Animal Farm Memoir

My parents enjoy telling friends and family that they originally purchased me from the hospital gift shop but had “no room in the inn” and therefore during my early childhood I was raised in a sheep stall in the barn. Though to this day I am unsure whether this story is valid as my father is yet to present the lost hospital gift shop receipt, it is still true that I have spent all of my life in an agricultural environment. When my parents moved from California to Idaho, they purchased a 40-acre farm in south Nampa as it was the perfect location for my dad to start his large animal vet practice and to raise myself and my two sisters. Farming was a new venture as my parents both grew up in urban environments in southern California where they

Since I was able to talk, walk, and control my own bladder I’ve worked on our family farm. From a very young age, I was given responsibilities from feeding the chickens and the sheep, to assisting with weeding or moving irrigation pipe. Moving irrigation pipe was a great experience in building a work ethic and was also the center of great sibling rivalry and dispute. To move the irrigation lines took the cooperation of both siblings but it was very common for an argument to break out and for one sibling to be left in the field to wait for either another sibling or parent to help finish moving the pipe. Though as we all grew older we better understood the importance of completing the tasks we were responsible for as they had direct implications on the success of the farm. Irrigation pipe had to move daily to ensure the pastures had provisional growth to feed the sheep and cattle so they could later be sold for

To the uneducated modern consumer, their food comes from the grocery store and they have little to no understanding of the time and effort it takes to produce a single crop. No longer is growing food the basic process of planting a seed, watering, providing sunlight, and then harvesting; today modern agriculture is much more complex. There are the processes of sustaining soil nutrition by applying fertilizers or implementing cover crops. Aerial drones are now used to survey fields and evaluate nitrogen levels in the soil and take thermal readings of crops to detect stress from possible disease or lack of hydration within the plants. The capital necessary to farm is extensive: tractors, seeders, tillers, cultipackers, sprayers, combines, manure spreaders, trucking services, fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and the cost of purchasing seed. To ensure a farm can sustain itself and produce a profit growth is necessary. According to the 2012 USDA Census of Agriculture, 97% of farms in the US are family owned and operated, and the average farm size is 434 acres (“What’s the Average Size of American Farms?”). Farming is a grueling and laborious career with no control over profit from crop sales and mother nature can take everything a farmer has worked for away in a sudden moment. There are far more careers that ensure greater profit, less risk, and take less time; however; there is no job more fulfilling. Farmers are some of the most passionate