Farming in the age of COVID-19

The past couple of months has been a strange time here at Innisfree, as I know it has been for everyone during this time of social isolation and pandemic outbreak.

What’s been strangest for us is how relatively little our day-to-day lives have changed in the face of these challenges even as we see the world struggling around us. That’s not to say we don’t face challenges, but years ago, my wife and I decided to follow the path of making our farm a smallhold homestead and making that decision has changed our relationship with the greater world.

I am a hermit by nature, so I have been long content not to go out much, and my full-time jobs have been here on the farm since 2008. Since last fall, my wife has been employed full-time by the farm as well, and we have had a long-standing dedication to readiness owing to our relatively rural location and personal experience.

So, when the social distancing came, what ended was the incidental trips we tended to make because we could. Otherwise, the farm carries on as normal. I know one of the challenges so many people face right now is being out of work, but since our money comes in clumps at predictable times of the year, we’re no better or worse off than we might otherwise be.

I’m not saying any of this to boast but rather to observe that we’re realizing that our farm-life choices have proved to be even more robust than we imagined them to be when we made them. It’s not an easy life, and it has required some difficult choices and sacrifices to make happen, but we’re realizing it now more than ever they were actions worth taking.

If anything, I want to put this out there for others to consider. This is a viable life choice if you’re willing to do what it takes to make it happen.

DLH

2 thoughts on “Farming in the age of COVID-19

  1. Hermits live with no one else but themselves. Hermits don’t have wives. I would say a better descrition of yourself would be a self isolationsist but the word, hermit is quicker to write and spell. I’m sure.
    I’ve told you this once before. You’re more like a big, garden gnome. Bear with me. I read a book about gnomes, once. That makes me a gnome theorist. A garden gnome is a misplaced, woodland gnome and you are defintely misplaced. You’re in your own, misplaced woodland paradise slightly altered into a BIG garden.
    Now that that explanation has validity. Let’s go on with the habits of lockdown.
    We too had to pull in our freedom of transport to going to the grocery, once a week. The occasional trip to Lowe’s also had to take place and of course a trip to the gas stations. Nitrile gloves and mask donned with a paint suit, face mask and Israeli gas mask on the back seat if so needed. They’re still there. I even shaved my beard off so my Israeli gas mask would properly adhere to my face. I learned that from you military personel in Kuwait during the several chemical drills during Desert Storm.
    In all honesty after President Trump’s speech, March 23, 2020 enacting national lockdown. I had a totally different feeling toward, coronavirus than I do today, July 18, 2020.
    I thought that crap was going to be on everything and up in the air, everywhere. I wore my mask during each store visit and still do. I couldn’t acquire enough, XL sized, nitrile gloves and where them everywhere I thought I could touch it. I bought a case of toilet paper and every time we went to the grocery. We’d stock up in the four maximum amount of hand sanitizer bottles we could until stock ran out.
    I went to work. Came home and stayed home and stayed home and stayed home. I got laid off for May and apart of June. No one could really go anywhere. If you went to Michigan. You could get a $500 ticket for being there without essential letters. One guy got a $1000 ticket for firing up his boat on his lake for the first time.
    In that time. I internet OD’d watching everything I could putting the pandemic mystery together. Finding majorly valuable information on mostly New York broadcasted Chinese and Indian, Gravitas WION networks. They cut through the BS where American affiliates casted hard details to the wind. But of course, there was Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingram really sticking it to everyone with a tapestry of truth.
    My COVID-19 theory stands at this. A manufactured, coronavirus type designed in Germany was being stored in Maryland. Somehow a sample got sent to Wuhan, China. It got on a meddling doctor and he spread it onto people. It got sent around the world by airplane travellers. No bats about it. However they can be carriers. It was a killer pandemic with lots of media flash. Our economy was dismantled. No telling how it will be rebuilt but all this high technology is producing while a vast part of the population is unemployed and becoming destitute.
    I guess it’s some kind of ploy, mastermind criminals affiliated to the American Democratic Party are using to dethrone President Trump. While he, himself has secret plans to lead a 30 year forced regime?
    Forgive me! I don’t have all the bugs worked out of my theory, yet. That’s why it’s still theory.
    Although, we do not have 200 acres of riverfront property. Things also happened to us as a result of COVID-19 stimulus. Whatever it was was able, I’m sure to help the banks be stonger. Our lives go on in the same, conservative type lifestyle we had. Though being off work as long as I was. It was like, Captain Willard in Apocalyse Now getting soft while Charlie got stronger. Going back to work with less help-as they did not return, 2/3rds of my group back to me- has been physically and psychologically antagonizing.
    I certainly look forward to the dissapperance of covid-19 in November when President Trump is reelected. Beware of a worse, coronavirus way more deadly to be released in 2030.

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