Shifting Gears, Negative to Positive

The last 11 days, since we were court awarded control of our property in Chatsworth, have been stressful. Managing two farms with livestock on both, the cleanup activities required on the bigger farm, showing of the that farm to prospective buyers and the twice a day milking there has been frazzling but, the blessings coming our way are equally overwhelming.

The community support via social media, texts, old fashioned but much appreciated phone calls has been truly awesome, and I do not use "awesome" very often. At night, when we are exhausted from it all, we read these comments and best wishes to each other and we are reminded of how special our family, friends, and past customers truly are. The word, community, has never felt so powerful.

We also remind each other...no one died, this is just stuff we have to fix, repair and resell. Things...are not permanent. Keith worries about my workload and I worry about his, that's how we operate. We both worry about our financial burdens but that gets offered up to higher powers everyday. HE has much bigger shoulders than even this wide bodied farmwife.

Through Facebook listings we garnered huge interest in the real estate and showed our one time family home to many people over the last 24 hours. Yesterday we met with a realtor and will turn it over to him very soon. You can see our home/machine shed/barn listing HERE.

All of our livestock, milk cows, young heifers, and calves are for sale. Some are being sold to individuals and the first few destined for the sale barn have been identified. You can see our livestock listing HERE. We are open to offers on all.

In a day or two I'll be listing our equipment for sale. Tractor, grain wagons, hay feeders, grain grinder, manure spreader.

It is difficult to piece out our old farm business life this way, we had always hoped it could survive intact, but that has not happened. Yet, at 57 I am aware that often something has to be torn down, deconstructed, dissected, in order for it to be built back up again, stronger, more resilient, than before. When we bought the Chatsworth farm in 1995 it was destined for destruction at that time, on the schedule for complete demolition and return to farmland. We had to convince the owners to sell it to us.

Over the next twenty years we built a new barn, repaired the century old farmhouse, built a milk house, added a new machine shed, opened a Grade A Dairy, converted it to a Raw Milk Dairy, and obtained organic certification for our land, livestock, milk and meat products. We also raised four children there. In the last 14 months much of this was destroyed or at least badly damaged, (not, the kids, they're fine) but there is a family or individual out there willing to envision it's new potential. So until we are connected , we are going to continue to work very hard to bring this farm back to a place someone would be proud to own, to call home, as we, our children and grandchildren did, for over two decades.