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interesting piece on challenges of young farmers

When Rachel Bell looked out the large windows of her concrete-floored living room on July 4, 2014, the rain from Hurricane Arthur had slowed. The wind, however, had not. The tall pines surrounding her property on the coast in Edmunds quivered.

Rachel’s farm is situated at the highest point of Tidemill Farm Inc.’s property. The trees, despite their great efforts, could not ward off the wind. Her goats took shelter in their hoop house, and its plastic tarp flapped and snapped like a flag in the wind, as strong gusts pushed the plastic against its frame.

The goats huddled in the back of the shelter, near their food. Through the window of the house, speckled with droplets, Rachel watched. The churning storm was beyond her control, and she was nervous. She and Nate Horton, her partner and a carpenter, watched on.

When the cedar tree snapped, Rachel couldn’t hear the crack. But she watched as the tree’s large shadow collapsed on the hoop house. The cedar crushed the back end of the shelter where her goats had huddled.

Rachel, a 36-year-old goat farmer, rushed to the phone and called her dad, who had an excavator that could move the tree. Nate watched the other half of the cedar fall on to the white tarp of the hoop house. The rungs of the house, like rib bones protecting pink puffs of lung, broke and collapsed half of the structure.

After Rachel called her father, Terry Bell, she ran outside into the wind and rain to look under the fractured shelter. Under the plastic covering, bowed and misshapen, the goats grazed uninjured, nibbling bits off the cedar tree that now pinned down their home.

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