One thing you must be able to do to be considered a farmer?

In order to truly be a farmer you do not have to have thousands of acres, you do not have to have hundreds of cattle, or many bales of cotton but you must be able to drive a tractor. You may be asking why I’m bringing this up, but this was a task I learned at a relatively early age. Granted, I had an unfair advantage as I learned to drive a vehicle, with an automatic transmission, before I could actually reach the pedals. I learned to drive a dump truck with a manual transmission, when I had to put both feet on the clutch to get it down far enough to get the truck to start. To learn to operate the tractor I spent many hours riding on the fender watching what daddy did and then when I thought I had it he let me try it. This all seems natural since I grew up with a grandmother that owned an auto parts junkyard. I could run a tow truck before I could ride a bicycle.

Any why do I feel I need to share this information? Well a couple of reasons while our hobby farm is really small as we have:

1 rabbit

1 pot belly pig

2 goats (a pygmy and a Nigerian dwarf)

2 turkeys (a bourbon red and a bronze)

11 quail

50 or so chickens of many varieties

and

3 kids (the people type not more baby goats).

I have been trying to get the kids more involved as Jen and I want them to enjoy farming or as she refers to it my mid-life crisis. So this week as i using the tractor I decided it was time for Kenzie-Grace to learn to drive the tractor. So with no more delay here are the photos of her learning to drive the same 1974 David Brown 885 (an English tractor made by Case) that I learned to drive roughly 30 years ago.