The backhoe is here

There’s a backhoe parked outside my living room window. It dug a trench out to the western field so that we can run water and electricity to two year round chicken coops west of the house. The coops won’t be ours, though. They’re being built by the Mainstreet Project, which will rent them from us and then offer them to aspiring Latino farmers that have gone through a beginning farmer class.

This is something we’ve been planning and agonizing over for many months. During the last parts of my pregnancy, I’d sometimes wake up because of contractions and in my half-awake state, I’d assume that the contractions had something to do with the proposed chicken barns instead of the baby. “What does this mean for the barns?” I mumbled to myself until I woke up enough to regain a grip on reality.

After all this anticipation, the back hoe is here now, and our western field has been terraced, and there’s a 6-foot trench dividing our yard. It seems surreal. In spite of myself, I find myself wondering how it all came to be, as though the decisions had been made by someone else.

We made the decision though, and I think it was a good one. We’re renting this land to the Mainstreet Project because they’re trying to help people realize their dreams of being independent farmers. I’m so grateful that we’ve had the opportunity to follow this dream ourselves, and we couldn’t have done it on our own. We feel excited to be part of a sustainable food movement that includes more diversity. Also, we see opportunities to possibly work together with these farmers to sell chickens so that our family’s farming can be more financially sustainable.

Like all exciting changes, it brings a sense of loss. This fall, my daughter wrote a paper for school about her favorite place, sitting in a maple, looking out over waves of corn. Starting this spring, her maple will look out on a chicken yard, and twice a day, folks will drive in to take care of those chickens. It won’t be quite as isolated, and for a girl entering middle school, it’s sometimes important to have privacy when you’re doing things like climbing trees. The same might be said for 38 year old mothers who sometimes sit in trees.

We’re moving ahead with it though, and it’s exciting. People might be raising chickens here by March!S