Homesteading is not all chirping chicks, baby rabbits and delicious fresh milk. Homesteading is also doing animals in below zero temperatures, finding your animals slaughtered by a predator or just fighting with one non-stop. When this happens, you have to rely on your “why”.
This post was originally supposed to be about “Growing What Makes You Smile”. However, this month that is not what happened. I was going to talk about how our favorite animal that we raise our meat rabbits. I love rabbits! Rabbits were the first pet I ever had, the first animal I ever showed at the county fair and the first animal I ran a breeding program with.
There is nothing as cute as rabbit kits in my opinion. I will be 30 years old this September and yet I still get a ridiculous amount of joy from watching each batch of babies being born and watching them interact with their siblings and parents.
Our meat rabbits got attacked
So, a few weeks ago on a Monday morning I went out to do rabbits like I always do only to find that our rabbit colony that had our California rabbits was empty. The day before it housed a breeding trio and 11 baby rabbits or varying ages. It was my favorite part of my day to take care of them and watch them interact together.
I loved their cuteness and also knowing that in a month I could sell off the babies and make around $350, finally turning a profit after struggling to get our set up right for over 6 months. Then one day it was all gone. A bobcat killed all but two babies who managed to hide in a burrow. I cried.
That Wednesday our other side which had New Zeeland rabbits was attacked. We lost our breeding trio on that side and one half grown rabbit. We had nine rabbits that survived on that side.
What if your homestead dreams get murdered?
I don’t mean this rhetorically, I mean quite literally your animals get massacred or your garden gets destroyed by pests. What do you do when you go outside and see your dreams or the thing that brought you the most joy in homesteading destroyed? How do you keep going and still find the joy among the hardship.
Now this may seem a bit overly dramatic, and maybe it is, but when you have invested hundreds of dollars and hours in something and had dreams of changing your life with this project it can be devastating to find it utterly destroyed.
Finding your why again
Maybe your animals are just fine, but you have one that seems to hate you. Or maybe you’re as sick as a dog but your dairy animal still has to milked so you still need to get up at 6 a.m. and go out in -2 degree weather to do. When homesteading is hard what gets you through?
For me it is two things. One, though this life may be hard I believe it is fundamentally good. Raising our children to understand where their food comes from, to understand that hard work is good for them and the freedom for them to be children for as long as possible.
The second thing that keeps me going is the dream that my husband and I have to one day have him home on the farm full time. This dream is a crazy one. There are very few people who are able to do this that aren’t working on an existing multigenerational farm, come from money or run a high debt load.
What is your dream?
I am someone who is extremely motivated by goals. I will push myself as hard as I can to achieve a goal no matter how crazy it is. This dream to have the family working together on the farm full-time may never happen. But I do know that if my husband and I don’t try with everything we have we will never achieve it.
What keeps you going? Is it that you can provide your family with quality food? Is it that growing food is what keeps you grounded? Is it that this is life you want for your family? Find your dream and never forget it!
Just keep trying
This homesteading thing is difficult! But we won’t succeed at it if we give up when it gets hard. It does not matter how many times we fail just how many times we get up and keep trying.
We got this!
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