Frustrations and Hope

It's 7:45 in the morning.  So far, I have gotten Mac off to school, the bedding stripped, a load of laundry done and on the line.  The animal chores are done.  I will be helping my neighbor with a chore and he will be moving my chicken coop and a hedge post.  This afternoon I will do the most dreaded of all tasks in my life..... bill paying.  There is not a single time that I pick up the checkbook that I don't think about how important it is to have the mortgage paid off.  Our mortgage is killing us.  It is indeed a death pledge.

Which brings me to.....

Somehow this weekend, Mac and I got into talking about how agriculture functions.  What it must do to make the shift to more conscientious farming practices.  How the huge farms will become unsustainable.  How the shift will be from one farmer raising nine hundred feeder cattle to a hundred small farmers each putting out nine feeder cattle.  He was with me until I used our acreage size as an example.  Then he became kind of angry.  "And what's that going to earn you?"  I gave him a range and it should earn a minimum of ten thousand, more in good markets.  He responded with, "That's ten percent of the income you should be making!  How are you going to come up with the other ninety?!"

A hundred thousand  per year!

I suppose I deserved his ridiculousness by engaging in that conversation.

I work hard and there is so much to do.  There is so much hope!  There is such a future to be had and lurking in this morass, is a miracle that will someday allow me to pay off the mortgage, to fulfill that death pledge and for us to have a good life, but I think I should probably do it alone.  It couldn't happen  if he tried to "help".

Louie