AdAgrA 2022: Sharing the Blessings

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Business & Ministry

Immian Wolfe

Pitfalls of Agriculture; Balancing Farming, Family and Ministry

I am married to my lovely wife, Kimberly, and we have 4 children, as you can see in the picture.

We've been farming here in Canada for about, well, I would say it's appropriately a 10-year project so far.

From initial dreaming and ideation to today, it's probably about 10 years.

I think I said 8 in the little blurb about the talk, but 9 seasons of farming and we are a commercial farm.

So we grow currently, Well, I'll tell you a bit of the history, I guess, about it through the talk, but right now we currently grow cut salad greens and garlic.

And we're of a size today that can actually earn an income for us as a family.

But I would put a couple of caveats on that point.

But before we start any further, I would just say, why don't you join me in prayer and then we can continue.

Father in heaven, I want to thank you for life today.

We'd like to ask for your blessing on our minds as we think about how to take agriculture and put it into our lives and into our families and how to use it in ministry and how to ensure that ministry does happen.

It's not about the things that we end up doing ourselves, but it's what you do through us and through touching the lives of people.

So we pray, O Lord, that you will bless our minds to understand how to put things in perspective.

So I come from a background working in the food industry and how this all started was in 2012, my wife and I, we had had, we had a two-year-old little girl, Aricia.

And we were noticing in particular a couple of challenges.

We were noticing that we had too little family time.

So I would leave being in a fast-growing business, I would leave the house shortly after the kids, after Arisia woke up, and just have a little bit of time to have devotions and maybe help out with breakfast, and then I'd have to run.

And I would get home just before she went to bed.

So we'd have supper together some nights, and we would find that, you know, you go through the evening worship and putting your child to bed routine, and you go through a few routines yourself, and then you're off to bed, and the whole cycle restarts.

And what I didn't like about that was, or what we didn't like about that was, there's just not enough unstructured time for sort of those natural parental and child, parent-child interactions to happen.

So the only things that I was getting to interact with my little 1 about was not those questions like, hey daddy, how does cauliflower grow?

Or, you know, what is that blue thing over there?

They were always, you know, within the context of devotions and hey, eat your breakfast and brush your teeth and it's time to go to bed kind of things.

We wanted more free interaction with our family.

We also had found that in our previous life, we had too little community connection.

We're living in an area down close to Vancouver, British Columbia, sort of a large general area.

I think in the greater Vancouver area, there's probably about 3 to 5 million people.

And the culture is just a little bit different there than we like.

Kimberly grew up in rural Arizona and I grew up here in rural British Columbia.

And we found that while we were there, if you're gonna go and visit somebody or somebody is going to come and visit you, it's always prearranged.

So it's like, there's no, there's no drop in.

There isn't that sort of comfort level that your neighbors or, or, or friends, just feel comfortable enough to drop in.

So if somebody was going to come by, they'd call ahead 2 days and say, hey, what are you doing on Tuesday night?

And it kind of felt a little bit less natural to us.

We were also noticing that all of our energy, so this is our sort of emotional, psychological energy, was really going to making a living.

So we went to, you know, we participated in church, but in the bigger churches, they don't particularly need your participation, And we were finding that we were just spending all of our energy making a living and we weren't contributing significantly to the kingdom of heaven.

So during the summer of 2012, we had been working on setting up a bit of a greenhouse and a garden, trying to get a bit more natural.

We were living, by the way, in a rural area of the Greater Vancouver Regional Area.

We were on a property there that was 18 acres.

And so We were renting a little place in the back of this property and we decided to set up some gardens and we set up a little greenhouse.

We've been reading Elliot Coleman's book on winter gardening and a few other books.

And we thought, man, this is really neat.

How can we have vegetables grow through the winter and how can we do some more of this kind of thing ourself?

And I was working here in this greenhouse that you see in the picture 1 day.

I think I was clearing out some beds of residue and needing to replant them or renovate them.

And I had spent probably 4 hours in there.

And over the course of those 4 hours, I got to the end of that 4 hours, And I had been thinking some thoughts about my devotions, and I'd been thinking some thoughts about some friends that I hadn't connected with in a while, and made some commitments to call up on them and check on them.

And I'd been thinking about my wife and my relationship with her, and what I could be doing differently to improve on that.

And so I had all these thoughts that were not work-related.

And I got to the end of those 4 hours that specific day, And I thought, huh, as a white collar worker, I'm hired for my mind.

And when they, when my employer has my mind, they also have my body because I can't separate the 2.

But as a previous blue collar worker, when I was a blue collar worker and when I do blue collar work, they're hiring me for a little bit of my mind to make sure I do my job well, but they really are looking for my body to get the work done.

And I just thought that was interesting to realize that my mind in my normal work at the time was not free to roam and to dwell on various subjects.

And so that chain of thoughts started an interesting, triggered another interesting chain of thoughts, which was the fact that I personally, as a person, I enjoy physically working, I enjoy mentally working with my mind as well.

So as a society, and I would say even globally, but more in advanced developed countries, what has happened during the industrial revolution is as people moved from rural living and trying to have their small holder places or living and working on farms, is we didn't just lose farmers and the number of farmers have dwindled as farms have grown bigger and bigger, we didn't just lose farmers.

What we lost was fathers, because fathers have tended to bear the, naturally, I suppose, have tended to bear the responsibility of generating income for the family.

And as jobs and as work moved into an industrial setting, fathers left the home.

And when they left the home, they missed out on this free interaction with their kids that happened at lunchtime or might have happened at, you know, when the kids were walking by and dad was there in the field and he said, hey, come look at this or other sort of non-structured type settings that just flowed throughout their days.

So the Industrial Revolution didn't cause us just to lose farmers, it caused us to lose fathers.

And we were thinking about this and, you know, at the time, has anybody in here watched a little series called Pioneer House?

It was an old-fashioned reality TV series.

And I can't see your hands well because it's a bit dark in there.

So just let me know if you have verbally.

Has anybody watched the show called Pioneer House?

We watched it back in 2012, just because we thought it was interesting.

And it was from the late 90s, I think, maybe early 2000s.

And it's a show where they had taken, it was a reality, an early version of a reality TV series.

It wasn't even TV, but anyways, they took folks from urban settings and they gave them the opportunity to live in an 1800s Montana summer and see what it took to get their themselves into the condition where they could make it through 1 Montana winter.

And they were given period implements and they were given period clothing and they were given period opportunities.

So they moved them out and anyways, it was just so fascinating to watch these people try to gather hay for their cow by hand and try to build a home by hand.

And what the families reported on most of all, the most significant thing that they commented on, in our opinion, was how, yes, they worked incredibly hard, but it felt good.

More than anything else, their families bonded together.

And Kimberly and I watched that and we said, you know, we want that.

John Dysinger

Pamela Dysinger

Hosting Interns

We weren't sure how many people there would be for this.

We knew it was probably going to be a small group because it's kind of a very specialized topic.

But just for introduction, I'm John Dysinger.

And we run Bountiful Blessings Farm in Middle Tennessee.

And we have been having interns not every year, but we took a sabbatical year or 2, but we started, our first intern came in 2008.

So we've done it long enough to know some twists and turns and hopefully it's getting better every year you know we look back at our early internships and kind of cringe because we didn't know enough to be having interns but they kind of came to us.

Anyway we're gonna talk about that and let's begin with a word of prayer.

Dear Heavenly Father we thank you for this opportunity to come together and to learn.

Lord, we pray that you would be glorified and honored.

We pray that you would help us to know what to say and what not to say.

These things we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

Okay, We're gonna have to share a mic here.

So this is gonna be We have to stand very close so I Guess the first thing and and I look out here and actually I see Quite a few who have been interns on our farm.

They're just here to make sure we don't tell stories about them.

But I guess the first question that we would want to know is, if you're thinking about doing an internship, why would you want to do it?

And these are some reasons that we kind of think you might have based on things that we have heard or maybe even felt ourself.

What farm isn't looking for cheap labor, right?

That's maybe 1 thing you're thinking, well, this would really help make my job a lot easier and the last thing is that you might think this is the way to take my farm to the next level and make it more profitable.

So if those are your reasons we would encourage you, those aren't good reasons for starting an internship.

And we'll talk about that more as we go along So these are reasons that we think are good reasons to have interns Number 1 That you have a passion for agriculture and you want to inspire the next generation.

You've probably all heard the statistics that the average farmer is, I don't know, 60 some years old and yes.

Okay, we have an average farmer in the room, but the sobering statistics, although I think there is an encouraging trend with younger farmers, especially in the organics and market gardening coming into it.

But generally speaking, farmers are getting older and their kids don't wanna take over the farm.

So we need a new generation of farmers and I'll just say here Working on a farm in my opinion and it's not just my opinion is a much better Education and farming than getting a four-year degree in agriculture at some university.

I mean, you can learn a lot of theory in 4 years, but I've talked to those Graduates and they're like, well, I don't know, you know, tell me how do I harvest a carrot?

You know, I didn't learn that in school Anyway, I I don't want to down Schooling, you know, I I'd love to go back and get a degree in agriculture now.

I've thought about that actually at times but nothing like hands in the dirt.

If you've reaped the many benefits of God's original plan and you want to share that with others you know when you start seeing wow this is why God created us to live in a garden wow this is an incredible life even though you know it's very hard and lots of challenges but at the end of the day you're saying man.

I wouldn't want it any other way then you have something to share and We believe it takes feeling a calling to teaching and training and mentoring young adults.

But it's something you don't do just to make your farm profitable.

Okay so we would say that there are some prerequisites and I'm gonna just mention this book right now.

Anyone who's thinking of starting an internship program I would highly recommend this book right here Joel Salatin Fields of Farmers.

It's called interning, mentoring, partnering, germinating.

It's the only thing out there that I'm aware of really on this subject.

Many of you probably have heard of Joel Salatin.

He's a meat farmer from Virginia, but he is a Christian, which is nice.

And he's a very, very opinionated farmer.

And so he writes with a lot of passion, but an excellent book.

But he along with us would agree that if you're going to intern you have to have achieved some level of success.

You know, you don't want the blind leading the blind.

If you're still trying to figure out how to do it yourself, then you're probably going to be sharing with others more frustration and, you know, confusion than you are encouragement.

So, We're not suggesting that your stand has to look like this and But we're saying you know you need to be able to to have To be able to produce and and I just you know I'm sensitive talking about this because we are very aware of our own areas of weakness And the fact that we still have so much to learn.

So we're not trying to tell you we know it all.

They'll tell you we make a lot of mistakes still.

They know the ins and outs of the Dysinger's, so they could be speaking about it.

But anyway, there's no doubt that there just has to be a certain level of success in the farming realm.

If you're trying to teach, you have to have achieved a certain level.

But some other things that we think are prerequisites.

But you have to ask yourself, do you have any housing?

Do you have housing options so this is our tiniest cabin this was Kirsten's our daughter's playhouse and it's 8 feet square that is very small and it has a sleeping loft that can keep can have 1 single bed in it so that's our smallest okay we it does fit a queen size John and I have stayed there many times.

We also did have 2 other interns, but I'm going to say that was a very character-building experience for those 2 young ladies to be in such close quarters.

So we really try to just put 1 person in this little house.

But we have 2 other small cabins that are, are they 12 by 12?

They have enough electricity to run a fan, plug in your phone.

I think our interns that have been in more recent years have found those to be quite adequate.

Another 1 is do you have an established team?

You know, we couldn't do our internship if it was just John and I.

These young people are integrated into our family.

And we have a team, beyond that, we have a team on our farm.

We have our son Joshua and his wife Kelly who work with us full time.

So that gives us some additional help for management in working.

My husband, it would be very difficult for him if he had to manage all the workload plus the teaching load of the interns.

And then we've pulled in some people from our church who have a burden for young people as well.

They're hand-picked people that we felt would mentor young people.

But again, like this year, I think out of the 6 months, yeah, we only had about 5 weekends that we were not responsible for the interns because this 1 had other obligations and that 1 had other obligations.

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Series

Business & Ministry

Hosting Interns

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

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Recorded

Parts

Pitfalls of Agriculture; Balancing Farming, Family and Ministry

59m

Hosting Interns

1h 5m

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