It Won't be Weird for Him

~ This article first appeared in the Leader-Vindicator newspaper. ~

“Well, Dad, it’s time to move these cattle to a new paddock for some fresh grass.”

The comment wrenched my attention back to the present.  I had been wondering privately how much longer my boney knees could hold out on the wooden floor before they simply gave up and relegated me to a lifetime of horizontal existence, but the discomfort seemed irrelevant now.

Henry went on, “They need to keep moving to stay healthy!”  At that, he pushed his plastic cows through the gate and into another location.

Advanced reasoning for a child who, at the time, was barely three.  There are a good number of adults who’ve had cattle their whole life and still don’t understand the correlation between pasture management and herd health.  In fact, I’ve struggled with the concept and practical application of methods myself, and here I am getting a lesson from a toddler.

Huh.  He does listen.  After the bathroom flood of ’21 I had taken a position that the kid was deaf and totally unaware of anything his mother and I said.

Most of the time I feel like my biggest revelations are so absolutely basic that I must be a dullard.  Here is my most recent “DUH” surprise:  Kids are accustomed to what they grow up with.  It doesn’t matter if the parent is breaking new ground; to the child, it is normal.

Pasture management to me is still something of a new concept; there were no momma cows when I was young and there was no pasture, either.  So when I started into the business in 2012 I was on the steep part of a very long learning curve.  The trials of moving forward with no past experience to draw from drove me crazy, and, truth be told, I’ve spent a number of nights wondering how to keep the whole grassfed agenda on track because there is no possible way my descendents would want anything to do with the mental burden. 

But, to my kid – kids, plural, in October…yikes – the idea is not novel.  Cattle have been managed on pasture on this farm since Henry was born, and from his perspective it makes absolute sense.  It makes sense to him more than it makes sense to me, in fact.  Oh my goodness.  The kid has something to work with!  Oh my gosh!  If I learn something, my kids will grow up to understand it!  Truly this reality has stunned me.

I don’t know why.  Intergenerational idea sharing is a fundamental component of my life.  My dad and uncle farmed and raised cattle, and they allowed me to be around so I could learn by osmosis.  From this experience I established the foundation of my future – known realities of what we do and how we do things.  Never once did it dawn on me that maybe those guys weren’t as confident in their decisions as I perceived them to be.  Whatever is normal to me probably wasn’t to them.

We continue that generational transfer still today.  My dad is the source of ideas for our business; he’s good at picking a course out of the quagmire.  I am reasonably good, once I’m pointed in the right direction, at implementing a plan and broadcasting its existence to our customers in order to generate demand.  Henry and the rest of his generation experience each of these new ideas as though they are permanent reality; it is their security in the idea that will determine its longevity.  If we get enough ideas and enough kids around here to see them through, this is going to be a pretty great place to grow old because it will be interesting.

In this discovery of the obvious I have found more stimulus than in countless books that discuss motivation.  Our job as the current generation isn’t to fulfill ourselves; it is to plan, learn, suffer, and plant seeds that will be tended by subsequent generations who perceive those seeds to be a fundamental part of life.  If we want kids to start caring about history, we need to give them something to remember.  This is not a passive commitment.  My grandparents remembered when businesses closed down as a result of globalization and consolidation of industry; I want my kids to remember when businesses opened and industry returned to a region.  The amount of sacrifice required to dig deep and reestablish the lifeblood of a community is staggering and cannot be endured without a greater purpose than fleeting self satisfaction. 

They’re watching.  Those goofy kids teetering around are the most profound development of today, absolutely full of potential.  Let’s give them a show, shall we?  Let us throw ourselves in front of the proverbial bus, knowing full well that we’ll be battered, so that those after us can grow up knowing for a fact what we think might be possible.  Let us build regional supply chains, however crudely, to save them the effort of having to think about it.  Whatever we want that is outside our comfort zone will be well within the boundaries of reality for our kids.  Create, parents, no matter the sacrifice.  It will be worth it for them.

I can’t think of a better mission for our visit to Earth.