A Good Year: Reflecting on Harvest Season at Mountain Steer

There's a particular kind of tired that comes at the end of harvest season. The kind that settles into your shoulders after weeks of long days, but somehow still feels good. We've chopped our corn for silage. We've baled our hay for the year. And for the first time in a long time, we're closing out the season with something we haven't felt in a while: relief.

After the Drought Years

Anyone who farms in Appalachia knows the last few years haven't been easy. Drought has a way of testing you as you watch the sky for rain that doesn't come, support fields that should be green, and continuously math what a thin crop is going to mean for the months ahead. We've lived through a few of those seasons, and we know we're not the only ones.

This year though, the rain came when we needed it, and the ground gave back everything it had been holding onto. Watching the corn come up tall this summer, after so many seasons of watching it struggle, was a reminder of how quickly farming can humble you, and how quickly it can hand you back a little grace.

What Came Off the Fields

By the end of it, we brought in 240 tons of silage and 650 round bales of hay off Ford Farm alone. It's easy to think of harvest as the finish line, but really it's just the next link in the chain. The corn and hay we bring in now become the feed that carries us through winter and raises healthy cattle, which becomes the beef that ends up on your table. Every ton in that silage pit and every bale stacked in the barn is part of that same story.

The Romance and the Reality of Farming

During harvest season, it is easy to romanticize farming — the golden fields, the tractors kicking up dust in the evening light, the satisfaction of a job well done. Farming is also early mornings, broken-down equipment, and years where the weather doesn't cooperate no matter how hard you work. It's both of those things at once, a juxtaposition of the beauty and the difficulty, that make years like this one feel like such a gift. Watching the fields we planted in the spring turn into feed for the winter gives us a peace of mind that is worth all of the challenges this summer brought. 

Grateful to Be A Farmer

At the end of the day, we're just grateful. Grateful for the rain this year, for family and hands that made this harvest possible, and that we get to keep doing this work — the same work our families have done for generations — and share what comes from it with our community.

Thank you for being part of that story with us. Every order, every visit to the storefront, every bit of local support is what lets us keep our hands in the dirt and our herd fed for another season.