Thoughts on Letting a Project Go

Since we began our agrarian adventure in 1998, we have tried many different projects and initiatives. Each one has offered tremendous learning opportunity, helping us see what we enjoyed and what wasn’t the best fit for our farm or us as stewards of it. Many of these initial projects are still with us and have grown and blossomed into their current manifestation here, while others we’ve opted to let go. It’s a process of refinement as we continue to experiment and hone the interconnected ecosystem of this place.
It has always been our signature to start small with a new project, allowing us to gain a feel for how well we like the initiative before investing further. Sometimes these small experiments like raising the initial 27 laying hens grows into a flock of roughly 140 happy, sassy birds. Alternately, sometimes things don’t work out, such as the year we tried raising a few geese. I’d never been so bitten in my life! They went in the freezer after the end of summer, and that was the last of raising geese on our farm.
Another example would be pigs. We began by purchasing two feeder piglets from a local farmer, hauling them home in a dilapidated dog kennel in our minivan! We’d met the enormous sows and knew we were not interested in doing our own farrowing with these beasts, so every year we would purchase new piglets and raise them up. They still grew to serious size, and they were rough on the land, so Kara went in search of a different kind of pig that might fit our woman-powered, less-tillage style. That’s how we learned about heritage Kunekune pigs, which are a smaller but stoutly-packed pig with longer fur (better for our northern winters) and a very calm disposition. We now comfortably farrow our own piglets and keep two boars, with no need for crating the sows while they give birth. It’s a gentler relationship both with the pigs and the land as the Kunekune short snouts means less rooting and digging.
Some of the projects on the farm have been discontinued because of complications and a need to have a few less balls in the air. An example is keeping honeybees, which was a 13-year adventure I hadn’t expected would happen when we began farming. Vending next to us at the Cable Farmer’s Market was Mr. Rowe, a charismatic elderly beekeeper who absolutely insisted that I should have honeybees on the farm for pollination and served as a tremendous mentor over the years. Keeping bees in northern Wisconsin is no easy task. Between the long winters and being hit by Colony Collapse Disorder that wiped out my hives three years in a row, in the end we chose to retire raising bees originally imported from Europe and focus on nurturing our native pollinators through habitat and food-source regeneration. This transition has been happily successful, with continued excellent pollination rates and a boom in a large diversity of native bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds on our farm.
We made another transition on the farm this last week, choosing to let go of a different experiment as we continue to hone and refine our process. As Kara’s management of our pastures increased the fertility of the land, she often had grass that needed to be eaten and not enough sheep to eat it all. Also, she was interested in adding to the biodiversity of the farm with different species on the pasture, to help break up parasite cycles by not bringing the sheep back to previously grazed areas for longer amounts of time. Letting the grass set, though, would cause it to grow stemmy and inedible for the sheep. Having an alternate species graze that area and then let it regrow to prime height before returning the sheep offered a viable alternative to simply running around with a mower and losing the feed. So, we decided to try having a few cows.
We are small people, and we went in search of small cows. Kara also had a vision for making a sheep and cow milk blend cheese someday, so that added to the equation. But over the years the cows proved to be bigger than we’d expected, the logistics of milking two species on the farm proved a licensing nightmare, the cows had trouble getting pregnant, and we struggled with a noticeable uptick in flies. The struggles were starting to outweigh the benefits. In addition, Kara’s new horse Blue and the two guard donkeys were proving that they could be excellent pasture clippers, so the need for having the cows solely for that purpose became moot. It was time to let that project go, enjoy some delicious grassfed whole-beef burger, and refocus. In the end, we were sheep people, not cow people after all.
None of these experiments are bad—everything is about learning and refining. If you only do what you’ve always done, you might miss things that it turns out you love! Or one experience might be part of leading you to the next one, like how the feeder pigs led us to the Kunekunes. An interest in alpacas led us to sheep as an experiment, and we fell so deeply in love with sheep that we never did get back to the alpacas! This week, dream on the projects you might wish to explore as well as those it may be time to let go. See you down on the farm sometime.