Today we’d like to introduce you to Maria Hartley.
Hi Maria, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
We first bought our farm in June of 2019 to develop a way to be self-sufficient. With the world going crazy, I wanted a way to provide food security for me and my family. It started out small with rabbits, chickens, & dairy goats to produce meat, eggs, & milk. I started networking with other farmers to gain the knowledge on how to care for these animals as well as watching lots of YouTube videos & reading books. In 2020 we added hogs to our farm & began a breeding program, as well as started adding a variety of fruit trees and vegetable gardens around the property. In 2021 we added cattle to our farm. My husband, Caleb, and I have full-time jobs, and the only way we are able to make this farm work for our family is everyone contributes. My three daughters, Kierra, Malea, and Natalia help with the daily chores, and we spend our weekends working on larger projects as a family. It is not easy to raise three teenage children, so keeping them busy on the farm teaches them hard work, dedication, and the know-how to provide for themselves.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Time management has been our biggest obstacles. We both work very demanding full-time jobs and raise three teenage children that also have extracurricular activities. Finding the time to care for all of the animals, clean stalls, and make improvements to the farm was very difficult, but we get up early, the girls do afternoon chores, we do walkthroughs after work, and work hard on the weekends. Unfortunately, dedicating this time to our farm takes means we give up vacations and spending time with other friends and families. To overcome some of these, we have started adding automations to our farm to make it easier for all of us. We utilize automatic feeders & waterers to cut down on the amount of time it takes to care for the animals and plants. Knowledge & experience was also something we were lacking. We were common city folk never grew up on a farm, never worked on a farm we knew nothing when we started. Animals take lots of care and are always trying to kill themselves, it seems like so keeping them alive and caring for them properly was something we had to learn. I bought lots of books on each animal before we got it studied up, and learned as much as I could. I watched episodes on YouTube of other farmers and how they cared for their animals. When we actually purchased the animals, I picked the sellers brain and ask questions about things that I was unclear on, but even with doing all this, we still have faced losses. Our animals are like pets to us, and we love them a lot, so when a chicken was missing at night, I would grab a flashlight and go looking for it until I found it or we found a sign it was no longer alive. I have cried so many times of the loss of our animals, and nothing can really prepare you for that! There are a ton a disease, poisonous plants, and you have to have knowledge about all of those things, so while we have been doing this for several years, I still look to others that have more knowledge & experience than I do on how to handle these challenges.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
We are most proud of our hogs! I am huge on taste, and I wanted something that I knew would taste good I just couldn’t imagine how good a hog could taste, but I could give up my beef steak for a pork steak now. We raise Hereford Hogs which are not very common in Florida as they come from a breeding program that was started in Nebraska and Iowa in the 1920s. I am from Nebraska, so we added a little piece from home to our farm. We raise antibiotic-free hogs and sell off the piglets to cover our costs. As we develop our farm, we hope to expand our offerings.
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
I believe the knowledge on how to produce your own food will be much needed in the coming years! We are open to sharing our farm with others to teach them how to provide for themselves and help them overcome or avoid obstacles we have already been through. Being able to produce enough to care for your own family with the cost of everything going up around us is going to be a very important thing! As Henry Kissinger said, “Who controls the food supply, controls the people…” so be in control of yourself by learning how to provide your own food.
Contact Info:
- Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/HartleyFarms2019/
Image Credits
Maria Hartley
