A huge part of being out on the land is just slowing down enough to really understand and
appreciate where you came from.
Our operation family farm is a 2,500 acre farming operation and it's a blended farm
between a chamber's land and the De Valarola land, so both my mom and dad's side.
Established in 1909, the chamber side of it, where I live now is actually on the De Valarola
side of my mom's family.
And it was homesteaded, broke the land here in the early 1900s, 1903, 1909.
When you're born and raised somewhere and in that same place as where the homestead was,
it has a lot of value.
It has a lot of chapters to where your family came and broke the ground and homesteaded.
I get sentimental when every time I farm that piece of land, every time I finish a harvest
and see the site, you think, wow, over 100 years the farmers have been doing this.
So it's pretty cool.
This was a big transition year right now on our farm.
There's my wife Martha and my 14 year old son Chase and we are sort of a sole operation
as far as, you know, I do get hired help at harvest.
This was the first year though that we actually took off a crop without my dad working with
me.
So that was a big transition.
We'd worked together the last 25 years and, you know, he's sort of earned his retirement
and they retired into town off of the family farm.
And so it was a very different year that way operating, you know, without having dad there.
Makes it more, you know, it makes it a bit more of a challenge.
It's almost like when you're kind of like, okay, now here we go.
This is my total show to run.
You know, I think you have a huge responsibility to understand the stories behind the land.
You know, you really are the steward of these stories and the hard work that went into breaking
the land and understanding, you know, the quarters of land.
And I mean, farming is a funny business.
Not many understand anymore because you have a story behind every quarter.
You know, I think you owe it to the future generations to help convey those stories.
And I mean, progressively farming is getting more technologically advanced.
There isn't the same types of hardship and stress.
But I think there's the same amount of stress.
It's just a different type now.
Going down enough to appreciate the stories in a society that's moving so quickly and
that has such a short attention span for anything.
I think people generally in their lives just don't slow down enough to appreciate the little
stories in their work day, you know, and appreciate those, you know, the sunsets over the horizon
of your farm.
I was very driven.
I didn't see farming in the same light, I guess, growing up that I do now.
I wanted to be in business, the lure of being in business and, you know, the thought of,
you know, picking up your briefcase and, you know, putting on your suit and going to an
office setting or being in some form of business important in that fashion always appealed to
me.
And, you know, it took me to probably my second year of university probably until I really
started to understand that especially farming the direction it was going is big business.
And it's important business and it's multifaceted in the respect that, you know, just because
you're putting on a pair of car hearts doesn't make the value of your business acumen any
different.
I think farming is a really, really challenging business from a mental and physical standpoint
to stay healthy in.
You do have a lot more hours of sitting now.
It's not like our grandparents or great grandparents where we were shoveling grain and throwing
bales and, you know, doing all this.
We've got beautiful machines and cabs that do a lot of that physical work for us.
So, you know, we are spending more hours with less labor.
So I think it's important that farmers find ways to balance their health and find ways
to be healthy, the little things that they can do in their daily routine and from a bigger
aspect the mental health.
And then, you know, using our vehicle of food producers to help society understand their
own food choices.
So it's never the same, like it's, you have to learn and evolve and change so rapidly
that it's, being a farmer now is just, it's just this constant learning curve.
I know that I'm not choosing to be the big farm.
I'm choosing to be the small, efficient quality operation that has the ability to monitor all
my land by walking it.
As a modern day farmer, it's a balance of, you know, not letting yourself zone out on
the equipment and also, you know, growing and evolving all the time and I think farming
itself technologically and from a learning perspective is just so in depth and there's
so much massive amounts of data that it's almost paralyzing but at the same time it's
still just as simple as it was.
They're putting seeds in the ground, praying that it rains and that they grow.
