I recently read Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. If you haven’t read it you should! I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t benefit from her teachings. The premises of the book is to “tidy your space, transform your life.” But the real goal is to help people live a life that sparks joy. This particular book reaffirmed some thoughts I’ve been pondering. My wife, Mandy, and I set out on this ranching journey over a decade ago because of the lifestyle that it afforded. Little did we realize that as we got deeper into the business, years later, that the lifestyle we had imagined in those early years would never come to fruition. We were doing what we choose to do every waking moment, but often out of necessity rather than choice. It was a daily grind waking early before the sun rose, tending to thousands of broiler chickens, hens, pigs, cattle and more. The remainder of the day was often spent in our processing facility slaughtering several hundred broilers to fulfill fresh orders to restaurants and customers. The days were long and exhausting. Our weekends were spent attending farmer’s markets an hour drive away in San Antonio. Even though we sometimes had great help at the farm, needless to say it wore us thin.

I’m not complaining, but it was long, hard work. When you do that kind of work day in and day out as we did out of necessity to make a living wage, burnout will creep up on you fast. It was simply an unsustainable pace and the financial rewards were far and few between. I know what many of you are thinking that “it isn’t all about the money” and that “ranching is about the lifestyle.” That’s easy to say when your living comfortably because your occupation is providing for your financial and emotional needs. We love ranching, we worked really hard, we were fairly business savvy even in the early years, but the numbers for some of our enterprises just didn’t make sense. Sound financial planning made our future decisions even easier, but the biggest factor was we no longer found joy in some of our enterprises on the ranch.

I can vividly remember waking up every day thinking how much I disliked raising broiler chickens. It’s the little moments that emotionally break you. We were catching broiler chicks in the brooder that needed to be moved out to pasture during the middle of August. It was probably well over a 100 F, and if you have ever been in a dusty, stinky brooder that houses five hundred chickens it’s straight up miserable. The day before a thunderstorm rolled through with wind gusts up to 60 miles per hour, flipping a shelter and killing several hundred broilers that were ready to be processed any day. In that moment in the brooder I decided that was enough and over the coming months we would slowly shut down our broiler operation and poultry processing facility. We sold any and all equipment related to our broiler enterprise. I didn’t even want to look at it any more. Mandy and I simply no longer found joy in raising broilers. When I asked myself “ten years down the road could I see myself doing this same thing?” The answer was a clear “no.” We could have kept going, hiring out the work to other people. But if I couldn’t find joy in it, I simply didn’t want it around. I didn’t even want to think about it, much less look at.

There are lots of other factors that played a roll in that final decision. The culmination of it all made us simplify our business model, we scaled down, rid ourselves of some enterprises and other enterprises were scaled up to make up for the needed income. We returned our focus to quality of life. We slowly built up a dream team of employees around us to help us achieve our greater goals. As I write this more changes are coming to Parker Creek Ranch over the coming months. I feel it’s important to write about this because too often I see people getting into farming and doing it all. Everyone preaches diversification, work hard and good things will come, so and so forth. It’s not always true and it doesn’t necessarily work for everyone. I say simply do what brings you joy. Consider the ideal lifestyle to which you aspire. Anything beyond that ultimately doesn’t matter.

I welcome questions or comments. Please feel free to post below or send me an e-mail to: mail@parkercreekranch.com