Today, I'm supposed to be at class number four of the Central Illinois Farm Beginnings program. But I'm not. I'm at my kitchen table, writing this blog, and feeling surprisingly OK about it.

The combination of a wonderful but demanding promotion that caused work to bleed into my weekends and my dire lack of knowledge about farming led me to the conclusion that I need to step back, reassess, and rethink the order in which I'm doing things. So the farm class is on hold. I'm not really a drop-out, I've just deferred continuing until next year, but "drop-out" made a better headline. 

I have this tendency to run headlong into things. Once my mind is made up, it's like the starting gun has been fired and I GO! This has served me well so far. After three months of dating, my husband and I decided to get married, and we did so just three months later. Next fall, we'll celebrate our 25th anniversary. When I decided it was time to move from our last house, we had our property on the market and sold in about two weeks, and bought a new house just a week after that. So when I decided that it was time to learn more about farming, I didn't hesitate to plunge into a class aimed at starting a farm business. I thought I was ready. But I'm not. Or maybe I was just on the wrong track.

I am ready, however, to get my hands dirty, and that is exactly the place I need to start. I need a season of planting something in my backyard patch of clay, of learning to make and use compost, of building a coop and getting a few hens. I have to start somewhere, and I've recognized that the place to do it is on this suburban plot I call Half-Acre Farm. Now I need to dig in. 

After my first day in class, I wrote about the irony of learning to farm in a windowless classroom—the very environment I'm seeking to escape. I still think there's a place for what I was learning there, I just think I need to earn a place in that classroom first. As a wise farmer friend said to me, "Courses are great fun and very helpful, but learning by jumping in is exhilarating." It's funny—I was thinking that by taking a class in the business of farming, I was jumping in—but maybe I was jumping around the fact that no matter how much I learn about farming, there's only one way to become a farmer, and that's to do it. So, deep breath! Time to plunge in.

The goal now? Chickens. I've been talking about it forever. Time to do. Time to GO! Let's see if this time, I'm on the right track.
 

Ah, reality. At this weekend’s Central Illinois Farm Beginnings class, it made a strong appearance.

In the previous two weeks, I’d spent time pondering the vision and mission for my business, with the help of worksheets provided by Purdue Extension. It was time well spent.

I clarified my overall goals and values, deducing that I want to connect people to their food in a meaningful way and create a unique, engaging, and educational experience around my farm. My “farm enterprise,” I’ve been calling it, because it has taken on dimensions beyond farming.

What I envision is not just land that I farm, but plots that I rent to people interested in growing their own food but who might not have access their own land, and who would enjoy learning to farm within a community of like-minded people. The enterprise will include raising livestock for meat and dairy. We’ll have a commercial kitchen for baking, canning, and cheese-making, and a climate-controlled room for aging cheese and sausages. We’ll have a retail shop on premises to sell all that we produce. And, since my husband is an artist, we’ll also have an art gallery—and since he has trained as a barista, maybe even a coffee shop! 

But wait, there’s more! We’ll bring in young chefs to give cooking lessons. Once a month, we’ll host fabulous dinners featuring food from our farm or other local farms. It will be a destination, a magical place that makes visitors feel warm, welcome, and part of a terrific community. 

Don’t you wish you were there right now?

Excited about having this big picture in place, and buoyed by the fact that there is a couple successfully combining farming and art at the Wormfarm Institute in Wisconsin, I headed off to class feeling good that I know what I want to do. The topic of the day was doing a SWOT analysis, identifying the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats to our farm business ideas.

Strengths came first. I had a list of about 20 or so, from having strong communication skills and marketing experience to knowing when to ask for help.

Then came weaknesses. A much shorter list, but the items on it revealed serious issues: No farm. No farming experience. No experience with livestock. No money to buy a farm in the near future. Debt.

Then came the assignment: Have a proposal for our farm business ready to share with farmers for evaluation in two weeks. Two weeks!  

The proposal should include our vision, mission, and personal goals; a map of our proposed farm; rough estimates for one or two enterprises (such as selling eggs and/or selling chickens for meat); and a rough plan of how we will market our products.

Ah, reality. Hello. 

On the drive home, I couldn’t decide if I felt like a deer in headlights or a deer who can’t stop herself from leaping onto the road and into the side of semi. Either way the fate of my dream seemed bleak, mirrored in the long, dark-red streaks I kept seeing on the highway.

Lucky for me, my list of strengths also includes determination, not afraid of hard work, and embracing creative problem solving.

I thought over my lists again, and moved one of my listed weaknesses to my strengths: the half-acre lot we live on. It’s mostly wooded, shady, and half of it slopes sharply down to a creek, but work with what you’ve got, I told myself. Figure out how to turn this far-from-ideal-for-farming suburban plot into a mini-business, and scale it up to farm-size when the time is right.

So.  

Welcome to Half-Acre Farm. 

I’m now researching what might grow in this space, starting with the 12-by-24-foot garden that gets maybe four to six hours of sunlight. (Skip the fruit-bearing vegetables like tomatoes and squash, I’ve already learned, but greens, herbs, and root vegetables might do OK.) 

I had already planted winter rye in an attempt to improve the soil (clay fill that was packed in—and I mean packed in—after the in-ground swimming pool was destroyed last summer.)  

The rye will grow through the winter, and I’ll cut it down and till it in come spring. I’ve also started composting, creating a bin for us and one for our neighbors, who are happy to contribute.

I need to plan for chickens next. Where this shed is located seems like a perfect spot for a coop that I could keep fairly secure from raccoons, coyotes, and foxes.  

But as I learned today from John Franzese, who provides the most excellent Fran’s Farm Fresh Eggs to our South Suburban Food Co-op, it’s not enough to have a secure coop. I need to consider, too, how to protect chickens from hawks, which are in abundance in these woods. He keeps a couple turkeys as deterrent, although he said owls are not afraid to take those bigger birds down—and we’ve got lots of owls, too!

I’ve also started looking into mushrooms, since this environment seems like a natural (wild varieties are always popping up in the yard.)

Suddenly, what seemed like the easier solution—working with what I’ve got rather than creating a hypothetical, non-existent situation—is seeming not so easy at all. Which is good. (My optimism is out of control.) I believe that if I can work this out and actually create a feasible, profitable business, no matter how miniscule that profit may be, I’ll be better prepared for full-time farming than had I worked with an imaginary, idealistic setting.

Reality, bring it on! I'm ready for the challenge.

I think. 

I hope. 

Can I do it?

I’ll keep you posted. 

Part of my desire to farm is fueled by my desire to shed the life that keeps me indoors, sitting on my butt in a sealed up building the majority of my days. So I had to smile at the irony of finding myself indoors on a beautiful October Saturday, sitting on my butt in a sealed up building in Bloomington, Illinois, as my first major step toward farming.

But there I was, along with 13 classmates—many of whom, like me, had driven a couple hours to get there—gathered for our first 6-hour class session of Central Illinois Farm Beginnings, a yearlong program on creating a sustainable, entrepreneurial farm business.

The day turned out to be worth every sunless second.

The classroom setting, the books, the in-class assignments, the guest speakers, the homework, all drove home an important point: I have SO much to learn. It feels a little ridiculous, really, to be thinking about if I want to focus on livestock or crops—and then somebody mentioned perennial crops, and I thought, whoa, now that sounds interesting—like I know what I’m talking about. My farming “experience” consists of having visited a few very small-scale farms, sweeping up after my friend as she sheared sheep, reading a couple books about farming, and dating the son of a pig farmer for about three months in high school. I recall being terrified of the geese, who hissed ferociously as they chased me to my car. 

I’ve grown a few tomatoes and lettuce and herbs—which are as about easy to grow as you can get—and I’ve consumed at least a large barnyard full of chickens, cows, and pigs over my lifetime, but that hardly qualifies me to embark on this adventure. Still, I’m determined. So there I sat, pencil in hand, eager to soak up the wisdom (and wonderful humor, it turns out) of the program coordinator, Micah Bornstein, and the farmers and other experts he will bring in with every class. 

The class focuses on farming as a business—because, despite romantic notions to the contrary—that’s what it is. Although it may be the only business people go into (by “people,” I mean me) without the expectation of making a living, or at least not expecting to make a good living. All along as I’ve mulled over the prospect of farming, I’ve consistently had in the back of my head (and often the front) that I’ve got to do something else in addition to farming because, after all, I’ll never be able to support myself that way.

Reading the text for the class,  The Organic Farmer’s Business Handbook: A Complete Guide to Managing Finances, Crops, and Staff —and Making a Profit, by Richard Wiswall, got me thinking differently. I realized that it was foolish to undertake ANY business without the expectation of profit. I would never even consider another business proposition that seemed financially doomed, so why would I think of farming differently? Granted, my motivation for farming goes far beyond financial, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t expect success.

So what is my motivation for farming? Much to my surprise, a good deal of our first class dug at that answer. I knew from reading the book’s first chapter that identifying personal values and mission would be part of the program, but in the first session, it became apparent that it’s not just part of it, it’s at the heart of it. Through exercises conducted in pairs and individually, we explored what brought us to the program, what we consider our core values, what we’d do if we had six months to live.

Equally surprising is how everyone went along with this. And this is not a group you’d think of as a touchy-feely bunch. It includes a high-ranking officer in the Illinois corrections system, three attorneys, a former sociology professor, a wine salesman, and a school principal who became a volunteer firefighter after accidentally burning down 10 acres of corn. I love that story.

I learned more than a few things from and about my classmates that day, including:

• Dry fields catch fire easily (more than one story was shared)
• It’s possible to live in rural Illinois and practice law in Manhattan
• When brainstorming ways to use a mason jar, more than one person will see it as a murder weapon

I’m not quite sure what to make of that last one, except that we’ve perhaps all read too many mysteries—and that we are all, in some way, of like minds. We shared a lot of laughs during the day, and by the end of the course, I expect we’ll know each other fairly well. Which is a good thing, because if there’s one lesson from the day that really stuck—and there were so many, I could write a small book—it’s that successful sustainable farming is not a solo endeavor. Even if you’re in business for yourself, you will at some point—perhaps at many, many points—need the knowledge, advice, experience, equipment, empathy, muscle, and kindness of fellow farmers. The greatest resource for farming, it appears, is a farming community. Getting to know each other, sharing and respecting our individual goals and visions, seems a better place than most to start.

So what is my vision? That’s the assignment for next session.

I’ll keep you posted. 

Colleen Newquist dreams of farming from her almost-country home in Park Forest, Illinois. Find more of her writing and illustrations at colleennewquist.com.