I am so blessed to have two amazing daughters that bring laughter, joy and full hearts to anyone they meet. Kinley and Kensi love being out with our animals, especially our steers. Kinley is the girl who loves feeding them and watching them from the bunk while Kensi likes to stand and talk to them. I’m telling you, if you haven’t seen a small girl talk to a 1300-pound steer, you are truly missing out. It’s the most wholesome thing you’ll probably ever see.
Both of my girls love the outdoors and are growing into this amazing space of appreciating where their food comes from and how it’s done. If you’ve read previous blog posts you know that I come from California and even though I lived there, we still had chickens in our backyard. In fact, Kinley’s first farm animals ever were those chickens who lived with us in California, and we moved them with us here to the farm. We had to get them vet tested and go through all the hoops to get them here but I’m happy to say that we still have two of those hens living in our flock! They are about a year older than Kensi and are still so very special to her sister. Both of my girls love tending to the chickens, caring for bottle calves (or other bottle-fed babies in the springtime), and competing in fair projects with their pigs.
Moving back here has always been our family dream. We wanted to be together to raise our girls on the farm and truly work together as a team. I was gone a lot with my job in California, and after intensive recovery from my Breast Cancer preventative surgeries, I knew I wanted us to be together, to be present, and to teach them valuable lessons along the way. We wanted to raise them in the country where they have an appreciation for the rural way of life, where their food comes from and the work that goes into it. It was important to us then (and is still important to us now) that they were raised alongside cousins and grandparents and were raised in a small community that is super supportive of them, us and agriculture. We are so blessed to be here and to be living this lifestyle; it’s something I will never, ever, take for granted.
My hope for them is that they have an appreciation for agriculture and truly become advocates for it. Whether they ultimately choose to come back to the farm or have a career in agriculture makes no difference to me, we just want them to understand it, and be people who have influence in our community.
These girls are the future and I make it a mission of mine to educate them on what we do and why we do it, to love them through the hard times, to love them through the incredibly happy times, and to be proud of everything they overcome.