If I were ever given the opportunity to approach this farm differently, would I? Of course I would. Who wouldn’t if you could start over with the knowledge you have now?
But think about this for a second.
What if you met someone before you bought a farm. Someone who spent years chasing a career, moving all over the country, trying to prove her worth. Someone who started a small family early in life with her college sweetheart, later married that same college sweetheart, and now here they are going on 26 years together.
What if that person told you she once believed her husband’s dream of owning a farm was just a phase. A distant idea that would eventually pass.
Then one day she was faced with a choice. Continue chasing her career across the country or follow the love of her life and their now young adult son back to the roots she once worked so hard to get away from.
If you met that person before you bought a farm, would you listen to her story? Would it be worth your time?
Hi there. My name is Jamie.
And I’m the spouse who wasn’t fully bought into my husband’s farm dream.
I was raised believing that in order to be valuable, other people needed to see your hard work and be impacted by it. And never, I mean never, ask anyone for help.
So what better place to prove that than the corporate America rat race?
Here I am, fifteen years deep into that world.
Now don’t get me wrong. Corporate America is the reason we’ve been able to do many of the things we do today. The catch is that most of those things happen nights and weekends.
Early in our relationship my husband talked about wanting to live and work on his own farm someday. I honestly just wrote it off. Life kept moving. Debt kept piling up. We bought things we didn’t need. Truthfully, a lot of that was me.
My husband was a penny pincher. I was the one hiding new clothes in the closet and making two or three Starbucks runs a day.
Career opportunities eventually took us to different parts of the country. From the outside it looked great. New jobs. New cities. New houses.
But a lot of it was smoke and mirrors. And honestly, that’s how it usually is when you really look closely at people’s lives.
Every time I landed a new job I told my husband this one would be the job of a lifetime. In reality, each one added more stress and took more time away from my family. Not necessarily because the job demanded it, but because I felt like I had to constantly prove my worth.
That was my struggle. And in many ways it still is.
Each move followed the same pattern. I would have a mandatory start date so I moved first and lived out of a hotel. My husband stayed behind, packed the house, sold it, took care of our son, and then moved everything to our new home. He unpacked it all while I was off trying to prove my value somewhere else.
Looking back now, it’s wild to realize that I was worth my weight in gold at home all along.
So yes, that part I would absolutely do differently.
I wouldn’t have given more than my fair share to corporate America. I would have leaned more into my husband’s hopes and dreams. Maybe our marriage would have been stronger back then.
But here we are now, six years into farm life.
We both still work our corporate jobs, but we’re much more intentional with our time. We give 110 percent between 8 AM and 4 PM CST. Before and after those hours, our dream life kicks in.
The first four years of this farm were really about learning how to work together again. In many ways, we were rebuilding our marriage.
Here’s the harsh realization that came when we moved back to Iowa. Our amazing son had just graduated high school. He was starting his own path in life, and living with us wasn’t part of that path.
That hit me hard.
While I was dealing with regrets from the past, I was also trying to figure out how to support my husband in a world I knew nothing about.
We navigated farm life blindly.
I’m not a deeply religious person, but I do believe in the power of prayer. I believe we are given choices in life that lead us down different paths. And I do believe God is real.
I think this farm was one of those choices.
For my husband, that choice actually started years earlier when he volunteered to help with the Extreme Home Makeover project in 2006.
Our situation may not look like a typical farm purchase, but the learning process has been exactly the same. The house doesn’t make things easier. If anything, it makes things a little more complicated.
My husband’s first goal was simply to make the outside of the property functional. We already knew the inside of the house would require expensive repairs. Our plan was to build income streams from the land first and focus on the house later.
He carved out a space on the property for the garden.
At that time our education came from what we jokingly call YouTube University. We were learning from gardeners and homesteaders online who were doing similar things.
What we didn’t realize at the time was how much location matters.
We are in rural Iowa. Many of the influencers we were learning from were in southern climates and in much more populated areas.
Trust me, there is a difference.
We learned that pretty quickly.
We were brand new to the community and people didn’t know us. I was hesitant about joining a local farmers market with produce we had just learned how to grow, but my husband pushed the idea forward.
The next year and a half was spent simply introducing ourselves to our community.
That’s when things started to change.
We began learning about programs like Practical Farmers of Iowa. We started getting to know our local NRCS representatives. We connected with other farmers in our area.
Getting involved locally was far more valuable than watching someone on the internet grow vegetables in a completely different climate and market.
So if you asked me what I would do differently, it would be this.
I would get out of my comfort zone sooner. I would get involved in my local community earlier. I would seek out programs that bring farmers together and start building those relationships right away.
Learn what opportunities exist in your area.
And eventually become the kind of person someone else can reach out to when they have questions.
Did you catch how I didn’t mention anything about growing practices or specific recommendations on farming itself?
That was intentional.
Because what I have realized is this lifestyle is not one size fits all.
That is where your local community comes in.
Take bits and pieces from the amazing people around you and incorporate those lessons into your farm in a way that works for you.
For example, do you know how many gardening tips we’ve picked up from people in our local community that we now use on our land? The way we grow tomatoes came from a local gardener who has been doing it for decades and doesn’t have a YouTube channel.
Find those people.
Trust me, you will thank me later.
Moral of the Story – Success isn’t always found in the career you chased. Sometimes it’s found in the life you almost overlooked
❤️✌🏼-Jamie
Moral Of The Story 