Homesteader Life

We have some good news on the farm search. We’ve found a place 75 miles north of us that will work. Its not sealed in stone yet but pretty close. We found a 127 acre farm with real good soils and a nice 56 cow tie stall barn. The barn is in good shape and has 4 box stalls, calf pens and heifer stalls at the far end. The cow barn also has 2 big silos and a working barn cleaner. There is a small horse barn and a heifer shed with headlocks. The land is in one big chunk right behind the barn and all on the same side of the road. The land happens to all be on a southern slope which the locals say makes it a few weeks earlier for spring a few weeks later for the first frost of the fall. There are some woods for hunting trapping and syrup making as well. The farm can be certified without any trouble, except that the barns must have the haymows cleaned out before the cows can go in or any new hay can go in. The land has not had any fertilizers or herbicides in the last 6 years and grows a mighty good hay crop. The milk house needs to be painted and have a new coat of concrete on the floor and it needs a bulk tank(found one yesterday). I’ve got to find a vacuum pump and put a vacuum line in the barn as well. The barn has no milking equipment in it. I’ve not the money to put up any fancy pipeline system, so I’m going back to milking with delaval bucket milkers. Its not far from a decent sized town which opens the possibilities for selling produce, chicken and eggs. Thats always been a draw back to living in the wilderness, no market for anything but milk. It has a brand new doublewide house on it with a full basement. Looks like Leah and the kids and I will take up basement living for the time being. The out of state owner happened to be in town a few days ago and we found out that they want very much to have a working organic farm there and are willing to have a long term lease and really want us come! The window of opportunity was real small, they are moving out west and were about to split the farm up and rent out part of it and put other parts in a program of some kind. However, they very much wanted it to be a productive, organic farm and have scraped the other plans. I don’t want to get too excited, but this seems to be really falling together for us. Praise the Lord!