A craft brewer’s wife came to give a talk at a farm tour I organised once. She was playing to her home crowd, a room full of farming women and some hopefuls just breaking into the niche farming and produce sector.
Feed your curiosity.
Nobody was surprised when she showed a slide with a list of the jobs she did in the business she ran with her brewer husband, or that the list ran down the screen and off it, or that she did everything from marketing director to truck driver to IT troubleshooter. We were all living and breathing lists like that.
Many have flocked to Tasmania in recent years following the small farm dream and the tourism hype and making it permanent, keeping goats for milk, bees for honey, olives for oil.
Come down for air, make yourself at home.
My husband and I did it for eight years, keeping Wessex saddleback pigs, breeding and farming and making our products and taking them to market. We were the supply chain. We took in guests when agri-tourism became a thing and we were all encouraged to diversify and spread ourselves just that little bit more thinly.
I distinctly remember chatting to a couple we had just shown around the farm. They had done the tour, fed the pigs and cooked the bacon on the barbecue for breakfast. “You really are living the dream,” they said, and there was a lull in the conversation when I could tell my husband and I were thinking the same thing – the dream is bloody hard work and it’s not paying very well.
That’s the side of the small farm dream they don’t tell you about in the brochures, the part that involves bank loans and nerves of steel and energy that belies your middle-aged years, a seven-day week and not much time for each other or the family or friends.
Unplug. Breathe in. Dream big.
I remember standing behind our stall at an award-winning farmers’ market one Saturday morning with a chiller cabinet full of premium pork cuts, unable to feel my legs for the cold creeping up from the concrete, doing my best to be an ambassador for Tasmania. As friends stopped by for a chat, and moved off with good cheer but no purchase, it occurred to me that people must think we were running our business as a jaunty rural hobby rather than a source of income on which to raise our kids.
My husband put the infrastructure in for our farm, digging water trenches, building sheds and a processing room, learning how to make smallgoods and standing alone for hours weighing, packing and labelling, while I sat in the house marketing, food licensing, web designing. It was our gourmet farm and we were proud of but it, became a lonesome grind.
A mentor looked at our business planning, such as it was, and said don’t bother, this is a hobby business; but we were in love with the dream, with the visitors and life-long-learners we believed would love it too, and we went ahead and for a time we loved it.
Slow right down. Play and stay.
At visitor events at historic estates and country towns we sold our wares, and I put the front-of-house spin on the product with branded aprons and farm-made relish, while my husband fired up his hand-made smoker to cook, sweltering in the summer heat in his goggles and fire gloves like an escapee from Mad Max, and at the end of the day we heaved that smoker up the ramp onto our trailer and hoped it wouldn’t roll off on the highway and kill someone.
Plenty of times we met over our kitchen table and asked what we were doing, looked around at others our age with salaries, superannuation and private-school educated children. But we were living the dream.
And then we weren’t.
Abattoirs close, pandemics come and go, the cost of feed goes up and up again. Before any of it happened we had written our exit plan, redirected our tired bones and energies, went back to work for other people and bigger companies and let the farm fall silent.
We were lucky. Others aren’t.
We survived with our family and our sanity intact, although neither was a certainty. We’re here to tell the tale, that a farm can be a lonely place that consumes your every waking thought, where everything is down to you, where there is no respite, just a seven-day week, and where there are now floods and droughts and bio-insecurity and skyrocketing costs.
At times, it all seems insurmountable.
Rural Alive and Well (RAW) aims to build healthy and resilient rural and remote communities to reduce the prevalence of suicide across Tasmania. RAW provides a confidential, no-cost psychological social support service for anyone experiencing life’s more challenging seasons. If you have resonated with any of the situational stressors in this article, I encourage you to reach out RAW on 1800 729 827 or www.rawtas.com.au.
Fiona Stocker is a writer based in the Tamar Valley. She has published the books A Place in the Stockyard (2016) and Apple Island Wife (2018). For more information, see fionastocker.com.