“Come on over and pull up a chair here on the porch.  Good to meet you!  My name is Ray…”  Pretty much this is me talking to my friends and neighbors out on the front porch after a days work.  Or at least, as is the case currently, after dreaming about having land again and the days work that would have been.

Let me start with me. As of the original posting of this I find myself at thirty eight years of age. I grew up in a semi-rural area of central Kentucky, assisting with some hay, occasionally cattle, and LOTS of tobacco during my growing up. I literally could not wait to get off the farm and especially away from tobacco by the time I was eighteen. I achieved that goal in dramatic fashion, landing in such high-tech places as IBM, Lexmark, and later on Virginia Tech. All the while though something began to turn inside of me back too that life on the small family farm.

While living in Virginia, I decided to start acting on that feeling and turned back to hobby farming.  It started with a garden and few horses.  In that last few years there were pigs, chickens, horses, goats, and even rabbits, all combined with a push toward doing things in sustainable fashions and really looking more toward the past in the way of doing things instead of a forward looking get big or get out of agriculture process.  While making that move toward sustainable practices,  I have had the opportunity to work at living history museum running a farm in an 19th century forward thinking way and very much enjoyed.  Combining that desire with a love of horses and realization that the process of working the land with horses is as green as it gets (and the most relaxing way to do it), that has become (though at times it was to begin with) a major goal for the future.

Now I have to back up a little bit.  Traveller’s Haven Farms really came to its own after moving back to Kentucky.  As things happen with life though, I had to let the land go for various reasons.  So,  I find myself in the midst of a few years without farmland of my own.  That of course has lead to a major scaling back of things and really has me running a few horses that I love to much on land that belongs to family.  I thought by early 2010 I would be getting back to a farm, but marriage and plans for a family have delayed that by perhaps another year at this point.

All of that said, I am currently starting to look in earnest for options of a not far off future land purchase to get restarted with this seeming lifestyle that is somewhere deep in my blood and can not seem to let the grip it has on me relax.  Though at this point, I can honestly say I do not want which in my blood to disappear anyway.