Burdening Future Generations: Why a Small Farm Builds for the Long Run

I've been a little hyped up lately.

Knicks winning a title. An unbelievable pace of Half Beef Share sales. A record-setting first cut hay season.

It's been a fun stretch for your favorite online grass-fed beef salesman.

But the day-to-day reality of the farm doesn't stop just because we're on a heater.

So today we're replacing a fence post.

Not just any fence post; the gate post for the main gate to our barnyard.

A gate post built to outlive me

Last year we got tired of our bent, crooked old gate and I went out and got us a nice heavy duty one.

This was a great idea in theory. We were going to have a big, straight, nice gate and maybe even put an opener on it one day when we're ballin'.

But in practice the gate was way too heavy for the existing post and it's been slowly pulling itself over since Day 1.

It drags in the gravel when you open and close it. There's a big groove there now.

It annoys the crap out of us, and personally I despise the fact that when you come here to pick up an order (or come to work) the first thing you deal with is this crooked annoying gate.

So today our long, moderately annoying, nightmare comes to an end.

Today we are installing the biggest, honkingest 10' long, 200 pound, 8" x 8" post we could get our hands on. Digging a 4 foot hole, pounding it another 2 feet, and backfilling the whole thing with hundreds of pounds of crushed stone.

We are going MAXIMUM overkill.

I intend to have this gate absolutely plumb and straight forever. I intend to make replacing this post an absolute nightmare for Juniper one day when I am too old to be involved in the process.

This is the fun part of being a farmer

Building something up. Burdening future generations with things that were built TOO well.

For the last 80 years, generations of farmers have saddled the next with debt, terrible business models, and worn out land that's increasingly chemical dependent.

I'm not blaming those folks. They had basically no choice. This is all by design.

Gutting the American agricultural industry has produced exactly what the massive corporations who run our country want. Worse food that's getting more expensive and making everyone sick. More money spent on petrochemicals and machinery and pharmaceuticals. Farm land (that sits on top of minerals and water) consolidated in fewer and fewer hands. And a shrinking class of pesky farm folk who can grow their own food and fix their own stuff and opt-out of the Brave New World they are engineering.

(For the structural numbers on what that's actually doing to family farms, here's why American farms are disappearing at 77 per day.)

What "they" hate to see

You know those "they hate to see us coming" memes?

Well they truly do hate to see a small farm (like us) succeeding.

The corporate-approved status quo is decay. Consolidation. Ubiquitous ultra-processed slop.

If you insist on eating meat, they want it to be bland and watery and inflamed and full of junk.

Couldn't be us. Couldn't be you.

(For more on how that bland, watery, inflamed beef actually ends up in your grocery cart, here's why grocery store beef is watery and who's profiting from it.)

Building for a better future, one share at a time

Because of you, we get to build for the long term. We get to do things the right way. I get to saddle my daughters with immovable fence posts and soil that's alive and a waitlist that will surely be years long by the time we get there. (This farm is our whole life. We even got married here.)

Sometimes that looks like installing a fence post that would survive a direct tornado touchdown.

And sometimes it's more complicated stuff. Investing in years of soil health improvements, searching out cattle genetics that work on grass, and working closely with a small butcher to nail everything from cut list to packing to a proper dry-aging. And sometimes it's buying 50 steers at once, the biggest swing of our farming careers.

Every share that leaves the farm (through that new, plumb, indestructible gate 😉) is what lets us keep working at it, keep improving, keep building for a better future.

Oh, and we truly are on a heater, so if you want to stock the freezer with a year's worth of beef you can actually trust, and put your money toward the kind of farm they hate to see win, you can reserve a Beef Share with a free chest freezer here.

P.S. Now I'm sitting here fantasizing about gate openers. Not having to get in and out of the truck to open and close that thing 20 times on a busy day will be the ultimate "we've made it" moment on a small farm. It's important to set attainable goals.