I’ve always dreamed of having my own homestead one day. I grew up in a small town on a “normal” suburban lot. Thankfully, we live in a very agricultural area and the Salatin farm is nearby (like, 20 minutes away from my childhood home) and later I actually married somebody who grew up on a farm. They have a hundred acres that’s been passed down in the family since the 1800s, and another hundred that came more recently.
It’s an absolutely lovely property. Pastures, woods, an ever running spring that’s the beginning of a watershed. (No upstream pollutants.) It’s beautiful. My mother in law and the remaining at home kids manage it as well as they can—rotational grazing Katahdins, keeping a few goats, a couple cows from time to time, pigs occasionally, a garden, a young orchard, building
fence when they can (professional
fence builders in the family), stuff like that.
My husband and I would LOVE to live on
land. Would love also to help with the family farm. But we want to have our own place that we own, 10 or 15 acres and then help with the rest of the family land sort of separately from that. Why?
Well, first of all, I get along well with my mother in law but we still don’t quite manage to communicate well sometimes. And it’s HER farm. Her vision. Her decisions. I feel that it could cause a lot of misunderstandings to have multiple cooks in the kitchen, so to speak.
We also like to have ownership over what we’re doing. Currently renovating our formerly-neglected 1930s house, and it’s wonderful because it’s OURS to do with what we may, and to feel the permanence of, and to consult only with each other about and not have to navigate the feelings of a mother in law or a sibling.
Also, since my husband is one of the oldest, and we’re doing well financially so far, we kind of feel that the “inheritance” of the farm is more for the younger siblings. Some of them do help on the farm and do want to keep running it.
At all costs we never want to cause family friction. Family is more important than a little land. But the more I think about it, the more I think that the family farm has SO MUCH ROOM for the generations to work it.
The family farm will never be split again, legally speaking. One section even has an easement to that effect. We could never nor would never buy a slice from them.
We could build a house on one of the neglected corners and care for it. But we again would be navigating family boundaries and communication. Different ideas. Different people. Seems anxiety inducing. I don’t want to be always worried about managing land in a way that will make the actual owner and other “stakeholders” upset.
How do multi generational farm families deal with this? How do they navigate boundaries and get along? How do they split land without splitting it?
Gabe Brown’s book
Dirt to Soil briefly mentioned that his parents sold the land to him and his wife and they took it over, but his parents still stayed on the land. I’ve always wondered how difficult that transition was.
How could we help to manage this beautiful land and bring it to its potential while respecting the other people on it? Is there a way to say, “Hey, mother in law, I’d love to take responsibility for part of your land”? What are our options in this situation?
My husband feels that the only option is to save for many years and strike out on our own as if there were no family land. But I haven’t completely made my peace with that idea yet.
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