Healthy dirt, happy farmer: The importance of being present

This is the second entry in a series that highlights the region’s agricultural producers and the difficulties they face to keep their communities fed. If you or someone you know is a local farmer with a story to share, please reach out to Soapbox.  

With enough work, a dead-end road can be the greatest place in the world if you tend to the land with the long haul in mind. For a livestock farmer, that to-do list never ends: fences need checking and mending. Animals need to feed, to be rotated to fresh pastures, to be processed and packaged. But what about the farmers? What do they need to flourish along with their land?

From the outside, it’s easy to overly romanticize an agricultural lifestyle. For Nate Brownlee of Nightfall Farm in Crothersville, Indiana, it’s important to understand that reality seldom resembles social media’s glamorous, lucrative portrayal of farm life.

“There are folks saying it’s easy to make six figures farming. That’s not our experience,” Brownlee says. “Farming is hard and the margins are thin. Talking with other farmers in real life, who you can see are actually trying to make a living farming — not just making social media content — has always been way more useful.”

Nate runs Nightfall Farm alongside his wife, Liz Brownlee. Together, they provide their community with pasture-raised meat free of antibiotics, hormones, or GMO-laced food. That means the animals have space to flourish and be naturally nourished, which, from a consumer standpoint, yields healthier and more delicious meat. All the necessary hard work to attain that superior food, however, takes its toll on the farmers if they’re not careful.

“Our biggest hurdle is affording ourselves the grace to be people and not just farmers,” Brownlee says. “We live where we work, so when we look out the window we see natural beauty, sure, but we also see projects.”

Brownlee explains that if he and his wife have a chunk of free time, it’s tempting to pop out the door and tackle something from the to-do list rather than something more restive like sitting still, reading or playing a board game. Rather than frequent stops in town to socialize and have fun, the pair tends to stack reasons to leave the farm until there’s a “critical mass of errands” they need to run, or respond to something time sensitive.

“We’re getting better at this, but it’s still pretty seasonal,” he says. “We slow down production in the winter and can schedule vacation, or say yes to invitations to dinner or ice skating or concerts more easily than in summer and fall. This makes half of the year incredibly taxing with a build-up of frustration and lack of pressure relief.  We are striving to incorporate small quarterly trips, like camping or hiking, in an attempt to create a better work/life balance.”

Even if you don’t work on a farm, the work/life balance Brownlee seeks to attain is a worthwhile compromise between productivity and self-care.

When it comes to food, Nightfall Farm offers pasture-raised chicken and eggs, turkey, pork, and lamb. These animals graze different sections of pasture on a rotational basis, which means they’re moved from one area to another on a carefully considered schedule. This practice is vital to soil fertility, which allows the previously occupied space to breakdown all of the livestock’s manure, adding rich nutrients and aiding in further vegetation development after being eaten and trampled by the animals. The land, much like the farmer, needs its rest.

All this talk about the necessity of rest should not lead one to think that farming is altogether an unpleasant pursuit. It’s hard work, yes, but there’s a reason so many folks are drawn to this lifestyle despite the tight margins and grueling hours.

“Farming is an incredibly tangible, engaging and challenging life. For us, it is quite fulfilling to put in a hard day’s work and be able to see the results of that work at the end of the day,” Brownlee says. “Our work days are an enjoyable mix of routine and novel, and our problem-solving is tackling both immediate response, put-out-the-fire kind of problems, but also the deliberate and forward thinking improvement kind of problems. We also are deeply rooted in this piece of land: we walk and bike around the farm, which slows us down enough to be observant and fully participate in the life of the farm.”

To learn more about Nightfall Farm, visit nightfallfarm.com.