Most of my personal belongings have been in a livestock trailer while Grandpa’s cattle were still grazing the back pasture. Our couch, kitchen table, sock drawer and bath linens a couple times traveled in the vented shelter of a trailer designed to haul pigs and cattle.

One of the coolest things about living or working on a farm is access to stuff. A backhoe to plant trees in our yard. A flatbed trailer to haul lumber for a house project. Farmers are known to give equipment multiple roles on the farm. As a child, Mom swam in a large, round livestock water tank, which served the cattle when she and her brothers were done with it. Old tractor tires became sandboxes. The hayrack was a float in the homecoming parade. We even used the machine shed for our wedding reception.
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So we had a meet-up this past weekend with some of the farm moms downtown, and I had a blast!  Once again I was reminded of how lucky I am to be a field mom.  :o)

For some reason, almost all of my conversations that night centered around pork.  The pigs themselves, the process of farming them, stuff like that.  At one point Chris Gould, a farmer who operates just about 50 miles outside of the big city, was telling our table about a trip he took a while back.  During his travels he wound up at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota.

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Ask me about farming, and my face might momentarily look like a TV screen test.

Let’s just say my basic knowledge of tilling the soil and raising livestock is limited to Old MacDonald, the Amish, and bottle-feeding calves on childhood petting farm field trips. But as a parent, I feel it’s my responsibility to pay more attention – to learn about the origins of the foods my family eats, and the processes that raise/grow/harvest them.

The flagship Field Mom program focuses on sharing that farm-to-family information with an open door policy. A hand-picked group of 10 Chicago-area moms have been given the opportunity to visit working Illinois farms and meet the folks who run them with the expectation that what we learn will be shared through social media.

Who knew that a lot of the food I cook up and feed my children was coming from just a few counties over?
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This is not a big secret amongst my friends and family, but I love, love, love the city. Yes, I realize I am a farm wife and will probably be one until the end of my days, but hidden just below the surface of dirt on my vehicle thanks to my country road is a girl who craves the lights of the city; its hectic pace; and, of course, the shopping.

So when I was asked to attend another Moms Meet-Up in Chicago this past weekend, I jumped, strike that LEAPT, at the chance! Even better, the event fell upon a weekend where we were neither harvesting nor calving, so my husband could come, too, and did I mention 3 of my four kids were with one grandma, and my parents were in the city as well, so babysitting was available for our baby, too?

Sweet.

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