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Home > The Off Farm Income Podcast > OFI 938: A Vacation From The Farm & How Vacation Can Tell You If Your Career Is The Right Fit
Podcast: The Off Farm Income Podcast
Episode:

OFI 938: A Vacation From The Farm & How Vacation Can Tell You If Your Career Is The Right Fit
Category: Business
Duration: 00:41:38
Publish Date: 2020-12-08 07:30:24
Description: SHOW NOTES Sign Up To Receive Our FFA Stories Newsletter! Email address: It starts with just a thought, maybe a small fantasy.  What if I could just head off to a cabin for 10 days and live like Ernest Hemingway?  Then another small step is taken.  You apply for an elk tag in that area to give yourself a pre-text to go.  Then you draw the tag, and now you are committed.  As the trip is getting nearer, you start searching online for cabins to rent, and you find one!  You talk to your wife, get the thumbs up and put down the deposit.  It is really going to happen. Then some months go by, and you don’t give the trip that much thought.  You are engrossed in your day to day activities, and because of your busy schedule you don’t dwell on the trip that much.  It seems like once you booked the cabin and bought the hunting tag that it went completely out of your mind.  That is the way your mind works after all.  You get an idea, decide to commit and then take action.  Once it is on the calendar and set, you move onto other thoughts.   About one month before the trip is scheduled to happen, you start seeing little reminders on your calendar.  Or, you get emails about the trip from the Fish & Game about your upcoming hunt or from Airbnb about the cabin you have rented.  Then you start to feel a little pressure.  A lot has to be done to get the farm ready for your departure.   You are the person who does 95% of the work on the farm from day to day.  So, when you leave your wife, daughter or farm sitter have to pick up the slack for you.  You don’t feel that guilty about the work you leave for the farm sitter.  They are getting paid after all.  But, for your wife and daughter you have had a normal way of doing things, and now they have your work to do on top of their regular schedule.  So, you need to make this as easy on them as possible.   This means that you need to get things set up for them before you leave.  Any small repairs you have been putting off need to be taken care of, because if you don’t they will surely break or fail while you are gone.  You have your system for feeding, watering and moving animals.  However, it has always been easier to just do it than to have them out with you every day to see how you do it.  So, you need to forget about your complicated system and design an easier one for them to follow. You actually started preparing this system earlier this year when you reinforced the pasture fences where cattle will be held during the winter.  This helps you enjoy any trip away better because you are filled with confidence that they will not get out while you are gone.  After you reinforced the fences you built a pen for feeding.  One that would be strong enough to handle the pressure put on the panels by the cattle everyday, and that included a hay storage area that you could keep the goats out of.   In the two weeks prior to the trip you started filling the hay storage area for them.  Because even though it easy for you to go get hay from the stack everyday and just feed what you need, it is a lot simpler and less time consuming for them if the hay is already at the feeder and they just need to spread it out.   Even though your daughter is normally in charge of filling the pig feeders you topped them off and figured out how much feed would be needed to get her through.  The pigs are almost finished, so they are eating a lot of feed.  So, instead of ordering your normal 1,000 lbs, you order a full ton of feed and have them load the tote into the horse trailer.  Having the feed in the horse trailer means you can park it right next to the feeders on the outside of the pen.  This way, when it is time for your daughter to fill the feeders, it is only a ten minute job. You had been dealing with temperature fluctuations for about a month now, freezing temperatures over night and highs in the 40’s during the day.  So, this had allowed you to be lazy and just break ice in the mo...
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