Farming with Hansen’s Harvest. That’s us. On the cover of a once a year publication here in Kentucky. Proving that It’s okay if you don’t know what you’re doing. We did not. We read a few books and threw ourselves in. We took a squishy plan and started working it. Ethical farming was at the heart of it. It was that or become vegetarians, something neither one of us favored. It’s been an amazing road with spectacular views and a number of major crashes. The learning curves were steep and hard, but once we started following the animals suggestions, as crazy as they seemed, life got a lot of easier. Letting everyone cruise around freely and come back to the barn at night, sounded a little nuts, but it worked really well and cut down significantly on medical issues. It’s easy to be antibiotic free when everyone is healthy. Hence our motto: Where the animals get a vote. We were thrilled when people began coming to us to learn how to give their pigs room to graze and forage. People reached out to us about sheep care, free ranging chickens, and how to implement solar. You want us to talk about everything we’ve learned and our passion? Not a problem. Free farm tours for everyone! So, since there are 24 hours in a day and we were only using up about 16, we decided to venture into farm fresh products. We looked around the farm and what we had were a gazillion Black Walnuts. If you’ve never tried to get the shell off of one, the best way to date, is to run over them, repeatedly, with your car. We quickly vetoed anything that had to do with Black Walnuts. We did come across an old Appalachian recipe for Hickory syrup. We had a lot of Shagbark Hickory, and the recipe was pretty easy. That sounded a lot less like work, so we tried it. Imagine our delight to discover it was good. Really good! And other people thought so too! From there we added in our seasonal items like wild blackberries and wild apples for syrup. We started using our herb garden to infuse extra virgin olive oil, and decided that what we really needed were mushrooms. Functional mushrooms, not FUNKY, functional. It turned out that we were not the only ones feeling pretty sketchy about big pharma and the mushroom tinctures actually made a difference! It turns out that those cultures who have been using them for thousands of years were right. Squishy plans are the best because they give you permission to change along the way. Throwing yourself in is scary but the lessons that count only come from experience. Whatever you’re thinking about daring to do… go do it. Falter, fall, and soar. It’s what makes life worth experiencing.
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