It has been a long journey establishing our farm in Fayetteville, and we have only just begun. Obtaining the land, clearing the land, and learning how to use it have been a labor-intense, yet fulfilling journey.
When we started, the entire 8 acre land was covered in forest. It was beautiful! I used to love walking around our property, praying and enjoying the nature around me. We had deer living and hiding their babies on the land every spring. It was amazing, but it wasn’t why we bought it.
The first thing we had to do was figure out a way to create pasture and growing fields. We had no sunlight under the canopy. There was no way that we could take down the trees ourselves, and paying for someone to come in and cut down all the trees was not feasible. So, we began to believe for God to make a way to have them harvested. We asked around and knocked on several doors for a while. Most tree harvesters would not touch anything under 40 acres. Finally, a tree broker in the area gave us a call back with a connection to a small foresting company that was getting off the ground in our area. They were in-between jobs and needed a quick job to keep the cash flowing before their next one began. It was perfect!
The first thing we had to do was figure out a way to create pasture and growing fields. We had no sunlight under the canopy. There was no way that we could take down the trees ourselves, and paying for someone to come in and cut down all the trees was not feasible. So, we began to believe for God to make a way to have them harvested. We asked around and knocked on several doors for a while. Most tree harvesters would not touch anything under 40 acres. Finally, a tree broker in the area gave us a call back with a connection to a small foresting company that was getting off the ground in our area. They were in-between jobs and needed a quick job to keep the cash flowing before their next one began. It was perfect!
They began taking the trees out, and in a couple of weeks the trees were gone and our land was destroyed! Properly destroyed – the company did a great job – but destroyed. It took an entire year to fully pick up all the debris and burn the giant piles of timber that were still left after the harvest. I would go out every day for a couple of hours and just throw sticks into piles to burn at a later date.
Unfortunately for us, some of the surrounding community were not happy with what we did. They were mad! Although we live in a residential agricultural area where everyone around had at least 5 acres, the neighbors did not like what we did. The county received one call after another complaining about the work going on at our property. We even had a code enforcer threaten to write a citation for accumulation of trash on our land and charge us a daily rate if we did not have this picked up in a month. He ended up writing two different warnings to no avail. The truth was that we were completely within our rights to have our land cleared and that the piles of tree debris did not constitute, “trash.” We also had the right to burn the timber and to wait until this was feasible. Warning after warning and complaint after complaint, I picked up sticks and documented the clean up as best as possible until it was time for the burn.
We had at least 4 giant piles of wood that made the biggest bonfires I had ever been apart of. One fire was so hot that it dried the leaves out on the top of a white oak at least 40 yards away.
After we had the sticks picked up and burned, we were able to seed the land and establish grass. Our devastated track of land began to take on form and the complaints subsided. We never did hear back from the code enforcer, even though we didn’t back down from our rights for even a minute (and probably caused a headache!).
We are still in the process of clearing out the stumps and establishing our grow fields, but the with the bulk of the work out of the way we have been able to see the final outcome emerging from the debris.
