preface

Wide open spaces and sunny front porches. A little garden, a little barn, and a few animals scattering the landscape.

Therein lies the romanticism of a life in the country.

This was the life I yearned to provide for my daughter. The opportunity to grow up on the basics, away from chaos and unreasonable schedules.

A place to ponder, to find purpose and meaning. To better understand our Earth and her inhabitants. To recognize our reliance on things that can’t be plugged into a wall socket.

I had lived for years in the center of a large metropolis. While I had loved every minute of it, I knew that I would have neither means nor time enough to connect my daughter to the world around us.

After two wide right turns from the highway and a few minutes of travel along a dirt road, we came to the end of a long overgrown driveway; there our journey began.

I was a single mother with no idea how to grow a zucchini, much less nurture the tender spirit of a three-year-old child.

For the first few months I felt like Eva Gabor’s character in the late 1960s sitcom Green Acres. I connected so deeply to her that I even started a website called Good Bye City Life with plans to chronicle our upcoming misadventures. Those high-end boots and designer labels just weren’t built for barn chores.

The local folk watched us arrive, learned that we had no nearby relatives, and made secret bets on how soon the old place would be back up for sale.

Seventeen years passed.

A child was raised and raised well. Together, we grew most of our own food. Through love and toil and occasional sadness we learned the invaluable power of self-reliance.

In full disclosure, we were never completely alone. As trite as the earlier bets had seemed, many watched over and prayed for us. We were lucky to possess the two most revered traits in a rural community—pure grit and humble spirit.

Of the two, humility—or lack of pretentiousness—was the true key to survival. To ask for and accept advice, assistance, and trust—without posturing or flaunting past city life accomplishments—serves new homesteaders well. When you have nothing to prove, country folk welcome and accept you with open arms.

In her sixteenth year, Veronica and I conferred over this book’s approach. Keeping farm animals, we’ve decided, is a balancing act of joy and morality. The ethics of animal husbandry, the environmental impact of every step, and eating well will be discoveries that depend on your personal comfort zone.

This book does contain information on keeping farm animals with the intent of feeding your family. The alternative (aside from being a vegetarian) is to purchase pristine white packages of meat from the grocery store—the meat of animals that quite likely had a miserable life, or at the very least a miserable end. The mainstream media has effectively shattered our trust in commercially harvested food.

Country wisdom overrides sentimentality within the remain-der of these pages but it must be said that sentencing an animal to the dinner table is a certainly a somber act. My advice is to do so with the utmost appreciation and gratitude, and with all the dignity your animals deserve—this will be your redemption as you provide for your family.

Raise what you can as best you can. Keep your humble spirit about you. Count every step of good stewardship as a joy and you will be richly rewarded.