8 minute read
Simple Times
BY SUZY McCRAY
DON’T CALL US HOBBY FARMERS
When I was struggling so badly on this farm basically all alone, I bristled if someone called me a “hobby farmer.” When I was fighting to thaw out a gate latch using warm water carried from inside the house to the goat pen with my fingers freezing inside my tattered gloves OR when I had spent all morning in near 100-degree weather delivering twin baby goats and literally breathing (and praying) life into their nostrils, the term “hobby” just didn’t seem fitting! None of my animal sheds were squared up and all the fencing was repaired with miles of baling wire and even zip ties. But the animals were warm and safe, and they seemed happy. I worked from sunup in the mornings until often after sundown so it certainly didn’t feel like a hobby to me. When my good friend and former Gadsden Times News Correspondent Darrell Norman wrote an article about my farm and my first book back in 2014, he titled it “Don’t Ever Call This Woman a Hobby Farmer.”
And that was pretty much the way I felt back then! I looked up the term “hobby farm” on Wikipedia and it said that a hobby farm was basically a farm where you didn’t depend on the income. That if you lost income on a hobby farm, it was basically a disappointment not a disaster. Then there was a guy called Tree Hugger on that internet that said a hobby farmer can have different definitions. But the basic idea is that “a hobby farm is a small-scale farm that is primarily used for pleasure instead of being a business venture. The owner or owners of a hobby farm typically have a main source of income like an off-farm job or pension or retirement income.” Whatever the source, his point is that the farm does not have to make money. It can be engaged in on a hobby level so if one season yield isn’t favorable it is considered more of a disappointment rather than a financial loss. But when I was covered in manure, dirt, sweat and sometimes blood, it sure didn’t feel like a “hobby” to me even after reading all that! When I was growing up, it seemed that everybody in our small agricultural community of Alabama grew gardens in their backyards, even in town, and they processed the food by freezing or drying or canning for the long winters. They weren’t labeled. It wasn’t anything special. It was just what everybody did then. My grandparents in Oneonta had a lengthy vegetable garden surrounding two sides of their city lot, a worm bed across the back, and flowers all in between! I can remember Granny Inmon drying apples on a window screen in her backyard, bringing it in every night until the apples were crispy and brown. And although by that time in their lives, Grandpa did most of the cooking, in late summer the kitchen turned back into Granny’s domain as she canned jar after jar of delicious vegetable soup! For many years folks began to slowly get away from that. Why bother to can food at home when you could go in the grocery store and get it seemingly for even lesser cost? There were some religious groups that advised their parishioners to have at least a year to two years of food in their pantries not because of a national disaster that might be expected but in case of job loss, illness, or other problems that would prevent them from going to the store and affording additional food. When I was a young teenager, I guess going through what people called my “hippie stage” (which was yet another label that I didn’t like), I began experimenting with homesteading and the back-to-the-land movement. When Y2K came along a lot of people saw that they might need to store food but many were embarrassed later when no big disaster happened and everybody kind of got away from it again. I always tried to have at least six months of food on hand. That was about all I could do and most of that was canned food that I got from the store, buying an extra can of this or an extra bottle of that whenever I could and canning and freezing what I could in my small way. When I saw the importance of that was when my late husband had the first of two heart attacks. We were at home for about six months with his specialist advising me not to shop in the big box stores fearful I would bring germs back to him – this was a decade and a half ago. So guess what we ate for those six months? Basically food out of my six-month storage pantry! After his death, it was even more crucial for me to have food on hand as my income was off and on-dependent on what season my small homestead was in. As I raised hundreds of heirloom plants in my tiny playhouse-sized greenhouse, there were several people who would come and ask me advice about plants even though I was certainly not an agricultural genius. But I talked to many who lived in public housing about how they could grow tomato plants and other plants in buckets on their small porches. One lady planted a straggly tomato plant between her shrubbery. She called me every week that summer detailing to me how many large tomatoes she got off that one plant and how many sandwiches she made. Along about the time I was first widowed I was
blessed to have a scholarship to attend the Annie’s Project program for women in agriculture through our county Extension Service. As we studied finances and different ideas about women in agriculture I soon found that while my profits were not huge on my little farm, my profit margin was as good or as better as some of the larger agricultural businesses that surrounded us. While I still was troubled by “labels” as I worked day in and day out that little tidbit of information helped my feelings quite a bit! Slowly it seems that the overall ideas of folks in our communities and in our country have been that we need to be more responsible for our own food. And while we support the larger agriculture businesses, and are amazed at the volume of their crops, there’s just something about going in your own backyard and picking your supper and then cooking it and eating it! There’s just a certain pride in knowing that you grow the food with God’s blessings! During the last few years we’ve seen some frightening things with some store shelves being empty and it’s made us think once again. There’s been a shortage of canning jars, canning lids, even freezers and other items, including seed, as people suddenly decided they all wanted to get back into being more responsible for what happens in their own little area of their lives for their families. Even some of the larger hatcheries have told how there were waiting lists for day-old baby chicks. So, while there seems to be a wonderful place for the agriculture that we have in the United States where one farmer can feed hundreds of folks, there also seems to be a return to the backyard farmer, whether you call us hobby farmers, backyard farmers, or just folks who are concerned about our own food. You can grow a lot between your shrubbery. You can grow a lot in containers. Dan Porch, who was the former Auburn Extension agent in Blount County, hosted container gardening seminars that were so insightful. The Extension Service is a wealth of information about those kind of things as are your local Co-ops. Your local Co-ops can tell you what plants and what seeds are good for your area and what will flourish and what probably won’t even in your small beds! Right now, Mack is building me several small beds for my herb gardens. He’s building them taller so that I will not have to bend as much as I’m not as young as I used to be. He makes a huge garden every year and we’ve been able to sell some of the produce, but we bought a new canner three years ago because we can basically all the time from early spring until well into winter. Does that make us hobby farmers? I don’t think so. I still prefer to think beyond the labels. When Darrell wrote that article eight years ago, he talked about my “simple life,” and noted how many of my Co-op articles which were in that first book “is at once a tribute by many generations of her family, a history of the land she holds, a memoir of personal loss and faith, a hymn to hard work, an anthem of independence and a textbook on how to live with dirty hands and an open heart.” He also said my words were “a testament to old-fashioned ways that still hold the power to nurture body and soul.” Darrell’s words, as do that of Paul’s in the New Testament, show that the hundreds – thousands –of us loving our land and our work on our tiny or big farms don’t need labels about our simple lives. As Paul urged us in 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12, “And that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you; That ye may walk honestly toward them that are without, and that ye may have lack of nothing.”
(Suzy and husband Mack live on a homestead in Blount County, Alabama and can be reached on Facebook or by email at suzy.mccray@yahoo.com)
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