well below any type of minimum wage, assuming my parents weren’t breaking child labor laws. It was a hard but good life, full of happy memories.

Only later, did I see the many risks that my parents took with the farm.   Trained as a bookkeeper, my dad could have made much more income in that career. But he chose this, and lived healthily to 97 years. And my mother until 90.  But the advantage was that all the dairy herd, a quarter section of land (approx. 320 acres) and farm equipment were paid for. How did my father do this?  This can wait for another blog.

Please stay tuned and thanks for reading.