Celebrating our daughter’s first birthday party along with several family weddings in recent weeks not only meant we were extremely busy keeping up with chores and being gone, but it also meant we had a lot of visitors at our farm. We hosted the first big event at our house this past weekend, our daughter’s first birthday party. This meant lots of cleaning up around the farm, finishing renovation projects on our old farmhouse, and preparing our new garage to be the site of the party.
With a slew of extended family and friends visiting for weddings and the birthday party, we were poised to give multiple farm tours at each farm location for visitors of all ages. When you have a farm, it comes with the territory that people want to see the animals and get a tractor ride while in the area. So, over the past month, we explained the robotic milking setup to aunts and uncles, talked through feeding and different commodities with visiting friends, fed countless calf bottles with eager little ones, gave four-wheeler and tractor rides to multiple generations and much more.
The idea of family events being tied to farm tours isn’t a new concept. Since I was little, having people over always coincided with a quick tractor ride or visit to the calf barn. Friends in elementary school and throughout my college years were always excited to visit and experience all the fun the family farm had to offer. Horseback rides, playing with the calves, picking berries during a four-wheeler ride, building forts in the hay mow, and playing in the giant sand pile were always crowd-pleasers. Since then, farm tours have been tacked on to many events, including family reunions, baby showers, bridal showers, post-wedding brunches, birthday parties and so forth.
That’s one of the many great parts of living on a family farm. Now we get to start making those same memories and continue these traditions in the coming years as our daughter begins to welcome her own friends to the farm.
Molly Ihde (Schmitt)
The author dairy farms with her parents and brother near Hawkeye, Iowa. The family milks approximately 300 head of grade Holstein cows at Windsor Valley Dairy LLC — split half and half between a double-eight parallel milking parlor and four robotic milking units. In the spring of 2020, Molly decided to take a leap and fully embrace her love for the industry by returning full time to her family’s dairy.
