A New Horizon

Cross country skiing up Lolo Pass

Last photo of Oliver <3

As many of you great folks know, during the beginning of winter and in the midst of holiday season chaos, I announced that I will be taking a step back from farm production this year (2024) and take an official hiatus from the farm.
I think sometimes it is really hard to know where to start because it wasn't one thing that lead to this decision, and it truly was a difficult one for me.
Being a mother to a young child feels like one of the most important jobs I have ever taken on, and not to say I look at my son as a job, but I do think it is our job as parents to provide the best environments, experiences and encourage them to feel confident and assured with love at all times we can give them. And well as many of you also experience this is no easy feat and there is a lot of pressure and constant go's with creating as good of a life as you can for your child, and that truly feels worth investing in for me and for our son.
I also think as many of you know I have been farming on various farms for 11 years and started my business between 3-4 years ago. I don't think I have ever really been able to allow myself space and time to recover from burn out that inevitability seems to happen just about every year. Farming is hard work, and I know it's easy to say that and people think "yeah it is," and think they really get it, but they really don't truly get it. Farming, especially the styles of farming we are doing with intensive specialty crops that can't be monocultured and GPS routed with huge tractors and combines, is exceptionally challenging on the body. We do a ton of manual labor, kind of constantly for at least 3 quarters of the year or more. Then on top of it as a farm owner, you are expected to pay for all your seeds, your supplies like irrigation, find greenhouse space, find tools and implements to help you form beds, order in soil amendments such as compost (because trust me it is really hard to make enough accumulated compost yourself for a farm), feed for the animals which goes up every year, trays for seed starting, seed starting soil, paying for heaters in the winter, finding cooler spaces for the summer, investing in storage containers, market supplies, advertising, website fees, and so the list goes on and on.
Not only is this job truly a huge financial and physical undertaking, but because I am farming for profit and to try to pay myself and not as some hobby or something cute to do to post on social media. Being able to find the balance of offering affordable pricing and find pricing that people are willing to pay for, which is no easy feat. Because truly what I actually need to be asking for a lot of products, would appall people, but because we are so detached from where our food, fibers and other goods come from, it is easy to not see how much work and how little these folks producing these goods are making. A lot of this countries foods and good are created from underpaid migratory workers, which farmers need in order to make any kind of profit, and they are the only people that are willing to take that on for such little pay and benefits. We also just continue to be a country developed and built off of slavery and asking too much from people but expecting the prices to be low when we find them stocked on the grocery shelf. It takes a lot of work to shift your mind and perspective on how much our goods should cost, but trust me, if we farmers wanted to be making even a semi-livable and normal middle of the road salary, we need to either get big and sell more and more and more (but then you have more liabilities with more employees, etc), or we need to charge more and value how much goes into just one flower stem, one head of lettuce and one ball of yarn.
For me, I still haven't seen a profit, and that doesn't even count years of money sunk into the farm that we just count as a loss now and don't equate that into the accounting for profit margins. It really feels like it is easy for folks to love what we are doing and offering, and they can see how much love and quality we put into what we grow and produce, but unfortunately when the numbers don't add up and you feel like you spend every waking hour working and in work mode, it doesn't make you feel better to feel the pressure to keep doing something that might actually be harming your family and yourself more than it is doing good in the community.
I have always seen it as my purpose to do the things that I am able to do and capable of doing to make better change and work hard for what I believe in.
But, when you are physically and mentally burned out deeply, your mind can tend to spiral and suddenly you don't know what you believe is good anymore and you start to doubt that what you are offering in the world is even worth it or will ever make any change.
I decided that I wanted my next year, which is now currently this year, to look radically different than what I have been doing for most of my career in farming.
Since all of the endless work I put in, I literally didn't make any money this year, and that hit me kind of hard and realizing we have essentially been living off one small income for more than 3 years now since I had to give up my side gigs.
What is the point in doing all of this, stressing myself and my family out, and missing important and valuable time with our son and family that we will never get back again when he grows up and starts his own life? Is it worth it when I can't even get the basic things that I would expect from working this hard? Which is really just some kind of return and security for my family.
I am ready to take this time to explore new opportunities in my life, and that make more sense for my family and I. And wow, already I feel like I have started to fill up my time and days with things that are really filling my cup and making me feel really good about how I am spending my days again. When you open yourself up to the world, it is amazing what fall into your lap and how much you truly can manifest.

So what is currently going on and what is the future of Lilly of the Valley?

As far as the growing season, yes I do still plan to grow many of crops, I don't really think I could ever not grow a garden during the growing season. So we are just going to focus on growing food and flowers for our family, and minimally offering goods in the farm stand when we can.
The farm stand will not be as big of a priority this year, and I still need to figure out how I want to even schedule things when we have products to share, but this is for you to know that it will be minimally open for parts of this summer-fall. That being said, I will not be attending markets regularly this year. If it works in my life and I have some product I may participate in some local pop up markets, but again, I really don't want to over comitt to things that honestly, can be really defeating and be hit or miss for me.
As some of you already have seen and know, I did decide to keep doing soaps in ways that works for me. I created the soap CSA, which is now closed for more folks to participate, but I am excited for those that did sign up. It is an offering where I am curating seasonal soaps boxes for each season winter-fall. We had our first shipment/local pick up at the beginning of January, Winter, and I received a lot of good feedback so far. So i hope that continues to go well and live up to folks expectations. The next seasonal soap box will go out at the beginning of April, and I am excited to start making those spring soaps very soon.
I have also taken a step up as a board member to the O'Hara commons and sustainability center. I joined as a board member last year in the spring. And I felt like with how my life was before, I really wasn't offering or working as much as I wanted to for this wonderful organization, and it created a deep sense of anxiety for me. This year since announcing my hiatus, I have decided to really intentionally find specific tasks that I am going to take on with the O'Hara board, and one of those being revitalizing a seed library at the O'Hara Commons. As many of you know I am passionate about getting seeds out into the world and I do seed swaps every spring. This is my next dream and step I have wanted to provide to this community. I hope that we find a unique and easy way to create this for you all to use, and I am really excited to announce more about that in the future months soon.
I also am going to be helping the O'Hara's a lot more with a special mission they have taken on for several years, which is maintaining and keeping the abandoned orchard at Blue Moon Orchard in Stevensville. Every year, thousands of pounds of fruit is maintained, irrigated then harvests through volunteers and members of the O'Hara commons and then sold, or donated to various outlets so that this food doesn't go to waste and is offered to the community. I am excited to take on more responsibility in running and helping facilitate this project, and I hope we continue to bring you all loads of fruit for seasons to come!
So outside of a significant amount of volunteer work I decided to do, I am going to be trialing out a new and exciting collaboration to make hopefully a small lot of money this growing season.
I am going to be working with Barnes who owned and runs the local seed company called Survivalist Seeds. Even though I have not had the pleasure of meeting Barnes personally yet (very soon), we have connected a lot through so many different channels and knowing of one another distantly. We finally decided to properly connect and start talking about what seed farming looks like. I have decided to take on many varieties of crops that I will be growing for his company, and potentially more seed companies that he is also sub-contracted out with. I am really excited about this because 1. I think it could actually be a really fun way for me to continue to farm, but not have to continually be marketing myself and dealing with perishable commodities that I take a tremendous amount of loss on sometimes. And 2. Because I really do love saving seeds but still have so much to learn about this sector of agriculture, I am excited to learn as I go, learn new techniques and possibly grow some new varieties of crops I haven't worked with yet. It has been a pleasure collaborating and working with Barnes so far, and he is one of those people that is really filling my cup up again with feeling useful and helping me find my path into more purpose again. Plus it always feels good to work with really cool people doing really awesome work for the world.
And as if I haven't already filled my schedule up enough, I am excited to be sharing soon some other work that I feel passionate about and could use my skills to work with the community more. I am not going to say what it is, because it could be a couple of things I am exploring or waiting to hear back on, but needless to say, the good work continues and I feel really great knowing that everything is going to be just fine with our family, even if we aren't farming in the ways that we are used to anymore. I am also excited to be helping and working with our son's little preschool in whatever way I can in the future, and really being able to help them with some fun garden projects.

Whew, well it honestly feels good to give a more in depth look into why this decision to take a hiatus from my profession of growing cut flowers, veg and herbs. I think sometimes it feels good to share our sides of the story even when it doesn't always make sense to others.
And honestly, I am having to remind myself a lot, that it doesn't matter what others think, it is my life, I am the only one living it in my body and my family is the only one most directly affected by what I chose to do for my profession. I did not fail, and I have not quit, I am simply taking a step back, reassessing the structure of our lives and working on doing things that make sense right now and feels better.

I went to the Women's Annual Montana Farmer's Union Conference in Anaconda this last weekend, and not only was it nice to get out of this area for a couple days, but I really love when I get to meet other farmers like me, especially women and other mothers. It feels good to know we aren't alone, that the struggles we have are not unique or a cause of our own failings, and everyone seems to be always reassessing their lives as farmers and changing things when needed constantly.
One thing that one farmer that I was excited to meet told me was:
"Why can't you change anything you want to change? You are allowed to do whatever the F*** you want, whenever you want and it doesn't matter what anyone thinks"
Simple, yet true and always something we needed to be reminded of.

And while this would be a good place to leave off, my heart can't really leave it all on a high note, when the truth is that we are going through a hard loss right now.
Our beloved cat, Oliver, died last week. My heart and body hurts so deeply from this loss. Oliver became my friend and pal when I was 19 years old. He has been through so many stages of my life, through so many adventures, moves, new boyfriends and roommates, hard times, and really good, and always knew how to inch his way into the heart of all my close friends.
He was such a unique cat, he really did like humans more than anything, and either he was just an alien or he might have really thought he was one of us humans. We took him hiking all over the rocky mountains, camping in our tent all snuggled up together, and he even was in the tent with us when a black bear decided to circle our tent. He slept all through it without a peep, while I was laying there feeling like my stomach and heart was about to jump out of my mouth!
He was a chatty bug, with the most silly gangly legs and walk, he always look like his feet were crossing one over the other when he ran. His tail always expressive, skinny and sticking strait up in attention and excitement. He loved his beans (his name for food), snuggling close to our heads at night, and laying on my big pregnant belly any chance he could get. He followed me everywhere in the house, the farm, in life. He was my little shadow, my dear friend and a very important member of our family.
I am so glad that our son, Emmer, got to meet him while he was still in good health, even though I don't expect our son to remember him when he grows up. It still meant a lot to me to see those two bond and share a life together while he could.
Oliver died at the decent age of 14, from natural age and health issues that arose quickly.
I am so honored to have spent my most formative adult year with him, and that I got to experience the deep love and connection to such a loving creature that was non-human. It is rare that we developed such a deep bond to something outside of the human world, and what a blessing I feel to have experienced the devoted friendship and endless love we had to each other.



 We are changing, growing, grieving, yet also excited about many opportunities and manifesting a year that we can feel really good and proud of.

Thank you for following along and being apart of our journey, and sometimes being the supportive community we really need.

Stay warm, it's still winter, but we are thinking seeds and plant starts very soon!

~Olivia aka Lilly

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Oliver and I (olivia)

Sweet Oli sitting in the windows, always