I'm Sorry If I've Misled You

I've always promised honesty and transparency. So if I've misled you, please hear me out and accept this as my sincere apology.

It started innocently enough, after finding a couple beautiful, pastel eggs nestled in some straw in one of our barns the other night, I just knew I had to share it with you. But, no matter the angle, no matter how hard I tried to get that perfect photo for our Instagram account, I just couldn't get the right light in our dimly-lit barn.

So like any modern farmer in this world of social media, I plucked those babies up in a quest for better illumination -- There in the corner of our broiler chicken barn, I was able to snap the shot that ended up making the grade.

As I awkwardly crouched taking photos with my trusty iPhone, Jay let out a laugh and clicked a photo of his own. He caught his farm-girl-other-half fudging a backdrop of an Instagram photo that would go on to get over 100 likes.

Now, I know we all do this... staging and editing our pictures to crop out those messes, shine a light on the beauty of our surroundings, and provide a 'highlight reel' of our lives so to speak.

And, lately I've begun to realize that my 'highlight reel' might be misleading.

I regularly get comments by non-farmers, 'Isn't farming just the best?!'... or 'I'm so jealous that you get to spend all day with all those cute animals!'

Let me say here and now that farming isn't always easy and it surly isn't always cute.

When we first got our cattle from Alberta, our girls went through a change in diet and like many of us that change did lead to some rather embarrassing bathroom moments for them.

While we knew this was normal, Selena just couldn't shake it, so in order to rule out any health issues I needed to take a sample to the lab for analysis. But, to say she had stage freight was an understatement. Every single time either myself or Jay were ready with gloves on she'd clam right up.

That is until that fateful day, when she finally decided to throw caution to the wind and go... right beside me. Without my trusty gloves or an appropriate receptacle, I was forced to catch her sample in a nearby grocery bag...

Please let that soak in for a moment. There I was frantically catching runny poop in a freaking bag.

Fast forward a few months and our cows are due to deliver next week. And, if you had told me before I got into farming that I would be spending so much of my day studying the vaginas' of cows, I would have thought you were crazy.

I think I can speak for all my fellow local farmers when I say this weather has been slightly more than I can handle. I can't seem to keep up with the endless issues and challenges caused by the below freezing temperatures Mother Nature has thrown our way.

Before our most recent chicks arrived to the farm, the barn they live in was sitting empty. Like any empty barn, it sat unchecked until one night as I went to hop in the shower I realized we were severely lacking in water pressure.

Out onto the farm I went to try and figure out the problem and as I walked past my newly renovated broiler barn I knew I'd found the issue. It seems the water had froze and burst my water line and my barn was filling up with fast running water.

It's dark, and late at night, and there I am getting soaked with water spraying everywhere, as one of our tenants walks by and says casually, 'Kendall, I think we're having an issue with our water pressure.'...

'Oh, you don't say,' I thought to myself. Here I was just enjoying a late night, middle-of-winter, one woman wet t-shirt contest, when there's a real issue needing my attention.