Immediate Gratification

Before we discuss today's topic, I'd like to bring you up to date on a couple of developments.  You may recall that we have been bottle feeding a baby squirrel, Tucker, that fell out of his nest during Hurricane Isaac.  Sadly, Tucker is no longer with us.  Despite our best efforts to rescue him, care for him, and feed the little fellow cow's milk, I assume squirrel milk is what he needed as he got weaker and weaker until he finally died.  We're all sad about it, but we also all understand that death is a normal part of life.

RIP Tucker

The second item of business is about Rosie, one of our milk cows.  She is pregnant and will be calving around December 16th.  She last calved on September 23, 2011 and we have been milking her twice a day for almost a year now - whew!  We "dry off" our cows 2-3 months prior to calving in order to give them a rest and allow their bodies to replenish themselves and give their new calves a good head start. 

We started drying off Rosie yesterday and instead of milking twice a day, we'll only milk once a day for a few days to bring her milk production down slowly.  Cow's milk production is tied to demand.  Lower demand = lower supply.  In about a week, we'll stop completely and she'll 'dry up' giving her (and US!!) a little rest.  We're still milking Daisy and will wean Blackberry off of her in a couple of weeks and then start to milk Daisy twice a day.


Gimme a break!

Now onto the topic of immediate gratification.  I like this concept.  You do something and immediately reap the benefits or rewards of your labors or your investment in money or time.  One of my favorite things about farming was you got to see this concept in action - sometimes.  An example is plowing a field.  In the morning, you'd pull your tractor into a field that may have weeds chest high in it.  All day long you'd plow big planks in the field.  Then you would plow diagonally to create a nice seedbed.  At the end of the day, with the sun sinking on the western horizon, you could look across the field and see beautiful brown dirt.  All the weeds had been turned under.  You could smell the richness of the land and feel a sense of pride and accomplishment that today, you did something.  The field that morning and the same field in the evening stood in stark contrast to one another.

On a hugely smaller scale I experienced this today.  Here is a before shot:


Weeds, weeds and more weeds

And here is the after shot:


A nice seedbed

As you can see there is a marked difference between the two plots and you can experience immediate gratification.  Too bad everything doesn't work this way.  Many times you work and work and work and don't see any benefits at all.  You ever feel this way?  You ask God, "God, am I on the right track here?"  This is where faith comes in.  If you believe in what you're doing, you persevere, you keep at it and one day, you hope to see the fruits of your labor.  Sometimes, you don't see that fruit until YEARS later.  Other times you never see the fruit.  Sometimes you work and work and work and have total crop failure.  While discouraging, you re-assess and try to learn from your mistakes and you start all over again.

In a previous post I talked about how we are raising more that crops and animals at Our Maker's Acres Family Farm, we're raising a family.  We're harvesting dreams.  We're preserving memories.  Unlike the example of the field above, some of the gratification has taken years and years to realize.  Some of the gratification we are still waiting to experience as we continue to walk in faith.  While we have had our share of ups and downs, victory and defeat, joy and heartache, we're committed and we are staying the course.


Our Family

Numbers 6:24-26

The Lord bless you, and keep you;

The Lord make His face shine on you,
And be gracious to you;

The Lord lift up His countenance on you,
And give you peace.