Help!

We have been planning for months to call our farm Fields of Light, and on the day before we were going to print out our chicken marketing forms, we opened up a huge can of worms. My eight year old hates that name. It brings tears to her eyes. After months of saying, "Well that is too bad," we decided we wanted a name that everyone in the family can endure because we’re all going to be working on it. The farm name will even be on our answering machine. People have also told us that Fields of Light sounds new agey, and that does not sit well with me.

We decided to call the farm Auntie Annie’s Fields, in honor of my great aunt who was tough and wonderful, and who farmed in the northwestern part of the state before there was such a thing is non-organic farming. It felt perfectly clear to me the farm’s name had been discovered, and nobody else in the family hated it. Joyfully, we sent the name out with our first “chicken pitch” of the season.

Then we googled it. A farm in Wisconsin that produces woolen products is called “Auntie Annie’s Fluff and Stuff.” "Auntie Anne’s" is trademarked by a huge company that sells pretzels in malls. “Anne’s Fields” is open, but I have asked a couple of people about whether sounds like a good name, and they just shake their heads.

So we kept looking for names, but after deciding on "Aunt Annie's Fields," nothing else seems right. Here are some of the names we have considered:

“Solid ground farm” is a horse farm in Pennsylvania.

“Story farm” appears to be a literary magazine because it brings up pictures of people sleeping in bed.

“Story field farm” is available, but it sounds a lot like the organic yogurt company. Plus, a "story field" is apparently some kind of psychosocial phenomenon.

“Light swept fields” is lovely and available, but it sounds like we don’t sweep much (which is unfortunately true), and it sounds more literary than agricultural. What are you going to buy from light swept fields?

“Pearls before chickens” came to mind in a moment of desperation, but we worried that it would cast our chickens in an unflattering light – as if they did not deserve pearls.

When I pressed the issue in a conversation with my mom, she admitted that she thought they all sounded a bit hippy-dippy, and she thought we might be in good shape going with something like R & O Farms, or I & E Farms using initials from our names.

Oh, and Fields of Light? It’s the title of a book someone wrote about his dad.

We are sick and tired of talking about farm names. We feel like we have lost any sense of perspective about this, and this is taking up way too much time. Which of these names do you think is best? Or do you have another idea?