The visionary and the realist- that's what Joel Salatin dubbed them after meeting Mom and Dad at a farming conference a few years back, and he wasn't wrong.
I've grown up living the ebb and flow of the visionary and realist lifestyle. It's like ocean waves lapping a little farther with each tide and then gravity pulling the waves back in. It keeps life interesting. powerful. balanced. Dad grew up with a hunger for farming. He spent his summers on his family farm in Northern Missouri, dreaming of the days he could run a herd of his own. He wrote to every breed magazine in the industry, asking for old copies of herd catalogs to be mailed to him and the piles under his bed grew. To Mom, the farm was a place where her Papa lived with his black and white Holsteins. When she married Dad right out of high school, a life as a football wife was on her mind, not a life as a dairy farmer, but Dad had different plans, and being the support system she always has been, she went along with them. Our family's agricultural history can be traced back to the Revolutionary War, but there have been some generational gaps along that timeline- Mom and Dad being one of those gaps. With both my parents not having grown up on a farm directly, I used to think we were at a disadvantage, but now I realize it was a blessing. The gap in my parent's agricultural heritage provided them with a fresh perspective and an open approach to farming. They started early on in their marriage raising registered Angus cattle (a breed we still respect and utilize within our herd); however, they were doing everything conventionally, and eventually they started asking themselves what they were chasing, not only on our farm but also within our family. They made the decision to raise our family on a dairy farm, and we purchased our first herd of Jersey cows from some of our close friends. From there, Dad kept researching and reading, thinking there had to be a better way than the direction we were currently headed. He started dreaming of building a farm his children could inherit some day, and mom kept him grounded along the way. Working within the aviation industry as a general manager for much of Dad's dairy farming life did not yield itself to getting too carried away with farming dreams, but that is where the rest of us came in (more on that to come). While Mom never dreamed of being a dairy farmers wife, she fills the position well, dealing with more early mornings and late nights than she knew were possible. She's dealt with years of muddy floors and stinky laundry, and most days she does it with grace. When she's not dairy farming, she's cooking dinner for her family (one of her passions), enjoying a cup of coffee with fresh cream and dark chocolate sugar, or reading a good book (when she finds time). When Dad is not dairying, he's thinking about dairying, stretching our family just a little farther with each idea that comes to him. Mom brings those ideas back down to earth, but sometimes the waves take over, creating the Creamy Hills Dairy of today.
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Our Farm's Voice
Hello! I'm Madelaine Paige, and I'm so glad we've met. I love mornings, milk cows, and musings. Archives
July 2021
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