Farming has been on my brain a lot lately. Perhaps it started when my daughter started going through her class roster, asking me who lived on a farm. It was surprising for me to actually realize that she, along with three others, were the only non-farmers in her class.
Her farm related questions (things she’d heard others talking about at school – facts about tractors, which animals lived on farms and other tidbits) made me realize that I really don’t know very much about farming or farms at all.
In our community where farming is so prominent, this feels ignorant. Growing up so close to so many farms makes me a little shy to admit that I’ve never visited a farm (unless the Agriculture museum in Ottawa counts).
I enjoy peeking into the animal barns during the fair and love seeing posts about the children in our community getting their animals ready, but it really just looks so foreign to me. I have no idea how to act or what to do when I go through those barns. Bottom line is, if I don’t know what to do, my kids definitely don’t either and I certainly don’t want to transfer my nervousness around animals to them. So, I’m on a mission to change that, for all of us.
This past weekend, we went to visit a friend’s dairy farm. We really enjoyed seeing the mama cows and all the baby calves. I even got to feed a two-day-old calf from a bottle.
The kids ran free in the fields with the other children, exploring every nook and cranny throughout the farm. They helped collect the eggs from the chicken coop and loved climbing and playing in the hayloft. I even finally learned the difference between hay and straw. They saw the animals up close (which they were a little intimidated by), saw how farmers gather the milk and where the milk is stored.
We had some questions answered, like are baby cows born able to walk and what those giant silos are for. We genuinely just loved the up close and personal experience of being around the animals.
The minute we were buckled into the car and on our way, the question I knew I’d hear “can we please have a farm” was out of their mouths. There were so many “one more minutes” leading up to our departure that I wasn’t surprised by the question. I did however take the opportunity to go through how much love, attention, dedication, devotion, sacrifice and hard work goes into having a farm.
We talked about how the farmers need to be on the farm to feed the animals twice a day (that means trips away or even to the city have to be planned very carefully), that they need to clean the cows beds every day, they need to be there to milk the cows twice a day, and collect the eggs from the chickens. They need to plant, harvest and store the crops just so that they can feed their animals.
We talked about how the farmers need to take care of the baby calves and make sure the mama cow is safe when she is having her calf (even if that’s late at night or while they’re sleeping).
We talked about how much the farmer would miss the animals and the animals miss the farmers if they ever went away on vacation.
We talked about how the kids help their parents by doing chores on the farm and that everyone is involved in the farm in some way. We talked about how different our lives would be if we were farmers. We all agreed that farmers work very hard and that we need to say thank you to them more often. From what we saw, farming is a way of life and not a job.
Thank you so much to Pleasant Way Farms for our visit, we thoroughly enjoyed it.
My journey into learning and teaching more about farming has only just begun! Next on the agenda is learning about farm safety.
