PIVOT!

We were scheduled to take the pigs to the processors on Friday. Come Thursday night, the pigs were not walking into the trailer. For a larger farm this may not be an issue. They may have farm hands or chutes or loading pens. Here at WRF though, if the pigs don’t voluntarily walk onto the trailer then they don’t get on the trailer. Time to pivot.

Sunday morning we’d planned a family fun day to a local museum. We pulled up the website bright eyed and bushy tailed Sunday morning only to discover that, oops, the museum didn’t open until noon! We’d thought it opened at 10AM and had planned our whole day around that. Time to pivot.

For the last thirteen years, I (Sarah) have built a career as a retail manager. Over the years, this career has allowed us to start our farm, allowed Kenneth to quit his job, and many other things. Recently though it became clear that we were at a crossroads in life. If I continued to work full time we would be unable to scale the farm further. Time to pivot.

Pivot (verb): to completely change the way in which one does something.

Here we are making the biggest pivot yet. As of August 7th, we will be farming full time without an off-the-farm salary to sustain us. We are both excited and terrfied, exhilerated and stressed, empowered and overwhelmed. To say this is a literal dream come true would not be an exageration. We’ve been working toward this point since we got married ten years ago.

While our ducks may not all be in a row as we’d imagined they would be when we lept into self-employment, we’re still choosing to take the leap. To give this endeaver 120% of both of us. To model bravery and entrepreneurship for our kids. To try and make a dream come true.

We’ll be working longer hours and raising more animals and trying lots of ideas to see what works. We’ll also be sharing our journey here. The good and the bad. The success and the failure. Stay tuned there is much more to come!