farm blog round-up: the best of the best!

It seems fitting to use the term "round-up" when it comes to farming blogs because old Western songs about round-ups and Roy Rogers' theme songs basically pop right into your head. 

Ok, or just mine. 

Winchester 

Also, you should be forewarned that this post has nothing to do with our farm dogs, although they do enjoy rounding things up.

Trash, for instance. Bottles. Corn stalks. Cardboard. A random glove. Pretty much anything they can find within a three-mile radius ends up in our yard. 

Now if I only could teach them to find discarded vintage Pyrex, we'd be set!

For those of you who may live in the city but are interested in farm life -- and I know you exist because you say so on Instagram -- get your mouse ready to do some clicking and bookmarking. Winter's coming, you know, and there's no better way to spend time waiting for the next blizzard to pass than pretending you're out on the prairie with Pa Ingalls trying to find your way from the house to the barn just by holding on to a rope strung between the two. 

Ok, maybe that isn't as fun as it sounds. 

Still. 

Colt 

Common Ground: The site and blog are written by farmers simply starting discussions about how they produce the food that ends up on your table. And they're super good at helping you break through all sorts of myths and misinformation. 

Country Linked: This is a sweet blog that's just right for all the people who grew up in the country and love hearing stories -- and seeing pictures -- of day-to-day life on the farm that brings all those memories right back. 

Cow Spots and Tales: Just go ahead and zip on over to Lisa's blog riiiiight now. She's a runner interested in nutrition, but she's also a dairy farmer, so all those stories you hear about whether or not it's good to eat meat and if there's antibiotics in your milk? She sets the record straight on pretty much all of them. 

Dairy Good Life: Sadie's blog's tagline says it all: "Cows. Kids. Chaos. It's all good." And it is! Plus, we once stayed at the same hotel in DC while attending two different conferences. We never got to meet, but our IG posts told us we were at least in the same vicinity and that counts for something! 

Petunia 

Dairy Carrie: You've probably seen or heard of Carrie on Twitter . .. or in Chipotle's nightmares . . . or on Facebook. She's a wife and a mom and a dairy farmer and a blogger all rolled into one -- with a sense of humor and a quest to make sure the truth is told to boot. 

Prairie Californian: Beautiful pictures, delicious meals, the truth about gluten and things you never even knew about raising sunflowers -- you'll get all that and more by following Jenny's blog! Just be prepared to leave hungry pretty much every time you visit. 

My Barnyard View: Janet's busy blogging about dairy . . . while learning how to drive a combine . . . all at the same time. I can hardly keep up! 

The Pinke Post: Katie is a wife, mom and agvocate who blogs from the prairie where she -- prepare yourself for this -- lives 97 miles from a Starbucks! That's worth reading about right there! 

You may not have grown up on a farm or ever lived on a farm or even been to visit a farm. But thanks to these ladies and social media, you can still meet the people who raise your food. You can learn how crops are grown. You can ask questions about what animal care looks like. You can hear their stories and tell them yours too. 

Like the time our dogs thought they wanted to take off after a coyote but then Petunia decided to just lay down and bark instead. 

Um, or maybe just go read a good blog about life in the country.

Yeah. 

Do that. 

And their tails all wagged happily every after. 

day 6 of farmacology: independence

One of the things you may not know about farm folks is that

we are really independent. Like, REALLY independent.

My dear friend Lynne likes to say, "Don't tell me what to do" and even "You're not the boss of me. 

My dad often reminds his daughters that "Where the pygmies rule, everyone else has to crouch."

My middle sister was once told by an internship supervisor that she had a "healthy disrespect for authority."

If you roll all those sentiments into one, you basically have a farmer.

In an age of blogs and Instagram, pictures make it easy to think farming is calm and easy, that it will help you escape the craziness of everyday life or that you'll constantly be surrounded by tranquility, that the day's toughest decisions will involve whether or not to romp with you goats or eat the asparagus you grew in your garden. 

But that wouldn't be quite right. 

Farming actually requires knowing when to take risk. It means being a good businessmen just as much as it means being a good steward of land and animals. 

It takes knowing what's coming ahead but reminding yourself of what happened to the markets and the crops and the weather in the past. It means reading up on the latest trends. 

If you want to be successful, you have to be aware. 

Or to quote a wise man, "You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, know when to run."

That's why farmers thrive on their independence. They play by the rules, but that doesn't mean they like being told what to do.

They're the people who have realized that they can achieve as much as they're willing to work for, and they're willing to work for a lot. 

They're particular about doing what's best for their ground and their animals, because when they take care of those two, those two take care of them, and farmers have pretty strong feelings on how best to do that. 

They like the freedom of making their own decisions and calling their own shots. They work best when they're their own boss, and they don't have any problems with saying no. 



Farming requires an innate desire for independence, an ability to make decisions quickly and well, a mind for coming up with sturdy courses of action . . . and fast. 

So when we read quotes like, "Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands" from Thomas Jefferson, we're inclined to agreed. 

And don't try to tell us any differently. 

Want to read more of my 31 day farmacology writing challenge? Click here. 

may day baskets farm style

My maternal grandma was the queen of the May basket. 

Hers weren't necessarily fancy. She just used plastic strawberry cartons, those holey ones that were a lovely shade of green, and threaded ribbon through the holes.

burning down the barn

Chris is a sixth-generation farmer. I'm a fifth. 

You might say things have changed since our ancestors first started farming. 

And you would be right. 

My side of the family includes the first white folks to break ground in our county in Iowa, right alongside the Native Americans. 

Chris's family's history has its own set of stories as well, like how his Grandma Heins worked her teenage years in a garment factory, saving money so that when she got married, she could buy nice furniture for her new home. But when she did get married, she ended up using the money to help put a down payment on their first farm, and the furniture had to wait.

But while we're no longer using horses and oxen to break ground, we're still doing the same thing as our ancestors: working land, caring for animals, enjoying sunsets and watching herds of deer run through the bottom ground while our dogs sleep obliviously through the whole ordeal. 

Maybe not that last part.