Hit By a Farm – Lesbians and Farming – Sounds Familiar!

I grew up in a township just outside a small town in western Pennsylvania. On a lark, my freshmen year in high school, I took vocational agriculture as an elective. Someone ratted me out to the ag teacher by telling him I had narrated school productions when we were all in middle school. He “convinced” me to join FFA (Future Farmers of America) and to be on the demonstration team to compete against other teams for chicken dinners and plastic trophies.

Our team created a demonstration about building an attached solar greenhouse – something that was being done on our school farm. After presenting our demo at a couple of granges for practice, we shockingly won our district and regional competitions in quick succession. We went on to the state state fair with our demo where, surprise, we won the whole shooting match against some pretty stiff competition.

At the end of my freshman year I was named the “Star Greenhand”, the highest honor that can be bestowed on a first year FFA student. During the year I had studied agronomy (soil/dirt) and floriculture (plants and flowers), learned how to arc weld and I had acquired a working knowledge of oxy/acetylene welding. I could drive a tractor, I’d taken good care of a stud bore, I’d skinned a deer, seen a sheep birthed, butchered chickens, grew vegetables, made sausage, apple cider and real maple syrup…you name it.

I left for the county vocational school to study architectural drafting my sophomore year and I never looked back…until I met my wife 3 years ago. Where she grew up, all of those things are very much a part of daily life. Wanting to spend as much time with her as I could, I found myself spending inordinate amounts of time on her family’s small farm. Not only that, my son got involved in 4H – mainly because they have shooting sports, but that’s another story – and started raising animals to show at the annual county fair. This past spring and summer we raised turkeys in our suburban garage – yes, you read that right, turkeys, in our garage! He sold one at the fair for $310.00, thank you very much…not that we didn’t have about a grand invested in raising turkeys… Every time we “walked” the turkeys, the neighbors came out for the show. It’s amazing how many people have never actually seen a live turkey.

There have been many, many interesting experiences on the family farm, especially before my wife’s father passed. Like the time my son got to “help” grandpa castrate a calf right after he’d eaten a big lunch. “The boy” was fine until the old farm dog ate the fruits of their labor…

Across the road from the farm are a couple of dozen acres of land that my wife wants to buy and, in a couple of years, when the boy is out of school, build a home on. Right now the land is heavily wooded and half of it is also a steep hill. Knowing my wife, this will be cleared and, in conjunction with the existing family land, farmed to some degree over the next several years. I guess I was just meant to be a farmer.

With that mindset, I read Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn by Catherine Friend. Wow! I laughed so hard at times that I literally cried…no lie! Though we’re different in many ways, I saw so many parallels between my crazy lesbian life and hers that I just couldn’t believe it. She’s a writer by nature and by trade and that’s the only vocation she wanted. Her partner however had other plans. She wanted to start a farm. Catherine wanted her partner to have her dream and figured she could write anywhere and so the saga began.

If you’ve ever had anything to do with farming, this book will have you alternately laughing out loud, nodding your head in agreement or shaking it and rolling your eyes because you’ve either “been there and done that” or you just can’t believe how dumb city folks can be sometimes. If, on the other hand, you’ve never had anything to do with farming but you want to start, read this book now! If neither category fits you, read this for the humor of it all. You won’t be sorry!