A Team Celebration

This week my husband, Mike, and I celebrated thirty-two years of marriage. Like many farm couples, we are a team and depend on each other to balance our strengths and weaknesses. During the past three-decades, ours has been a learning and a “leaning on” experience. When things got tough as we started our farm life together, we discovered how to manage the challenges and support one another to make things work out. Farming helped grow our family stronger. Walking away from our partnership was never an option. We were in it for better or worse!

Both of us learned about commitment from our parents. My folks celebrated their sixtieth wedding anniversary last month. Mike’s parents had celebrated sixty years together before his mother died two years ago. Both sets of parents were farmers. They worked together to raise children, crops and cattle. My folks are still on the farm where my sister and I were raised. It has been a part of their life and livelihood for more than half a century. They, like other farm families, know what it means to F-A-R-M and stay committed to that goal.

Before meeting Mike, I knew I wanted to farm and hoped to find someone who shared that dream. I was working for the Soil Conservation Service in Adams County when I met my future father-in-law who operated a bull dozer, building conservation practices on the land and digging out farm ponds for irrigating orchards. After a few months, I finally got to meet my future husband on a fruit farm owned by former Pennsylvania Farm Bureau President Guy Donaldson. (He still takes credit for getting the two of us together!) After exchanging a nod and a wave, I kept surveying the diversion terrace that this young high-lift operator was carving out of the hillside. That was the beginning of our work together in agriculture.

I literally fell for Mike while he was building a pond a few weeks later. I was unloading the surveying equipment off the back of the USDA pickup truck, and jumped down off the tailgate onto what looked like solid ground. It turned out to be crusted over mud that was more than ankle deep. My work boots stuck tight in the oozing mud and I went plummeting to my knees, none too gracefully. I still cringe when I think of the impression I made! Thankfully Mike wasn’t looking for perfection or coordination, and we started dating soon after that pond was finished.

After a year and a half of getting to know one another, Mike and I decided to tie the knot. While we are different in many ways, we are alike in our commitment to the land. It hasn’t always been easy. Saving up money to put a down payment on a farm seemed to take forever. While we were working on that, we rented a farm where we learned the art of barn building in Wayne County. We had moved there when I was transferred by SCS to Lackawanna County to become the first woman District Conservationist in Pennsylvania.

We needed a barn to stall my horses in, and our landlord gave Mike the go ahead to use an overgrown orchard and pasture, lay up a field stone foundation, and gather old barn wood from a building that had fallen together years before we moved there. It was our first major project as a young couple. That barn is still standing on the farm now owned and operated by our landlord’s son. Instead of horses, however, it holds apples harvested from the fields that were cleared and reclaimed by my horses, Mike and me. The worn out orchard where my horses spent countless hours chewing down hardhack and brush, has been reinvigorated with new trees that are bearing fruit and helping to feed another farm family.

There have been many stories, both happy and sad, along the way as Mike and I travel life’s path as a farm team. With meager resources but lots of determination, we have taken our desire to farm and channeled it into a game plan that has guided our footsteps since the day we walked down the aisle on October 11, 1975. Together we have turned dreams into reality, and like our parents, have raised a child, cattle and crops. We are Finding A Real Meaning with every new day --- celebrating the past and awaiting the future, and tackling the work at hand as a team.

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