As previously mentioned in another blog post… I joined the active-duty U.S. Army in 2021, partially to get away from my home state of Washington. As chance would have it, the Army stationed me in the one place I was trying to avoid – Joint Base Lewis-McChord, WA. This blog post is about how I rediscovered my purpose and passion, and how I reconciled with the fact that one does not necessarily have to create distance to make the heart grow fonder. Sometimes it’s not the distance that resonates – it’s the depth. I dug deep, literally dug into the dirt and discovered the loose ends in my life, like the ends of unearthed root balls, I found them and buried them. It turns out I had unfinished business in my home state of Washington, and this was my chance to resolve it. This is a story about how I found my home and heart without ever having to leave it behind. This is a story about how a piece of ground literally grounded me during a time in life when I was facing significant upheaval and uncertainty.
Originally, my farm was supposed to be at the Veterans Farm in Orting, on the Washington Soldiers Home campus where they have ¼ - ½ acre incubator farm plots specifically for military veterans. I planned to lease a plot at this location. I visited the site and met the farm manager Carrie towards the end of summer 2021. The Veterans Farm is located in the shadows of Mt. Rainier in the Puyallup River Watershed, which possesses some of the best agricultural soil in the whole world. This is due in part to the way the river floods and deposits fine sand and silt on the valley floor, referred to as alluvial (water-deposited) soils. Carrie enjoyed bragging about the soil. She gave me a tour of the farm and introduced me to some of the farmers who were working in their plots. Because the site is popular among beginning farmer veterans, and has a limited number of plots, there was a waiting list. I put my name on the list in summer 2021 and was hopeful something would become available before spring 2022. The opportunity to farm in Orting was more than a lease, but a chance to work with a knowledgeable mentor and build camaraderie among other beginning farmers, who also happened to be misfit military veterans such as myself.
The rest of summer and autumn passed, and soon it was January 2022 and I still had not heard back from Carrie about the lease. I figured the odds of getting a lease were favorable, probably about 80 percent. Even if I struck out on the lease in Orting… I was pretty sure I could find a small parcel of fallow land somewhere in Pierce or Thurston County... in someone’s backyard… some perimeter space at the JBLM Community Gardens… a similar incubator farm managed by the WSU Extension… a bunch of Plan B scenarios crossed my mind. Despite not having any definite access to land, I decided definitively that I would try my hand at running my own small farm. I would do it, one way or another. I suppose the “never-turning-back-now” moment was when I bought $350 worth of pumpkin and corn seeds from an online catalog. It was a leap of faith, and I don’t recommend starting a business on such a whim, but those odds were as good as I would get.
A few days after I submitted my big seed order online, a farm owner messaged me through a website that links aspiring farmers with land and farm owners. I created a profile sometime in summer 2021 and my profile remained active, but I was not proactively searching for lease arrangements. When the husband-and-wife team invited me out to their farm, I couldn’t say no. (For the purposes of this blog, we’ll call the owners William and Kathryn).
Our initial meet and greet went well. I learned that William and Kathryn were hoping to semi-retire soon, so they were looking for a younger person to help at their dairy and livestock farm. I started volunteering at their farm in Rochester (Independence Valley), assisting with animal care and mucking out barns, among other upkeep chores. They kept inviting me back. I started going more and more often, until it became my regular weekend volunteer gig which eventually evolved into an official internship. Pretty soon, I was spending every weekend, holiday, and any spare time I could carve out at the farm. Kathryn welcomed me into her home, providing meals and a guest bedroom so I could spend extended nights and days at the farm without having to commute back and forth. Whenever I would get leave approved from my full-time job as an Army nurse, I would retreat to the farm for a working staycation. Fortunately, the farm is an easy trip from where I was stationed at JBLM (Joint Base Lewis-McChord).
Around April 2022, the farm manager at the Veterans Farm in Orting called me to say a ¼ acre lease was available. To be frank, the excitement about leasing in Orting was slowly fading away as I spent more and more time in Independence Valley. I was becoming enamored with the place, the animals, and the people in Rochester that I could not imagine spending my time anywhere else. I knew I couldn’t be in two places at once. Splitting my free time between Orting and Rochester would be impossible, due to conflicting priorities at my “day job” (i.e., Army) and an awkward commute between the two locations, which are over 60 miles apart, in separate river valleys across two different counties. Although JBLM is situated in the middle between the two farms, it became clear I needed to pick one.
Coincidentally, around the same time I was playing mental tug-of-war between Orting and Rochester, I found out I was being transferred into a different Army unit which was preparing to deploy to the Middle East in autumn 2022. The decision was made for me. Since the lease at the Veterans Farm was only offered in 3-year terms, I had to decline the lease. I could not justify signing a 3-year lease if I was going to deploy for nine months. The deployment would mean I would miss a whole growing season. I accepted the reality that my own farm dream would have to wait for some time, while I took care of the commitment I made to the Army. As I sidelined my plans to start Chainy-Stakes Farm, I dove deeper into my internship at the dairy farm and continued to engage in other outdoor volunteer work to keep myself connected to a community of small farmers and land stewards.
I continued to integrate into William and Kathryn’s farm rhythms as I worked side-by-side with them, drove on errands into town, and shared conversations over the dinner table. One night, loosened up by Kathryn’s homemade elderberry wine, I started talking about my passion for pumpkins, and confessed a dream of owning my own pumpkin patch. I elaborated about my interest in experimenting with a Three Sisters method of companion planting, which interplants corn and beans amongst the pumpkins and/or winter squashes. I explained that I already purchased a collection of seeds with the intent of leasing at a different location. William casually started planting a bug in my ear about leasing me a slice of land on the edge of his property, about an acre in size. At the time, it was being used as one of the paddocks for the small herd of beef cattle and juvenile dairy cows, or “beefers and heifers” as we lovingly call them. William explained that many years ago he grew corn in that same pasture. It was beautiful tall corn, but tasted awful, he remembered. He called it the “world’s worst tasting corn.” I think he was being a bit verbose, using the witty, self-deprecating humor of a seasoned third-generation farmer. I think he was trying to set the bar of success very low for me as the rookie farmer. He joked that anybody could grow better corn than he did. He encouraged me, “Heck, the field has already got plenty of cow patties scattered about, no better fertilizer, I’ll even run the manure spreader over it again, if you want. Harrow it in a little. Best soil you could ask for, Chehalis sandy silt loam.” William reminisced about being a kid on the family farm and growing a sweet corn variety called Jubilee. He remembered selling fresh ears of corn off the roadside, eating it straight off the cob, simply the best corn he ever tasted. It became apparent that if I stood any chance of impressing my mentor William, I would have to grow corn.
I remember feeling hesitant at first to accept his offer. I was still feeling guilty about turning down the lease in Orting, but a tad bit relieved not to have the burden of starting my own farm on top of a pending deployment. I knew my life was about to get extremely hectic as my unit prepared to deploy… I had to travel out-of-state for pre-deployment training on two separate occasions, lasting two weeks per trip (once in May and the second time in October)… I had to move out of my house and put all my belongings into storage… Did I really want the added stress of starting a farm on top of all that?
If I accepted the lease from William, what would I do then? There were a thousand, what-if scenarios running through my mind, urging me to form some contingency plans. What if the deployment date gets pushed up? What if I don’t have enough time? What parts of my life must be sidelined or sacrificed to make this happen? Where can I find help? Who’s going to want to help me? What if I get hurt? How do I explore my calling to be a farmer without devaluing or distracting myself from my present position as a nurse?
I kept pondering all the “what ifs” for a few weeks, as I casually eyeballed the acre of land from a distance. The aha moment happened when William and Kathryn took me to see it up close. They led me to the pasture and watched me set foot onto it for the first time. As I absorbed the scenery, I didn’t have to say anything to them because my expression made it clear – there were no more doubts in my mind. I wanted desperately to farm this ground.
To paint the picture of this landscape, the acre is located behind several outbuildings that shelter the pasture from the road, and it’s on the edge of William’s property, so it feels secluded. The neighboring property is an overgrown Christmas tree farm with tall, skinny noble fir trees, which provide an extra layer of privacy to the east. On the south side is an old railroad grade sandwiched between two thickets of trees and shrubs. As a result of the elevated wood line, the south edge of the acre gets a decent amount of shade. On the west side, William’s farm stretches beyond about 80 acres, which is all pasture where the beefers and heifers are rotationally grazed, and hay is baled during the summer. Looking even further west, the farm runs up against the neighboring vegetable fields and orchards. Green and more green is all that can be seen, fading into the horizon as the county road bends around the winding Chehalis River.
I was overwhelmed with the tranquility of my surroundings as I reflected about my circuitous path to arrive here. I grew up in the Seattle suburbs and lived in the heart of Seattle (Lower Queen Anne) for ten years as an adult. I used to get claustrophobic in the city, but this was the exact opposite. I fit in here. There was room for me, the vastness made it such that I felt welcomed. It was the opposite my life in Seattle, where I always felt like I was getting in the way as a pedestrian on the street, a cyclist on the road, or a commuter on the bus… everywhere I went there was congestion. On the farm, I literally felt lighter because I didn’t have to compete for space or clean air, there was ample of it. I was giddy, literally awe inspired at the opportunity to farm on this property. I still couldn’t believe I landed a lease here.
The land was just a “chunk of dirt” to William, who had no intention of charging me for said lease. I suppose forty years of getting paid very little in exchange for shedding pounds of blood, sweat, and tears on the farm will make an old farmer scoff at taking some young chump’s change. According to an expert, the going rate for leasing an acre was $250-$350 per year, so that’s what I offered to pay him. He vehemently declined my money. I think he was just amused that some young person was so stupid to be so excited about a slice of soil. As he shook his head and laughed, I couldn’t tell if he was laughing with me or at me, but I didn’t care. I knew I had to farm here. Not just any land, but this land. I could not wait. No better time than the present. After all, “People who do things right don’t get nothing done,” as one of my other farm mentors likes to say. He means if you wait around for the perfect weather, the perfect plan, the perfect person, the perfect timing, and so on, you’ll never accomplish anything. As farmers, we do the best with who we are and what we have on hand, and that was exactly what I was going to do.
Copyright, all rights reserved, 2023, Kayla McCarthy.
(Author's whereabouts upon publication: Inside a shipping container at an overseas military base, living it up on deployment).