Thoughts on the Long Journey of Building a Farm

When our family purchased our farm in 2008 it wasn’t a farm. It was undeveloped land with pretty dense forest regrowth from recent timber harvesting.

It had a few dirt trails and a shed and city water hookup (which we didn’t plan to use), but the rest was forest.

Over the course of the past 17 years, we have built two homes, a barn, a shop, numerous outbuildings, a pond, road system, wells and water lines, pastures and fencing, and much more!

Today it is a very pleasant place to live and work.

But we aren’t done yet.

And it can be hard to make it to the finish line.

How do you keep from burning out when you are working on a long-term project like building a farm?

How do we make sure our kids enjoy the benefits of working the farm as it was designed to function, not as a perpetual construction zone of a half dozen unfinished projects, where they struggle to care for animals and raise crops with half-built infrastructure and inefficient systems?

Just living takes work and time even without trying to work on infrastructure projects.

But the living is harder when the infrastructure isn’t finished.

For example, we are still in the midst of trying to finish our farm workshop where we can actually start doing the woodworking and mechanic projects my kids are excited about.

The cows electric cross-fencing system is still unfinished which makes managing them harder and the grass less productive.

The feed room in the barn doesn’t have any organization to it so it is hard to keep clean.

The blacksmith shop still doesn’t have the chimney installed so we still don’t have it operational.

The flooring for the boy’s bedroom is taking up part of the basement pantry.

Our family’s new chicken coop still needs to be built so that we don’t have to use the old broken chicken wagon that makes the chickens hard to care for.

I could go on, but you get the point!

The danger I see in my life is that of getting complacent and failing to keep pushing through to the finish line in the development of the different elements of this vision God has given our family.

There are different kinds, or perhaps stages, of burnout.

The kind of burnout that we are probably most familiar with is where we give up and quit. Or we keep going but we have lost our joy.

But perhaps another kind of burnout we need to watch out for is where things take so long that we don’t finish the race.

We make it a long way, but we sit down, content to rest by the side of the road, and never quite reach the finish line.

In Galatians 6:9 we are told, “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”

Whenever God has to give us a command, I always figure it’s because my default is to do the opposite. Which in this case means I am always in danger of growing weary of doing good and giving up.

Sometimes I grow content and smug that I decided to race and made it so far, but I then risk losing the motivation to finish the course.

For farming or homesteading this can look like a farm or homestead where we are always talking about what we ‘intend’ to do but are stuck with a perpetual reality of temporary solutions, hay-string fixes, and tattered tarp chicken shelters.

Seasons come and go, and we are always tackling more than we have time to do and stay stuck in a perpetual construction zone.

A construction zone often has to be messy, but when there is focus there is progress and we watch the transformation with eager expectation of the finished barn, or organized workbench, or perimeter fence.

But we must make sure we don’t confuse the construction zone for the finished product.

Do we ever arrive? No. But that is the point.

The reason some homesteads and farms don’t deliver is because we give up on improving, content to function with the half-finished systems we intend to complete someday.

This is often a result of greedy goals. I want a one-acre garden when I only have time to care for one raised bed. I want to add sheep to my homestead when I still haven’t built the housing for the pigs.

Growth is what brings life. When we get tired of the journey we are tempted to settle, to cut corners, to stop the process of growth that brings hope.

But growth is something God adds when we are faithful with little. Starting with small things that we can do well, finish, and enjoy before prayerfully beginning another step in the project.

If I stop improving what I have been given, God can’t add to me. If I am spreading my resources so thin that I have to be stingy with time and money to every responsibility and relationship in my life God isn’t going to add to me either.

There is no quick fix. There is just faithful growth, with God adding the joy and the increase.

This is a reason we try to monitor our ‘joy-level’ in our family. If we are losing our joy, we are somehow out of line with God. And we need to evaluate where we are being unfaithful in our expectations, responsibilities, or relationships.

And typically, we have to surrender something that was our plan in order to regain the joy of participating in God’s plan for our family and farm.

So, I want to commit to trusting God. To do the next thing.

I want to guard against tolerating too many things around my farm and home that aren’t a reflection of what I ‘intend to do’.

I want my farm and home to display the gospel. Not by putting on a good face and pretending like we have ever arrived, but by looking around and making a habit of saying,

“How can I be more faithful?”

“How can I reflect who God is better in the way my farm is managed?”

“How can I do that better this week than last week?”

“What does my wife see that needs to be done that I don’t see?”

“What frustrates my kids about the farm or home that I could fix?”

Then, when I am overwhelmed with my inability to be who I need to be and do what I need to do . . . I am reminded that I can’t make it to the finish line.

I can’t even make it one step of this farming-for-Jesus journey by myself.

But my hope is in the promise that “He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” (Ph. 1:6)