Five Years In: How the Farm and My Business Grew Up Together

July 15th marks five years since we moved onto the farm.

Six weeks earlier, we'd driven up a driveway lined with big, beautiful trees, looked at each other, and said out loud, "Oh shit... this is it, isn't it?"

At that point we'd spent about five weeks technically homeless after our house sold due because thanks to COVID we entered that super hot housing market of 2021 where properties were selling so fast we couldn’t even get a viewing. We had a toddler, two puppies, absolutely no farming experience, and an alarming amount of confidence. By the time we found this place, we were ready to make a fast decision.

Our realtor, an old farmer, smiled and told us things moved at a different pace out here.

He was right.

Five years later, I think about that conversation a lot.

The farm and the business have grown up together over those five years, mostly by accident, entirely on purpose. I've written before about the systems side of that story. This is the other half: the parts that were just plain ridiculous.

Blind Hubris and a Blank Canvas

Year one was a blank canvas, and we filled it in fast. Chickens, turkeys, sheep, pigs, all added in quick succession, with the blind hubris of people who had never cared for livestock or maintained an acreage property in their lives.

Take the turkeys. Year one, we raised three of them for fun, because we were new and figured why not try everything at once. I do not recommend this approach, but we learned a lot.

Year two was a complete disaster. We lost money, couldn't sell a single bird, and ended up with a freezer full of scrawny turkeys nobody wanted, including us. Year three, we actually nailed it and broke even, which felt like winning the lottery at the time. Year four, we turned an honest profit and started planning real upgrades to the setup.

From the outside, year two looked like proof we should quit. For about an hour, I felt that way too. But none of it was actually wasted. It was four years of very expensive, very feathery data collection, and it's exactly how you'd expect a small business systems approach to livestock to go: ugly first, then workable, then, eventually, good.

The Skunks Did Not Sign a Lease

One spring, an entire family of skunks moved in underneath the chicken coop. Not a rogue bachelor passing through, a whole household, fully settled.

It took weeks to evict them. Weeks of figuring out how many we were actually dealing with, waiting for the right moments to act, and slowly, carefully plugging every hole we could find underneath that coop so they couldn't just tunnel back in the second we turned our backs. It was not fast and it was not glamorous.

We finally sealed the place up, declared victory, and got a hot minute of peace before a second wave of skunks decided the space behind our shop looked promising. This time we at least knew what we were dealing with, but "slightly better prepared" still meant it took a little over a week to sort out.

Through both invasions, the chickens kept right on laying eggs like nothing was happening. The coop routine didn't care how many skunks had opinions about our property line. It just kept running.

That's when it really landed for me: the point of having systems in place isn't that nothing ever goes sideways. It's that your operation keeps functioning regardless of how stinky things get, literally, in this case, twice.

You cannot skunk-proof your whole life. You can build things sturdy enough that a skunk moving in, or an entire second skunk family, doesn't take the whole show down with it.

The Turkey Brooder We Tolerated for Way Too Long

For a couple of years, our turkey brooder was fine. Not good, just fine. The doors were in an awkward spot, the wire mesh needed replacing, and cleaning it out was its own special kind of unpleasant every single time.

We never fixed any of it. We just quietly tolerated it, season after season, because "fine" was technically true.

Then the flock grew, and "fine" stopped being fine. Every inefficiency we'd been shrugging off for two years turned into an actual problem, all at once, during the exact week we had zero spare time to deal with it.

That's usually how it goes. The thing you've been tolerating doesn't quietly go away. It waits for the worst possible moment to become urgent. If you've got a version of the turkey brooder somewhere in your own business, something that's "fine" but definitely not good, theSystems Gap Quiz is a decent place to go find it before it finds you.

The Great Kitten Takeover

At the tail end of this last winter, our barn cat had a litter, and the vanity drawer in the cabin bathroom became a full-time kitten maternity ward for six weeks before it ever got installed as an actual sink.

I looked it up. A group of kittens is technically called a kindle. I would like to formally propose that in this specific case, "chaos" is more accurate.

They graduated from the drawer to the cat tree, where they spent a solid month doing their best to make it structurally unsound while reenacting scenes from The Lion King. The curtains survived, mostly through luck. And every single one of them went on to pass barn cat academy with flying colours, leaving a proud little collection of mice on the porch as proof.

None of that was in the plan. None of it needed to be. Some parts of running this place were never going to be systemized, and honestly, those are usually the parts I'd miss the most if they disappeared.

What Five Years of Small Business Systems Actually Built

None of the good stuff, the skunks staying out of the actual coop, the turkey years finally turning a profit, even having the bandwidth to laugh about a kitten-filled bathroom drawer, happened because we got lucky. It happened because somewhere in year two or three, we stopped just reacting and started building routines that could hold.

Systems don't remove the surprises. They just mean the surprises don't take the whole operation down with them anymore. I've written more about exactly how that shift happened over inanother post, if you want the more serious version of this story.

The People Who Got Us Here

None of this happened alone, and I don't want to pretend it did.

Our neighbours knew we were newbs from day one and took us under their wing anyway, saving us more times than I can count and never once failing to answer the phone for one of my seemingly dumb questions.

My clients didn't mind my chaos, which gave me the courage to be unapologetic about the life I was building alongside the business. My mastermind, my weekly business brain session with a small group of brilliant women, has kept me focused, grounded and talked me off more business ledges than I can count.

Being your own boss means you get to choose your co-workers, and I have built the most amazing roster of kickass business owners who pop in and out of my co-working sessions. We're in the trenches together, doing the unsexy but oh so necessary business work. Sometimes it's admin or bookkeeping, sometimes it's marketing and accountability, sometimes it's deep work on exciting projects. Doesn't matter which, we get to do it together, and it has made all the difference.

Beverlee Rasmussen atSystems Business Coach gave me the systems foundation I've built my entire business on, and with it, the life I actually wanted. And my coach,Lindsay Dotzlaf, keeps shining a light on where my energy actually needs to go, personal development, instead of where I want it to go, business development, because we both know which one has to happen first.

Steady Progress, Not Grand Plans

In April, after a winter that overstayed its welcome, I finally got the hammock back out. I cannot overstate what that meant after months of running on spite and coffee. That's the kind of milestone five years buys you: noticing the hammock instead of just noticing everything that's broken.

These days I spend my mornings feeding our bottle calf, herding turkeys from the barn to their teenage playpen and wandering through the garden, coffee in hand, checking on all the progress.

For the farm, it's steady forward progress from here. No grand plans. We'd love to slowly add cattle, a steer or two to grow out, maybe a mama down the road. Beyond that, we've spent five years getting this place to a manageable point, and now we get to shift into something closer to maintenance mode. Less scrambling, more time actually enjoying what we built.

If you want more of this, the chasing-your-tail years, the skunks, the turkey math, the systems that finally hold, I write about it every week. Join the mailing list here and it'll land straight in your inbox.

Here's to the next five.