What is Hobby Farming?
One of the questions I have had with my new site is what is hobby farming? Wikipedia defines a hobby farm as a “small farm that is maintained without expectation of being a primary source of income.” Yeah that pretty much sums it up. We are definitely not quitting our day job any time soon! All we really sell at this point are eggs, so we’re not raking anything in but chicken poo.
Don’t get me wrong there are ways to make money with a hobby farm. Just google, “how to make money on a hobby farm”, and a million sites will come up, but we simply have too many mouths to feed to offer our harvest for sale. Also the consensus around here is that our food tastes too good to sell, and it simply would not be worth everything we put into it to sell it. But if you stay close, buy eggs or attend church with us, chances are you will get the benefit of our garden one day. I’ve been known to show up to bible study with a laundry basket full of cucumbers, or offer last years sweet potatoes (that are still good btw) to make room for the new crop. It totally embarrasses my kids, but I consider that embarrassment my job.
I thought about writing about some of the pros and cons of hobby farming for anyone that was wondering what it’s all about. And if you do have any questions, send them my way!
Pros of Hobby Farming
One obvious pro of having a hobby farm is being more self-sufficient. The more you raise of your own the less you have to buy. There is a little security in having a steady stream of food coming in, or preserved from the previous year, to hold you over if the world suddenly goes crazy (like this past March!) I have never been to the grocery store and not found food! Now we don’t produce toilet paper on our hobby farm, so we aren’t completely self-sustained, but overall we were in a pretty good position. (Actually we were able to trade our fresh eggs for the much needed paper goods! Thanks Melissa!) The thing that popped into my head when it seemed like we would have limited store trips and availability of groceries was that we could survive on eggs, sweet potatoes & last year’s green beans. I wouldn’t earn many best dinner awards, but we would survive.
Another perk of the hobby farm are the lessons we learn on the job. Being able to show my kiddos, and their friends, where food comes from gives them a bit of perspective. They learn the value of hard work, and a job well done. They know what it takes to grow food, and in turn makes them less wasteful. Another great lesson for us all is God’s design in the things around us, and also things that represent sin. We actually named one of our prickly weeds that try to invade our gardens the wicked weed! I’ll never forget when my son had his preschool friend over and we ate one of the chickens for dinner. He went home and told his mom that the Barton’s eat their pets. So maybe the lesson was lost on that one.
Last pro I’ll talk about, although there are so many, is how much better tasting and more nutritious garden fresh veggies and farm fresh eggs are than their store bought counterpart. There is really no comparison between a fresh vine ripened tomato, strawberry, or fill in the blank here, than anything you can buy in the store. A farmers market might come close, but typically you will pay for the difference in taste and nutrition there.
Cons of Hobby Farming
So sounds like all sunshine and rainbows right? Well let me cover some of the cons of having a hobby farm before you go out and order your first goat. My biggest con is having the garden tell me what to do and when to do it. Ask my husband, kids, or even parents for that matter, I not a big fan of being told what to do. Summer vacations need to be planned at a time that makes sense to leave the land. You don’t want to leave for a week when all the plants are producing, that would be a huge waste of spring and early summer efforts to miss out on the big show of the harvest. I’ll never forget one year we missed a group camping trip because we had meat birds that needed tending to and were close to being processed. And it almost happened the following year except I put my foot down and we processed all the chickens in one week so we could go. So instead of planning and packing for our camping trip we were boiling water, pulling feathers out and filling the freezer with fresh chicken. It was not a fun week. So you can’t just go out of town on a whim. You have to prepare a bit, maybe hire a chicken sitter, and make sure the timing makes sense.
The other obvious con of having a hobby farm is the amount of work that goes into maintaining it. Very little magically happens on its own around here. There is something amazing about planting seeds, watching them grow, and produce food, but most of the work to accomplish this is by the sweat of our brows. There is definitely a season where there is more work, but there is not really a season that you can take off. If you have animals they are a year-round load of work. Now some crazy people like my husband and mother-in-law love this work, and it’s actually therapeutic for them, but it’s not for everyone. I can usually hear my craft room calling me from the garden. Shockingly, this past summer I found peace in the garden, because as it turns out the kids don’t bug you in the garden for fear of you asking them to join you. It only took 9 years of having a garden to transform the work into peace. I guess I was on the slow path. I just get a little chuckle when folks visit and say how peaceful things are out here, and I think, yeah when all the work is done it’s peaceful!
What’s in the box?
And the final thought, not sure if it’s a pro or con, but just a funny story that I probably would not have found myself a character in if we didn’t have a hobby farm. After coming back from weeding the strawberry patch I discovered a shoebox in the middle of the driveway marked: “Warning, not for the weak hearted. Property of Alex Barton.”
No one was in sight. I couldn’t help myself. I had to go for the bait. I fully expected something to jump out at me. I slowly opened the box to find…
Chicken feet! Eww! And not just any chicken feet…rooster feet. Mean rooster feet, and after I got over the disgust I was overjoyed. See this rooster had been tormenting me on my visits to the ducklings. I have to walk through the chicken area to get to the duck area, and each time, armed with a stick, I felt like I was taking my life into my hands because of this rooster and his reign of terror. Here’s to chicken soup!
I hope you learned a bit about hobby farm with this post. So where are you at? Are you a hobby farmer, or maybe an aspiring one? How did you get your start, or what’s holding you back from starting? Do you want to learn more about hobby farming, or are you content reading about us sweating it out in the SC sun & red clay? Drop me a comment below!
