Robbing Peter to pay Paul!

Everybody likes to pay bills, right?  One of the least exciting things about living on a farm is sitting down and doing the budget when your bills could fill a bushel basket, and you have about a quart pail's worth of money to pay with!  I would image that many families right now are experiencing the money squeeze, not just farmers.  But, in a way, it may be just a small insight into what farmer's deal with daily, weekly, monthly, year by year as we work as hard as we can to try to fill that bushel basket faster than it's being emptied!

Farmer Rick has done a great job over the years of keeping machinery running, cattle healthy, and the crops looking good.  When the price you receive is beyond your control, it can be rather defeating at times, but once again, the joy of being a part of this wonderful process of providing good, clean food to those who need it, makes it all worth it.  Farmer Rick and I put money away for rainy days, but with being on a small scale, it's possible.  When someone operates on a much larger scale, I feel for them now.  Trying to cover thousands and thousands of dollars worth of debt with so little to work with can be rather daunting.  I thank God that we chose to stay small, pay down our debt as quickly as we could, and be content with the size of farm that we've been blessed with.  We just heard on the radio a few days ago from a business owner who was being interviewed who supplies farmers.  He said that he'd rather have 50 small farmers paying on their bill as best they could, rather than have one or two large operations that couldn't pay a dime.  That's what he's running into right now.  What was that about economy of scale that the university system has been trying to sell us for the last 30 years?

Well, anyway, enough of my soap box.  Times are tight.  They're tight for everyone.  We just take a day at a time, watch our spending, and live each day by faith.  As I took a ride this afternoon on one of the geldings, it was so apparent again why we love this land so much.  The woods were absolutely silent but for the sound of falling snowflakes.  Taking a quick gallop across the hayfield on the way home filled my lungs with fresh country air and gave the old horse a good stretch of his legs.  Yes!  It can't get any better than this!