three of the new ewe lambs in the foreground

“Hi, I’m Anna, Mr. Mark’s daughter. You caught me. I was just unloading the feed before doing chores. We were expecting you at 10 a.m., and I was trying to get this barn mess cleaned up. I’ll call Dad at the house and see if he can come on down now.”

It’s 9 a.m. on a recent cool spring morning. We have just driven from our farm in the Tennessee River valley into Central Time on the Cumberland Plateau, eventually winding down into the tidy agricultural county of Wilson, an area that, like Berry’s Henry County, has the misfortune to neighbor a large city, yet that at least on this eastern edge still seems to be holding its own, displaying no subdivisions or “look-at-me” McMansions to mar our view.

We’ve arrived at an older well-maintained farmhouse. It sits a couple of hundred feet from the rural road, shaded by mature oaks and surrounded by the perfect wrap-around porch from which to gaze at the occasional passerby. The gravel driveway splits midway, the left fork going to the house and the right making a sweep past a long cluster of outbuildings and around the front of the barn. It occurs to me that the art of laying out a farm driveway is a dying craft, and I’m relieved to see that the long loop allows us to back up to the business end of the barn and then pull forward with ease onto the road.

Our trip to Middle Tennessee is a chance to look over and purchase four ewe lambs, all of them Dorset/Hampshire crosses. These new girls are not old enough to be bred until fall of 2024. But like most small and big farms, ours is in a constant state of evaluating and improving its stock selection. In our case we are chasing the ideal meat sheep, one that will grow well on our pastures, with minimal inputs yet the best-muscled carcass at slaughter. It is a horizon that is never reached.

When we pull in, a young woman of 16-18 and attired in T-shirt and shorts is slinging 50-pound bags of feed out of the truck bed and hauling them into the barn. From the evidence of the remaining bags on the pallet, she has already unloaded a dozen with plenty more to grab. I am struck by her greeting: she is poised and comfortable talking with adults in a direct but respectful manner.

Within minutes of being called, her father arrives on foot from the house, and for the next 30 the four of us chat and examine ewe lambs. They both talk knowledgeably about daily weight gains and overall farm goals for its stock. Mr. Mark’s conversational style with his teenage daughter is considerate, and it soon becomes clear that this farm girl is a full partner in the operation. She maintains her own breeding flock, keeps the records, arranges to have her lambs slaughtered and butchered, and sells the meat to an established base of customers and at the local farmer’s market … and has an encyclopedic culinary knowledge of the various lamb cuts. 

When we’ve made the selections, father and daughter hoist the four 75-pound lambs one by one into the pen in the back of our truck. As we drive away, we chat about the experience and Cindy quips, “Hire the farm girl!” And it is true.

Some of you readers may have had the good fortune to grow up on a farm or perhaps work in a family business. You will be nodding your head in agreement. But yours is an opportunity missed by most. It is difficult to convey the maturity that came naturally, and bolstered by 4-H and FFA, to this farm girl. For a farmer to succeed, it requires a complex range of attributes, among them physical strength, intellectual reasoning, and sophisticated social skills. A friend of mine, a well-respected, highly successful lawyer in a small town, was gifted with being raised on a dairy farm. From my observations it shaped him in profound and positive ways: it gave him a leg up in the world that the average coddled youth does not experience, and it rooted him in his community and instilled in him a compassionate heart.

So let us also throw emotional wisdom into this discussion. Lest one of you is thinking that this young woman has been hardened of heart and spirit by her work, that she has been raised to be no more than a merciless money changer, think again. To raise animals from birth and choose which ones will die in order for the farm business to carry on does not produce a callous soul. On the contrary, it cultivates love developed with a clear-eyed view of the means, ways, and limits of compassion, stripped of sentiment and confronted daily by hard choices that cannot be put off on anyone else.

Indeed, we might wish that our leadership class today was pulled from the well-maintained small farms in the agricultural counties of this land. We all might sleep better at night. Maybe it is not just an admonition to “hire the farm girl” — maybe we should elect her, if given the choice.

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Reading this past week: True Grit (C. Portis), a well known book that has been poorly served by two movies. Greenmantle (J. Buchan), a Richard Hannay novel.