A SPECIAL THANKS.

It's dark and it's raining. Not hard, just obnoxiously––the kind of rain that seeks, that comes up from underneath, drifts sideways and finds your dry spots no matter how well covered they are. And for a bonus, the rain has made the ground around the house slick and muddy and ideal for handling turkeys.The turkeys are roosted by this point, so its easy enough to sneak up on them in the dark to load them into the truck. They kick and flail when we catch them, throwing mud and wetness about wildly, but everyone makes it in unharmed. Not thrilled, but unharmed.It feels good to have them loaded, and sad. And the next day it feels good to hand them one by one to the processor, and sad. It feels good and sad to raise an animal strictly to kill it, then good and sad to eat it. But that's what farming is and we are always thankful when we can feel both good and sad about an animal we eat. Because it's a lot of hard work, from start to muddy finish, but it's nothing in comparison to what they do for us.As difficult as they were this year, we are thankful for how much the turkeys challenged us, how much more they taught us about farming. Hannah and I are thankful these birds will be a part of so many good dinners, and appreciated by so many wonderful people. Thankful for our own bird, in the oven as I write this. Then when dinner is over, and leftovers exhausted, we will be thankful for how much richer the turkeys made our farm, and the strength and energy they give us to continue working on making it, our community and world a healthier place. Our thankfulness will not just be spoken at dinner then, but demonstrated in our actions throughout our lives. So thank you, Turkeys, we will do our best to never stop giving you thanks.- Jesse.

A GOOD, OLD-FASHIONED HUMBLING.

When we came back to the house from doing chores yesterday morning, the pigs were out. All of them. Again. Feel like you've read this post before? Same here.Honestly, it's becoming a joke––a really mean one. But it's also entirely our fault. They're getting out because we recently let the solar-electrified fence wires get cold––low voltage––and the pigs learned to slip underneath. We've tried to retrain them to the fence but obviously that hasn't taken. (That being said: Trousers probably wouldn't care if the fence swung at him with hammers. He'd still get out and come to the house to see what we were up to. It would be endearing if he weren't an unpredictable, two hundred pound digging machine.).And every time it happens, although I know it's the worst state to be in to deal with animals, I can feel my frustration rise, I can't help it. Between the pigs getting out, the goats killing our blueberries this Spring and the turkeys eating our garden, I'm just kind of over animals this year, and tell Hannah often––"Only chickens next year."But truthfully (and begrudgingly), we need them. We love them. And we love what they do to the property, how our farm is slowly transforming because of these derelicts. It's really our management, with our inadequate equipment, that has failed. Farm animals have no sense of obedience. They just have needs and those needs have to be met. So that's what I try to think of when I'm chasing Trousers and the others through the woods, or dealing with the turkeys getting out and eating the pig food––they're not failing us, we're failing them. Needless to say, it's been a humbling year, but the farm is really coming along and we've learned a lot about husbandry. We need these weirdos, we just need to manage them better. So next year, when we get more pigs and keep rotating the goats, we'll be raising them on a farm thriving from a year's worth of humility. But we'll be doing a much better job of it, by God.- Jesse.