Cold Antler Farm is a six acre farm in the USA run by Jenna Woginrich. Graphic designer, blogger, writer, farmer, fiddler, hunter, falconer and soap maker. Hit her up for soap, logos, graphic design work, pork shares, sheep, soap, or lessons in fiddling and falconry. Today’s post is about farming, adaptability, and Cold Antler Farm.
There are all types of farms. Large. Small. Micro. Enormous. Factory run, family run. Community focused or corporate.
There are differences. Industrial farming privileges efficiency over community, capital over work, cost effectiveness over everything. Shave every cent. Cut every job. Automate every process. The small scale farmer is afloat in a sea of community. There’s not much capital, so you replace it with work. You don;t have capital, but you do have credit with your feed supplier and a neighbour to split wood for. You can’t beat a factory farms bottom line, but you can raise better, healthier, higher welfare standard livestock. You can’t automate, so you work. Damned hard.
A factory farm is outstanding in it’s efficiency. A small farmer is out standing in her or his field. Every day. Many nights. Pouring work, love, work, heart, soul, work, blood, sweat, and, as an absolute last resort, more work and then some money, into their work.
It’s many things being a small farmer. Rewarding. Beautiful. Freeing. Joyous. Demanding. Soul crushing. Drudge. Danger. Connected. Healthy. Horrible. Freeing. Containing. Lonely. Fulfilling. It requires a lot of love and work.
Farming can be many different things. But there’s a shared set of characteristics at play that make it all work, or kind of work, or teeter on but not tip over into disaster. Whether it’s family or factory. Large or small. Gigantic or micro. Arable, mixed, fruit, dairy or livestock, the genetics of farming share much in common.
Frugality. Hard work. Intelligence. Optimism. Knowledge. Adaptability. These are the engines of agricultural enterprises. The values, characteristics farmers recognise as being desireable, optimal, essential.
Jenna Woginrich over at Cold Antler Farm is adapting. She has written posts, recently, about changing farm focus, managing her workload and economics, and rethinking aspects of the sustainability of how she farms, selling some of her flock, outsourcing for some ingredients, lowering winter feed costs and work, and re-organising her resources to maintain a stable, sustainable, functioning farm, and life.
People have responded. With support. Or qualified support – you failed but you tried – or with uncertainty – what’s happening, are you going away.
I’m a farmer. I can tell you what she’s doing.It’s not failing.
She’s farming.
Adaptability is at the heart of farming. It’s what gave us 100’000 unit factory farms, pemaculture smallholdings, both the death of and return to mixed farming, organic, conventional, factory and smallholding farming. All are functions of that hardcore, frugal, hardworking, smart adaptability of farmers.
Adaptability is not an option. It’s not a like to have. It’s not an also ran. It’s the heart and soul of a farmer. You are the nexus of the needs of your land, your stock, your climate, your weather, your wind and rain, your customers, your economy, your feed and forage price, your workload, your healthcare, your economic wellbeing, the state of your barn and the state of your back. Try doing that without adaptability.
You want lean, fast pivot, iterative agile development and management. Go work on a mixed farm.
I gotta applaud Jenna. As one farmer to another. I recognise your adaptability, resource re-organisation, refocus, and careful financial planning, underpinned by vast volumes of hard work. I recognise seriously considering a 6 dollar a week outlay. I recognise complex the algebra of work done, inputs bought, life not lived and lived, joy reaped and gone, stress busted, stress stored, stress experienced, and stress shoved in a long term savings account where it gathers up into a tsunami of bubbling stress just about contained by the rickety fence you put up last autumn with reclaimed posts nails and wire…
It’s farming.
Cold Antler Farm is adapting. More on this farming story as it happens…
If you feel like supporting her, read her blog, buy her books, buy her goats milk soap, buy a fiddling lesson, or pick up a share in high quality, high welfare, what your grandparents just called food old fashioned pork,
