Read an Excerpt

Excerpt from the introduction:

To become a farmer is to accept the worst sides of chance and laugh at them, and to understand there is no difference between pleasure and pain. Feeling either is proof you are still waltzing among the living.

I love equally the early mornings that get me outdoors before the sun crests the tree line and the early nights tucked in under heavy blankets with my kind dogs. I am too tired and too grateful for their heat to kick them out of the covers. I rejoice in holding baby chicks in my dirty hands and feeling their rapid-fire heartbeats under their baby down. I rejoice in the black soil of spring, the sweat and humidity of summer, and even the downpours that wash away three months of work.

We all thrive together here at my homestead. Cold Antler Farm has always been a one-woman operation—me—but that hasn't slowed down its growth. It has grown from tending just a handful of chickens and a few rabbits into a full-time job. I raise dairy goats and turn their milk into cheese and soap. I raise rabbits, pigs, and chickens for their meat. I keep hens for eggs. There are expansive vegetable gardens and beehives, too. I use horses as working animals to cart, haul, and plow. There are no tractors on this mountain farm, just a strong brick house of a Scottish pony and my stubbornness. The farm runs entirely on animal power, and usually I am the animal powering it.

(I'm not against tractors, I simply can't afford one. Even if I could I am certain it would topple over and crush me on my steep hillsides.)


This is what takes up my daylight, and keeps me up in the darkness. It's a lot of things to me, but mostly love. I'm in a monogamous relationship with six-and-a-half acres cut into a mountain.