THE NEXT DRAFT.

Jesse and I have always tried to focus on the long-term goals we have for the future – our holistic goals. These are the goals that we have set not just for our farm, but also for our future finances, for the future quality of our land and for the future quality of our life. Determining holistic goals is a process that considers the financial, social, and environmental impacts of a decision before you implement it.This is something we learned from our mentors, Eric and Cher, while we were Bugtussle Farm interns. It is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day work, the projects that begin to stack up and the never ending cycle that is life, but it is important to stop often and revisit your holistic goals. Ideally, you would revisit them before every decision you make, to make sure that what you are doing now is moving you towards where you want to be later. You may find that you have veered off course, or that you are wasting energy on work that doesn’t align with your values, or perhaps even that your goals themselves have changed. This kind of periodic checking-in at home base, re-centering and making sure everybody is on the same page, has been immensely helpful to our business, our marriage, and our sanity!Last December, Jesse and I found ourselves on a date for the first time since Further had been born – our first time alone in one year! Sitting in a hotel bar while my parents blessedly watched the baby upstairs, we used that time to revisit our holistic goals. And we discovered some surprising things. We were both feeling like our current distribution model was unsustainable – the hour long drive to market twice a week was starting to take a toll. Not just hard in terms of gas mileage, but hard to be off the farm two ENTIRE days a week. We want to be a part of the community we are feeding, to be involved in a way that isn’t just driving in and dropping off our food. But we don’t have extra time to go back into town for activities, socializing, volunteering, local politics and social justice – we don’t have another full day to give. So, we end up feeling disconnected.Also, it turns out that the cliché is incredibly true: having a baby changes everything. We want so many things for Further – we want him to have that same sense of community connection that we are craving. We want him to have the option of school or sports or lessons or even simply playing with friends on a regular basis. Most of all perhaps, we want Further to be closer to his grandparents – to see them regularly, not occasionally. We selfishly want and need his grandparents’ help to allow us to work more on the farm, or perhaps even have another child some day.As we talked about all these things last December, we allowed ourselves to say something out loud for the first time: Maybe we can’t have all of these things here. Maybe Bugtussle isn’t our forever home.It was a difficult thing to say – a difficult idea to even entertain. We had finally gotten our farm to a really great place: The cabin we had worked so hard to build, the home where Further was born. The land Jesse had been slowly carving out by hand, clearing and tilling and mulching and nurturing. The neighbors we love and had worked alongside, their children we were watching grow up. Our little homestead was a paradise. But we had come to see that our paradise was just too isolated from the other parts of life we wanted for ourselves – we conceded that our holistic goals could not be fully achieved here. Bugtussle was maybe just not in the right place for our new family.Honestly, I could go on and on about all of our reasons, about how many times we went back and forth about what we should do, about all the thinking and rethinking and praying and agonizing that went into this, but we ultimately knew it was what we had to do. And so we began to talk with our families and to start looking.Well, to go ahead and jump right to the end of it, we found it. We found our new farm. It happened very quickly and unexpectedly. It is in Anderson County, still beautiful and surrounded by woods and creeks. Still very isolated while also being close to many major cities as well as our families. We are incredibly excited and terribly devastated at the same time. Bittersweet. Leaving is hard. Change is hard. We will miss our market – our Bowling Green family and friends that have been our support system and our customers for four years now. We will miss our Bugtussle family, the Smiths who are actual family to us, and our wonderful neighbors who are the definition of generous and kind.And so, this Rough Draft of ours continues to be just that. Right now, we are still trying to focus on the growing season. We won’t be transitioning to the new farm until the winter, until after our fall share ends. We are anxious to share more with you about the new place, but our energy is still entirely here right now. On saving the blighted tomatoes, on weeding the late sweet corn and keeping the deer out of the sweet potatoes. We just keep farming, keep moving forward and taking the changes as they come at us. Keep trying our hardest to do what is best for the garden, for the land, for our family.-Hannah.