Garden & Gun

A Farmer’s Shadow

All beginnings set us up for endings. As a farmer, I know that well. A farm is a living, breathing thing, and the changes I see almost daily remind me that time is fleeting, and nature is cyclical. We plant seeds and harvest crops. The sunny days of today will give way to clouds and rain, but the sun will come back, and the cycle will repeat itself.

Our South Georgia farm sits off a loose sand road in rough but beautiful country—just thirty miles due east of the Okefenokee Swamp and home to gators, snakes, and a king’s ransom of insects. My wife and I have three kids, two boys and a girl. We farm pigs that we raise on pasture, meat chickens, and eggs, with a smattering of vegetables and citrus. It’s a fairly bucolic life. A good life. The kind I lie in bed at night and feel thankful for.

There is a special glue that holds us all together, more

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Garden & Gun

Garden & Gun3 min read
Big Cat Comeback
Someone once told the sixth-generation cattle rancher Jim Strickland a maxim that stuck with him: If you save the Florida panther, you save Florida. The endangered species, which represents the only breeding population of a big cat east of the Missis
Garden & Gun3 min read
The Art of Rewilding
In a sloping green bowl of earth in the Shenandoah Valley, Leigh Ann Beavers listens to the vibrating dawn chorus, her head still resting on her pillow. Above the roof of her clapboard German farmhouse in Raphine, Virginia, a raven and a red-tailed h
Garden & Gun5 min read
Mutual Assurance
The first night I brought Ernie home, he curled up on the pillow next to mine, defying physics with his compact roundness: from dog to perfect doughnut. I’d purchased a large training crate, as his foster mom had suggested, but couldn’t resist his sl

Related Books & Audiobooks