I know where my comfort zone is: it’s checking on the animals and plants, managing their interactions and the complexities of a sustainable healthy ecosystem. It’s contemplating the husbandry of the acres to produce plant and animal foods bursting with nutrients, and trying to maximize the use of the sun’s energy to build soil, heat living spaces, and grow exceptional food for my family and the families of others. It’s experimenting with a rabbit colony in the barn in the winter while waiting for kids, lambs, and bee pickup day. It’s exploring a permiculture base with annual vegetable highlights as an alternative to a traditional garden, and wondering if a take-what-you need, pay-what-you-can model is the most appropriate when trying to be an asset to the local community in a pandemic. It’s using goats to enhance pasture, sheep to mow lawn, and a scythe to harvest hay for the winter. It’s learning how to produce quality yarn from raw Shetland fleece, after first learning how to shear the sheep. So many interconnections, choices and possibilities!

I also know where my comfort zone is NOT: not in hawking the products of the farm on social media, nor in answering phone calls! In truth, I do best one-on-one, face-to-face, but am often too shy and insecure to initiate conversation. Yet the goal of being a community asset requires more of me. It requires not just that this piece of God’s earth be well tended, but that I step out of my comfort zone to solicit interaction with my neighbors. That I promote the values and philosophies of this and neighboring farms, including the food security engendered by our local and sustainable farm enterprises. That I draw attention to this farm, and by association, to myself. That I risk failure in others’ eyes.

This will be the growth focus this year. While the farm evolves, so must I. We will reach for our potentials in sustainable productivity and community communications