Locust Hill Farm

Regret is something we're all familiar with. If someone asked you to name something you regret, would you name something you regret doing or something you regret not doing? My guess is the majority of the time the answer will be you regret something you didn't do. The questions "what if.." and "if only.." linger in the back of many people's minds. "Why didn't I buy bitcoin in 2012?" (major regret there). It's likely that you regret few things that you decided to do because those choices led you to the life that you know and live today - your family, friends, home, career. It's the things you didn't decide to do, opportunities you didn't take, risks you didn't take, that leave you wondering, "what if...". Oftentimes we may feel that we're too old to follow a dream or try something new. As the title to this post says, "today is the first day of the rest of your life" so just start. The best time to ...

  The photo on the left was taken in October 2021 and the one on the right over 3 years later from nearly the exact location. One is in the middle of a hay field and the other from the middle of a kitchen. It represents our dream that we thought impossible followed by the reality that we managed to accomplish that dream. Starting a first generation farm is extremely difficult with significant capital needs and not much return. It has been tough for my analytical self to get past this but I’m trying. For lots of families, farming is a lifestyle choice rather than a financial one and I wish it didn’t have to be that way. When you don’t have the size and scale required to make it in a commodity business, you need to find ways to innovate and add value to your product. We are utilizing rotational grazing to return nutrients to the soil. We also built a mobile chicken coop that gets pulled around the farm to the fields the cows were previously in. The chickens provide us with pasture ra...

So far January has been cold, windy, and snowy. It's been several years since we've had an actual snow. It snowed a couple of weeks ago and then stayed cold so it never really went away and then this week it snowed another couple inches. I'm not really sure how many inches of snow we got because the wind is so brutal on the hill we're on. All of the snow in the back yard blew away while there are drifts against the basement retaining wall 10 feet high. With the cold temperatures and fierce wind, the thermometer says it feels like 0 degrees. One morning it felt like -2 degrees.  My office view One morning during this cold spell while I was working from my computer inside a comfortable 75 degree house, I noticed the cows were acting strange. They weren't eating their hay and they kept mooing and congregating in one area of the field before moving and congregating in another spot. Usually the cows are very content and quiet. When Mike came up the driveway, they all sta...

As we begin the year 2025, I was reminded that this upcoming year will mark 10 years into my banking career. During college I did an internship with a local bank who then offered me a job once I graduated. I stayed with that bank for over 8 years, primarily as a Credit Analyst, before accepting an opportunity to be a Credit Analyst in the Capital Markets Department at a $45 billion company. I have always enjoyed writing so thought I would take a minute to think about and share a few lessons I have learned over the last 10 years that might be of use to someone starting out in their career. Stand Out From Your Peers  I graduated college a year early so was only 21 years old when I began working at the bank. My boss, mentor, and friend, Jim McAlister, played a big role in my early career. He was a very successful banker and took it upon himself to give me advice and share his knowledge that he gained from over 40 years in banking. 10 years later I still remember one ...

Will 2025 be the year I finally stick to blogging consistently? Probably not... But after agonizing what topic I want to blog about and what platform to blog on, I came to the conclusion that I just need to start and not care about the details. I've actually been blogging on and off for over 16 years. When I was in high school I started a blog on Tumblr then through college I had a blog on a different site. Then when I started my career I started a personal finance blog. When we bought our farm I briefly blogged about the farm. Each time I eventually faded away from the blog because our life has been a crazy whirlwind the past 10 years. I've always enjoyed writing but I've been paralyzed by what "theme" to stick to because I'm involved and am interested in so many topics - motherhood, banking, agriculture, real estate, personal finance, self improvement. I felt the need to stick to one topic to blog about, which seemed impossible. Then I would get the crazy id...