Blogs

April showers bring May flowers. Those spring showers can also bring on some much-needed spring cleaning. Instead of complaining how it’s too wet to do anything outside, turn those rainy days spent indoors into a day of productivity.

I’ve learned over the years from growing up on a dairy farm and being married to a dairy farmer that dairy farmers tend to live in a bubble. We all hang out with other dairy families. We live in rural communities where most people have a connection to agriculture.

For those of you who read my first blog, you know the excitement I had to become a full-time dairy farmer. If you didn’t read it, long story short, I left an excellent job to come back to a physical job with longer hours and less pay, and I couldn’t wait to get started!

“Nobody ever made a difference by being like everybody else.” —PT Barnum, The Greatest Showman

The summer season is rapidly approaching, and our little shop on Main Street in Maquoketa, Iowa, has been preparing!

Time is so valuable; time might be our most valuable possession because it has a finite limit. It can’t be manufactured or remodeled. It is spent and it is gone. While I recuperate from hip replacement surgery, I have some time to reflect on some topics that aren’t as easy to capture on paper regarding farming.

People are pretty crafty when it comes to scheming up ways to receive a check for doing nothing. For the most part, farm kids are above quitting a job and looking for a handout. But with the pool of qualified available talent shrinking and the number of farms depending on labor outside of the immediate family increasing, it makes sense to put some rules in place for dealing with labor.