Can farmers go on vacation?

After around ten years of keeping livestock and practicing regenerative farming, we are now transitioning our farming operation more into a diversified perrenial farm. While we contiue to keep some livestock, it is mostly going to be for ourself and family and to provide nutrients to the farm. I have been thinking a lot about the topic of travelling and leaving the farm once in a while, and being able to go on holidays or visit family members who are far away. As livestock farmers, it is really easy to fall into trap of daily chores and soon it may seem impossible that you could ever leave the farm. I am curious what people here think about the farm/life balance and if you need to plan and go on vacations once in a while. We share our thoughts, and some footage of our trips. At our peek, we had nine sows, around sixty weaners, a hundred sheep, a couple of steers and several hundred poultry. Yet we somehow managed to get away from the farm for a whole month, thanks to amazing farm sitters.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this? Do you have livestock, and do you have a desire to go on a vacation once in a while?

I have a write-up I'm working on (not quite ready to share in full), but the fundamental idea is that modern people in most developed countries have a terrible understanding of community. While "buy local" and "attend community theatre" are small parts of it, the most important part of historical community was shared work. The reason everyone is so overwhelmed all the time is that we don't share work anymore.

As a small-scale example, this year, I'm going to try to get some of the growers from my church to have a rotating schedule of sharing work, where we all meet at one of our houses and work on the garden for a couple hours. I'm not sure if the total work done will be higher, but we'll all learn more, connect better, and understand each others' garden, meaning we could easily help take care of it if someone went on a long trip.

You're running at a much larger scale, but you might be able to implement something similar. Likewise, when my kids are older, I'm hoping to get them to do work on a nearby farm (preferably permaculture) for very little compensation because the learning is the more valuable than most education we could get even by paying for it. At that point, my kids would be in an excellent position to help keep things together if the farming family wanted to take a vacation.

In short, I think one of the many benefits of building shared-work community is that it allows farmers to take vacations like the rest of us.

I have livestock.  While I don’t have the urge to go on vacation, I have made arrangements with four individuals to take care of my animals if need be.

Those "amazing farm sitters" make all the difference in the world. We currently have 23 chickens, 5 muscovy ducks, 9 "mutt" ducks, 1 sheep, and 9 goats. I can set things up so we can get away for about a week, in Spring or Autumn, only needing someone to come collect eggs each day (so the chickens don't eat them & they don't attract snakes). We have a couple friends who are willing to do that, though not daily for a whole week, and 1 of them can check on the 4leggers. So we rotate, so that the one who lives furthest away only needs to come once or twice - but she's the only one who knows anything about the 4leggers. The best thing is that we *can* get away; 2nd best thing about this arrangement is they do it for just the eggs they collect, in payment.
The downsides for us, are that with only a couple friends available, we have to be very careful not to leave them(or us) feeling like we're taking undue advantage of them, and there have been a couple instances where one of them wasn't able to come when they were supposed to, or when something off the wall happened that they didn't know how to address. My mom, who lives 9hrs away, is in poor health, and a simple fall could kill her, if she lands wrong, so we're trying hard not to go anywhere, just in case. But, we also have 3 indoor dogs, who are all very attached to their humans, and don't do well, if we're gone from them, more than a day. So, we work hard at finding ways to take them. Two are small, and easy to travel with, particularly in finding hotels that will allow them. The 3rd one is an Irish Wolfhound. Few hotels will allow a dog that size, and most of our friends and family have things in their homes that her tail will destroy, just walking by - if she were to get the zoomies, their belongings would be destroyed. "Oh, what's that? An irreplaceable, antique, heirloom vase that my dog's tail just nonchalantly swished off the shelf?" 'Oops - I'm so sorry' just isn't going to cut it...

Our only other solutions are not being away more than 2 nights, or only one of us being gone, so the other can take care of the farm & dogs. This coming autumn, for example, we have a family wedding to attend, in the Chicago area. Rather than trying to find someone to help on the farm and boarding the 3 dogs, we plan to find a pet friendly hotel, only stay 2 nights, and I'll stay at the hotel with the dogs, while John goes to the wedding, and my daughters, who live in the area, can come visit me, at the hotel. This past Autumn, my son, in Central IL (still over 5hrs away),  had 2 separate events, 2weeks apart, that we wanted us to attend. I went to the first, while John stayed home, then John went to the 2nd, while I stayed home. It's not ideal, and can be sad and frustrating, but it's efficient.

I suppose I need to address the down side.  Why do I have 4 unrelated people lined up?  Of course, there is the chance that someone might not be available. The major reason is that I narrowly avoided disaster three times. Twice it involved people with serious drinking problems I was not aware of.  The third time the person didn’t see a problem with a cat starving to death. The cat was fine because of the previous two experiences …I always leave out extra food and water.  Anyway, in recent years, I have not gone on vacations.

When we had a commercial farm we went on vacation. As the saying goes, the best time for a vacation is when you don’t have the time to take one.

We had sheep but went on a vacation during lambing season and paid some farm sitters. It was good for them and us and had no over-mortality from it.

And don’t forget, as farmers you can deduct 50% of the vacation off your income taxes!!!

In winter at our farm we would leave for up to ten days, by first informing our customers a few weeks in advance of the days that we would not be shipping. The day before leaving we would bypass the warm water straight to the drains, raise the water levels a bit, and turn the cold water down to a trickle. Before leaving town we would make sure the Bullfrogs and tadpoles were in torpor on the bottoms of their troughs.
Several times, upon returning there would be a skim of ice on the surface of the water in the troughs. Our animals suffered no morts or ill effects once they were slowly warmed back up.
In warmer weather we had a renter who was happy to spend an hour and a half a day feeding and cleaning in return for a $75.00 per day discount on his rent.