I Gave Up the Farm Life

Last week the ladies over at RHD had a blog post with five reasons to not leave the farm.

Too late.

I already did.

I sold out.

No, really, I sold out my interest in our cows the week after Ft Worth.  It was close to 50 head that I was half owner in.

One weekend I was leaving Fort Worth on the road to Houston to go watch one of our calves take reserve grand in a chapter show, back home where I got to show a young man how to palpate, and sold a calf to one of the nicest families I’ve ever had the pleasure of dealing with.  I loved every minute of it and had no intention of stopping.  

Two days later I told my dad to come up with a number for my portion of the cows as I was walking out the door.

Since then I’ve seen the two Longhorns at the golf course more than I’ve seen the herd I spent the past decade building.

The reasons are somewhat personal but suffice it to say that I’m walking away from something that was my main passion for non-financial reasons that have nothing to do with the cattle herd itself.  If I’m honest with myself I know exactly where I was when I realized it wasn’t going to work long term but it took about 18-months for me to finally stop pretending I could do anything about it.

The people that know me and say they could never walk away from their herd are all different in one key aspect; they get to call the shots and they can hold members of their operation responsible when needed.

It’s something I’ve needed to write about for the past few months -the RHD post seemed like a good enough reason to- I’ll ramble on and on about the secondary reasons over the next two weeks.