First, we visited our local USDA Service Center (epicenter of The Farm Bill) and were whisked through the process of registering our property as a farm!!!
Here's an aerial showing our place (yellow rectangle in the center) amidst a rural mix of agricultural and woodlands. There's a lot more forest around here than where we are from and we love that.
Zoom in and you will notice several polygons. The north polygon is what we've designated "pasture" while the south polygon contain our buildings, our yard/wildlife habitat, our garden and our orchard.
Around this same time we found the below note tucked in a Christmas card in our mailbox. Apparently, someone had been driving by who still had some emotional ties/memories of the place and was happy to see it being LOVED again:
When you are coming off a year of cleaning up other people's trash and a series of projects just to get a place back to live-able, it's nice to have a couple of pats on the back like this.
Here's to a quick jumpstart on a great 2012 to ALL OF YOU!!!
