This week I’ve been wrapping up 2024, catching up on bookkeeping and things like that as the spring 2025 nursery season will hit us just after New Year’s Day.
I woke up with a mental list of my top farm failures of 2024. My mind quickly rattled off 10-12 of them and started sorting them into a top 5 list.
While the coffee maker squeezed out a cup of joe I was forcing myself to make a list of things that were successful on the farm in 2024.
And then I stopped in the kitchen, holding my cup of coffee, and zoomed out the lens.
In the last 2 years, with no farming experience whatsoever, in a non-farming area, somewhere we didn’t know a soul when we arrived, not coming from a farming family or background, without outside investment– Kristen and I have built a freaking farm from the ground up out of nothing. We’re not there yet. But we’re on the right path.
It’s easy for my mind to focus on the negative. I can’t tell you how many times this year I’ve looked at Kristen or Cody and said, “Well, that didn’t work.” Learning how to grow all of these different things, how to market our farm products, how to sell stuff… that’s full of failure.
But the overarching thing is that we’re building a farm from scratch having no idea what we’re doing. It’s a heckuva thing.
In 2005, I learned from the Google how to build what became YMX. In 2010, I remember turning to Google to learn how to turn a Word doc book manuscript into an actual book. So it’s no wonder that in 2024 we’re learning how to build this new business mostly from Google, YouTube, and failing our way forward.
Yesterday, I was listening to a podcast about farming and the guy being interviewed was talking about how he wasn’t ready to jump into his farm full-time. He listed a whole bunch of money reasons why, how he didn’t want to risk his kids financial future, or his retirement, and how he hoped to go full-time on the farm once he’d secured all of his financial goals. To him, the risk was just too great and you could hear the subtext of not wanting to fail his kids.
As I listened I thought… but what the hell are you teaching your kids? Those kids won’t care that dad has a fat retirement or that they’ve got a giant college savings if they saw their dad be a weenie to a job he didn’t like his whole dang life. Maybe what he needed to teach his kids is that it’s better to try and fail than it is to do the safe thing all the time? Had he considered that?
I know I do. Yes, our kids might see their mom and dad fail at trying to start a farm in the middle of nowhere with no idea what they are doing. But I hope what they see is that their parents are willing to take big risks to lean into their dreams and passions, too. For me, that’s worth the risk.
So yes, it’s easy for me to look back at 2024 and reflect on all of the failures, the things I want to do better in 2025. But I forced myself to make a list of successes in 2024, too.
And it’s one heckuva list.
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