08/20/2026
If I hear you calling me a hobby farmer, I will, in fact, throat punch you 😆😆😆
Read on...
Honestly, people. You don't become legit overnight.
And when, exactly, do you qualify as "legit"? Honest question.
We own 12 cows, plus replacement heifers and a few feeders. We started in 2017, so over the years we've sold cows that don't work for us and we've stayed around the 10-cow herd. My sister and brother-in-law, who help us raise our cows and winter our herd at their place, just bought their first heifer to start their own herd, last year.
We run this show together - we have from day one.
We rent our pasture land (Have you checked land prices in this area!??)
We bale some hay, but buy the rest.
We pasture our cows in the summer. And run them in a dry lot in the late fall/winter.
We deal with calving season, weather issues, equipment issues just the same as people running hundreds of cows on hundreds of acres.
I actually think being smaller is sometimes harder.
We don't have a feed truck. We feed in the fall/winter by hand with buckets. Hand scooping feed into buckets to give the cows their daily ration. Because it doesnt make sense at the moment to invest in machinery to do what we can do by hand.
We do own a skidsteer, a haybine and a round baler, but we borrow the rest of what we need.
This all to say. We are PROUD of what we have done up until this point. We are constantly looking to expand and build, but when you are FIRST GENERATION, sometimes you have to build LITTLE by LITTLE.
If you're wondering why we consider ourselves first generation, even though we've grown up in agriculture our entire lives - we didn't continue the family farm or continue farming with parents/grandparents as some people do, we had to start on our own from nothing, except a dream and the know-how to get started.
And honestly, I think that's made me even more proud of our accomplishments - with the grace of God and our hard work, we are SLOWLY building the dream!
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"Whoever can be trusted with very little, can also be trusted with much." Luke 16:10
