Farm families are a breed unto themselves, and yet no two are exactly the same. My wife and I have decided to parent our kids using three pillars we agreed upon before there was ever any twinkling in anyone’s eye. 

Our pillars are simple: Faith, Family and Farming. We’ve been working on getting our wills in order because that’s a thing you’re supposed to do no matter how bad it makes you feel to talk about it. Throughout the ensuing discussions, however, we kept coming back to what was important for our kids and likewise ourselves, should we remain healthy and living as we certainly hope to. 

Leaving aside the darker side of things, it remains a core subject of our lifestyle and parenting to farm with our kids. We have the added blessing that aside from our own farm, the grandparents’ dairy farm is just next door. So to keep our young minds busy and engaged in all things agriculture, Monday nights have become barn nights with Poppa (Grandpa). 

The barn means all kinds of other things to me personally, because it was essentially where I courted my wife. For all you guys wondering how to impress a farm girl, the key is doing her chores with her. But now we’re onto other stages of life, and our boys are in the barn to spark their own farming passions. And to that end, there are few better chores for a three- and five-year-old than feeding calves, especially bottle feeding. 

We had a few heifers freshen over the last week or so, and with that of course comes new babies. Sure, petting the big cows is fun, and helping to clean their udders and scrape down poop into the gutter will capture a little boy’s attention. But you hand one of them a milk bottle the size of his own torso and watch him hang on for dear life as a thirsty calf clamps onto that thing till it’s drained. Then you’ve got a captive if not deliriously giggling audience.

There seemed to be a rash of bulls being born for a while, but now we’ve begun a run of heifers once again, which bodes well for the future of the milking operation. The baby heifers get named as part of their recordkeeping, whereas the bulls only get named if they are going to be kept for breeding purposes. The guiding rule for naming calves has always been to use the first letter of the name of the mother, i.e. a cow named Peanut would have a calf named Pistachio. They all have tags and such to further identify them, but what farmer who works intimately with his cows wants to call a cow by their number over their name?

It has the added benefit of making the boys giggle to say the new names, which also tend to be foods like peanut, pistachio or quinoa. Yes there is a “Q” line of cows, and I fear the day they start breaking out the dictionary to name them. 

The way out here we keep ourselves busy, because the work we do is also the pleasures we seek. Idle hands may be the devil’s workshop, but also true of idle hands is that they lack discovery and imagination. In the barn, there is an abundant surplus of things to be learned, seen, discovered and achieved. I hope when our kids are older they find the same problems I have, and not enough time to explore all the wonderful options God has given them. Farming is a universe of exploration. It may have been among the first frontiers, but its bounds are endless.