As a young kid, rejection was what I always feared the most. My life motto was: “Never try; never fail,” and to be honest I lived by it like it was my job. I never tried anything new, because I didn’t want to fail, to fall short of expectation, to be told “no.” I think the first time I really took rejection the hardest was my freshman year of high school. My goal was to play high school basketball, so I tried out for my high school’s freshman basketball team with a pretty good chance of making it.

The last day of try-outs was in the morning and letters were handed out right before we had to get ready to head to class. When asked if I was going to open my letter, I told my friend that I was going to wait — I wanted my parents to be there for any outcome. But before I could explain my friend ripped the letter out of hand. After a quick glance down, her facial expression said it all. As she handed the letter back to me, her only remarks were, “I’m sorry.” I quickly grabbed the letter and chuckled, “You’re joking, right?” But before she could answer, I was already on the verge of tears. I… was being rejected.

So to those who rejected me then and to those who have rejected me since: thank you.

Thank you for helping me realize that my time was far more well spent somewhere else.

Thank you for allowing me to better understand that the world isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Thank you for helping me make that decision.

Thank you for helping realize that rejection is better than I ever thought it could be.

Thank you for allowing me to follow my correct path.

Thank you for helping me prove a point.

Thank you for teaching me to believe in myself, even when you don’t.

Thank you for pushing me to achieve bigger and better dreams.

Just… thank you.

Have you ever farmed? I have. I grew up doing it and still do, actually if you ask my friends– it’s all I do, and they’ll even tell you it’s my major. I love it; I would even tell you that it’s my passion. And to farm in any sense…it takes passion. You never know how the year is going to play out. One year you get too much rain, the next not enough. Your tractor breaks down, you lose half your crop to a pest, your barn catches on fire, or half your herd is lost to disease — one way or another, it just doesn’t always work out in the end. It takes a special kind of person to farm, and do I mean special. Not everyone can wake up every day at six in the morning, shovel manure for hours at a time, fight with animals that are ten times the size of them, and spend countless hours in a 100 degree hay loft. Not everybody can put an endless amount of time into caring for animal, watch it die, dry their eyes, and say “maybe next year.” It takes a certain type of person to put their entire income on the line every year at planting season. Not everybody can watch as their entire year’s work goes down the drain simply because it didn’t rain, and still try next year. It isn’t about the paycheck at the end of the day. You have to farm with all your heart, take your time, and never give in — you have to be passionate, patient, and persevere.

Now when I tell you I farm, you probably think that I have some hundred acre operation with a hundred or so dairy cattle, or beef cattle, or thousands of head of poultry or swine. Well I don’t, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t take passion to do what I do, or I should say we do. Don’t get me wrong when I was five years old my family farmed over 300 acres of hay crop with the hope to expand to a beef cattle operation in the future, and although I was five, during hay season you would find me in the hay field not all of two steps behind my father and brothers — it’s a passion that started young. Farming those three hundred acres was not easy though– we did custom farming, meaning that we rented land or farmed land for others on top of both my parents having full time jobs. We had trouble with the land owners and let’s just say all of our farming equipment had at least a little a bit of rust on it and fell mostly under the ‘antique’ category. We did what a lot of other farmers did with a third of the equipment, but probably with ten times the heart.

When a financial crisis struck my family, farming was what got put aside. Eventually, all the equipment got sold to help make ends meet. It wasn’t an easy decision for my father- to give up his passion — but he did it to support his family.

I was probably around the age of ten, when we had to give up farming — an operation we started from the ground up. And by the time I was ten and half, I promised myself that it wasn’t going to be the last time my family would farm and this time it would be our farm. For months and years, I wrote letters to anyone I thought could help: grant programs, owners of properties, various organizations, really anyone. By the time I was 15, I had found the prefect property — it was small, but it was all we needed to start. My parents and I went to meet the owners of the farm one evening, and as soon as they met us they decided then and there that we were going to be the new owners. I guess they just knew farming was our passion; whatever it was, I’ll never be able to thank them enough.

That was in 2012, like I said I was 15, but to be honest our struggles haven’t changed much from those times that we farmed when I was 5. Yeah, this time we own the property — which I will forever be grateful. But we’ve had to start from the ground up for the second time. Our equipment is still covered in rust and all of our tractors are over 50 years old. There isn’t a day on the farm that something doesn’t break down and I don’t think we’ve had a carefree day in the hay field. But somehow we always get the job done — even with all 5 of us working full time. If farmers had to do what we do to continue to farm, I can almost promise you: they wouldn’t. While many farms have been in families for generations at a time, our farm is on it’s 2nd generation — that generation being my brothers and I. As a farm, we haven’t had the time nor investment others have had to grow and expand. But that hasn’t stopped us; we are growing one step at a time. But I can promise you that the one aspect that has grown in the ten years, is the passion myself and my family has for agriculture — and sometimes, that’s all it takes.