Welcome to Lower Pond Farm. We are a small farm about twelve miles north of Lebanon, Tennessee. We raise LaMancha milk goats, White-faced Dorper sheep, a variety of chickens, a couple of ducks, and four dogs. We milk the goats, eat the occasional sheep, sell the eggs, tolerate the ducks, and love the dogs. There are also large catfish in our pond, but we don’t really claim them. They came with the place, and try as we might, we can’t get them to leave.
We plant a big garden every spring, can tomatoes, beans, and pickles of all sorts, make jams and jellies, freeze sweet corn and berries, and brew thirty or so gallons of beer a year.
When we call this place a “farm,” we’re being generous with that term. I grew up in the 1960s around farms in southern Illinois that were hundreds of acres, mostly in grain. Now-a-days, those farms are three or four thousand acres. Real farms, in my mind, make a profit, or at least that’s the goal.
That’s not our goal. We do sell a few eggs, and occasionally even a few sheep or goats. We’re happy if we can sell enough each year to pay the summer hay bill and part of what we spend on feed. We “farm” for the love of it, and for exercise.
It sure beats golf.
