I've never thought of myself as a farmer and it has never really been in my list of aspirations to become one.  I've always been pretty well set on a life with books and computers. I had brief periods of time in middle school when I thought it'd be great to train horses (a lofty goal for someone who had never ridden one), but other than that my farm ties were non-existent. The closest thing I had on my life's resumé was gardening and that was just something my family had always done. I was quite content just growing vegetables and fruit in my backyard garden.

Then we had CoVid and bird flu in the same year. I didn't see the supply shortages that everyone else saw  (other than toilet paper) until much later into the pandemic. Suddenly there were large, open spots on the shelves that didn't seem to have any rhyme or reason. Factories were opening back up, but there was a shortage of materials and employees in those plants. The price of chicken meat doubled and eggs almost quadrupled. It was easy enough to leave these out of the diet for a while, but suddenly the substitutes either skyrocketed in price or disappeared from the shelves.

I started watching more YouTube in my free time. The catch phrase on one of the channels really struck a chord with me: "You don't have to be self-sufficient in everything. Just be self-sufficient in something...". What could I do to be more self-sufficient, and less dependent on this crippled supply chain? The obvious answer was the food I was already growing in my garden, but what else could I do? Saving my friends and family a few dollars on tomato and strawberry products seemed like a drop in the bucket. I started looking at more things I could grow or do and that lead to different plants, bees, and chickens. I read entire papers written on growing peanuts, I attended lectures about the feasibility of greenhouses in the Northern winter, and took a class on raising bees.

I'm still not a farmer, but I've spent a lot of time amassing knowledge and finding a direction to move in. I've decided on things that I want and are important to me (chickens, bees, new plants) and am figuring out what a future with those things might look like. It's quiet in the winter, but I'm excited to start doing some experiments and see how they go.