The occasional summer I would go to Arkansas for a few nights when my family would make the trip out there from Dallas, Texas, they would only stay for a short period it was my aunt and uncle's Chicken farm. They were conventional growers for Tyson. It was a fun time out there, but I do remember thinking this is an enormous amount of hard work. My aunt and uncle never get to leave this farm and there's one thing I know for sure. And that's--I don't want to be a farmer.—Vanessa Chickens can't be...

It feels good that we're providing this product for people's nutrition, for their families. They keep coming back to us and appreciating that. We are who we are; we're the face, we talk to them, we have them to our farm for tours. That's what people are looking for.—Beth We both have a full time job figuring out how to move this business forward that that you can't get done if you're picking eggs and putting down bedding in the layer houses or fulfilling orders. Can't do it.—Bruce Be...

I describe farming as really just one long extended expedition. It's very much like a mountaineering expedition where you wake up every day, you're working outside. You have problems, often new problems that crop up at least weekly. It's very much like being in a big mountain expedition where you're constantly working with the weather. You're working with the people on your team. You are focused on a goal. That takes all of your effort that you really have to commit to a hundred percent.—Bruce ...

I remember being seven or eight years old and drawing… having construction paper, big rolls of paper all over the living room floor, drawing pictures of where my cows and my sheep and my chickens would go on my future farm.—Melissa You pick and choose your battles for sure…do we want to focus on cleaning up all of our step-in fence for the sheep and do all the outdoor stuff or are we going to focus on a house that we can bring friends into? So unfortunately, our game nights have taken a hi...

We had bought this house in Brattleboro. We'd bought the truck. We bought the sheep. We bought dogs. We did all of this long before COVID hit, but then we were like, okay, this is our pandemic project.—Kimberly Kimberly and Zan Walker-Gonҫalves were both kids exposed to animals but not raised on farms. As parents, they circled back to growing food and raising the maximum number of livestock their town in Massachusetts would legally allow. Five years ago, they packed up everything and moved...

“Neither one of us came from a farm family or any kind of money in our background. We've just kind of done it on our good credit. We've leased the farms that we've been on. We are hoping to be able to buy the farm we're on now.”—Samantha Kemnah “The seasonal intensity of growing vegetables got old. My seventh year, I was like, I should quit last year. Because it was just, between the weather--the hot weather--I run hot as it is just temperature wise.--and my attitude is hot. I'm short temp...

“We did have the sense to look and say, you know, God created ruminant animals to take advantage of grass and low input. You know, if we've got a grass base, and we take care of that, that's as low input as you're gonna get versus hauling in feed.”—Emalee Buttrey “There's a lot of challenges that you just don't come across in the classroom or the textbook.” –Brad Buttrey Raised in McEwen, TN on a small cattle operation, Brad developed a keen interest in reproduction, learning to AI w...

“I have a specific memory of the first time we ever did sheep, I was so mad at my parents, we were going to kill the sheep. And then fast forward like an hour into it. And I came running into the house holding a sheep tongue and being like, Mom, check this sheep tongue out.”—Jeremiah Vernon Vernon Family Farm (VFF) is a 1st generation, pastured livestock farm on the Seacoast of New Hampshire. Established in 2014, VFF works hard to provide wholesome, delicious food to their community throug...

“We cleared eight acres and piled the trees by hand. Not the trees but the brush. We had 96 brush piles in one field. And we had no friends left, because we would say to them, ‘Come on over for the weekend. And we'll give you beer and pizza and you can help us pile the brush.’ Nobody would even answer the phone.” Hank and Heather LeTarte of White Gates Farm in New Hampshire started clearining their land in 1982 out of largely pine woods and a prospective view. They built a home, a family, and...

“The jobs that I worked were a pickle factory and a spinnery and an apple orchard, All of those were learning how to operate in a system watching how other people create systems and deal with the logistics of production. I think now that's made me a pretty strong systems thinker. I'm good at being strategic and good at looking at the entire large moving sort of juggernaut of the farm and identifying where it's not working.”—Ashlyn Bristle Ashlyn Bristle and Abraham McClurg come from a variety of backgrounds in art, education, cooking, and non-profit management. They met at a dance and “have been dancing ever since”. Their dance has included homesteading, renting land, buying a steep hillside farm, and growing a business through the stresses of COVID. Along the way, they’ve focused on setting up good systems, balancing farm time and couple time, and figuring out what enterprises they’ll keep doing and which they’ll drop.

“I think for me, my pre-farming life had little experience in farming, but I think the way my parents raised me, it’s just being honest. It’s working hard and trying to build something bigger than you.”—Austin Troyer Austin and Maggie Troyer of Crossroads Land + Livestock in Ohio figured out pretty early in life what they didn’t want to do, which led them to farming right out of high school. Austin started by working on a beef ranch for several years and then out on his own with custom cattle...

“People who don’t farm don’t realize how much it really governs what you can and can not do with the construct of your lives. Unless you’ve got the systems in place to manage that stuff.”—Chris Sargent When I had the idea to start this podcast, my husband Chris Sargent was fully on board and very supportive of my goal to share the stories of first-generation and other farmers making the conscious choice to make livestock farming a serious part of their lives. After a few interviews and a ques...

“Yeah, neither Lisa or I grew up on a farm. So this is all new. This was not in our plans. I was chasing the corporate ladder. She was a public-school teacher. Then we started to look into food, which is a spiral. A downward spiral, if you start to do that, because you discover that so much of the food in a supermarket—that’s not really food, and it's probably not healthy for you. And so our solution was, fine, we'll just grow our own.”—Randy Robar Randy and Lisa Robar didn’t expect to become...

“I would say the overarching of all of this is actually understanding that this is a business. Right? It’s great, it’s farming, it’s pastoral. It’s all these things., but at the end of the day, this is a business and a business needs certain things to exist and function.”—Cheryl Cesario Thanks for joining our inaugural episode, featuring Marc and Cheryl Cesario of Meetingplace Pastures in Cornwall, Vermont. Marc and Cheryl have been farming at their current location since 2009, joining their ...