“I am very delightfully holding on to the things that I hold dear about myself that are a part of my life as a farmer, and not integrating that into my life going forward, where I'm not commercially farming. I really appreciate being remembered, and that people still value the thoughts that I've had over these years.” After falling in love with farming as a young boy on his grandparents farm in Pennsylvania, Brent Beidler dreamed of starting his own dairy farm in Vermont. He worked on many fa...

“I really love the sheep. They're not stupid. Nor do I think they desire to die, as I've heard on more than one occasion. I do think they require awareness. They also are so instinct driven--which makes sense, based on what they are--being totally prey-driven. They will do things entirely based on that instinct. If it's fight or flight, I'm flighting first and fighting never.” Jessica Newman of Southview Station moved back to Pennsylvania to combine her nursing career and love of genetics with a...

“I didn't have mechanical background, I didn't grow up fixing tractors. I had never driven a tractor. I wasn't good with equipment. Grazing was very approachable. It just really appealed to me. You're outside, you're working with the environment. It just grabbed me really fast.” Jascha Pick is a sheep farmer based in Northern Vermont, who didn’t set out to be a farmer but caught the farming bug. He fell in love with farming, and especially with grazing. He’s used a lot of creativity to get st...

“Go and work for a bad boss. Go and spend some time breaking somebody else's machines, losing tens of thousands of dollars on their payroll, before you're doing it on your own payroll. That timing is probably somewhere between, two years at a minimum, and maybe ten years at a maximum. If you do it for much longer than ten years, you're probably going to be so dependent on that salary, it's gonna be really hard to step away from that and make some bold moves.” Dallas Mount is the CEO of Ranch Man...

We finish up our second part of the chat with Margaret and read some listener comments. Lots of gold to hear and respond to in this episode!

“For a long time, it's been just like struggling to get my farm to the bare minimum of what I would consider acceptable in my head. There was no pride, no accomplishment, because before that I was failing. So I was simply not failing now that I've done this thing. I'm trying really hard to be able to take accomplishment in the improvement, and the continuous improvement.” Margaret Chamas fell in love with goats through 4H. That was a life changer. She went to college for animal science, start...

“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.

“So I went around on the farm tour and I went to check out all their barns and I spent like eight weeks almost every day going to visit somebody, talking about their sheep. Going from barn to barn I realized, ‘Oh, everybody does this really differently.’ Kristen Judkins didn’t expect to become a farmer, in fact, she’s not even sure she’s comfortable with the term, but she moved to Vermont and fell in love with fiber arts. Then the Great Goat Giveaway happened…well, she’ll tell that story. ...

“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...

“Problem solvers make the best farmers. If you’re not a problem solver, it makes your farming life so much harder.” I’ve known Jinny Cleland of Four Springs Farm in Royalton, Vermont for more than 20 years, which is about half of the time she’s been farming. We’ve had great long talks about farming, business, faith (she is a Christian Scientist), and much more while processing turkeys together. When you are elbow-deep in bird carcass and wet feathers, you really get to know a person. I hav...

On first thinking about ranching bison, Matt said he thought “I’m a kid from suburban Chicago, I could never do that.” And then he went on with his day. As he describes it, “I didn’t entertain the thought of it, really. But then months later, it was still there.” Matt Skoglund didn’t start as a ranch kid or even a kid from the country. He had a couple of different careers before deciding in 2017 with his wife Sarah to find a ranch and begin raising bison outside Bozeman, Montana. In 2018, Nor...

“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 ...