A typical day in a homeschooled kid’s life may consist of sitting with a parent or tutor, watching a few lectures on a computer before perhaps playing outside in the dirt or running some errands before the clock’s big hand turns to 2pm.
Shelley Anderson’s kids live this lifestyle: reading books in the morning with their mum and playing soccer on Mondays with other homeschooled children in Geelong.
Most homeschooled children have their days in the palm of their hands. Except Shelley Anderson’s children also have cows.
Just four years ago, Anderson worked as an IT manager in Melbourne while managing to homeschool her three children before uprooting their lives to live with the cows and her best friend’s family.
Since Shelley was 16, she and her best friend had dreamed of living on a farm together, starting a lifestyle created from the sustenance of agriculture. Four months after her best friend had bought a farm in Freshwater Creek, Shelley decided to follow to fulfil their lifelong goal together. So now, when you step into Shelley’s world, you’re stepping into 157 acres of paddock, a home to cows, chickens and Anderson and her best friend’s families.
“It’s been panning out to be just as much fun as I’d hoped to be,” she says.
Shelley’s farm days start early and end late, not dictated to the rhythm of a 9-5 routine or confined to school pickups. Rather, the farm runs by the rules of weather and the cows.
“You make a plan, the weather changes it, and you’ve got to change with it,” Shelley explains. “That’s farming. Sometimes it’s 10pm at night and a cow is calving and you’re out there and it’s not going well and you’re thinking, oh gosh, what have we chosen.”
In the first two years of Shelley’s arrival, the farm experienced the wettest weather they had ever seen. The following two years after, the farm experienced the driest. “You can plan everything but there’s always things that don’t cooperate…you just need to roll with it.”
Shelley has learnt farming requires ongoing adaptation.
“We have much lower rainfall than, say, Gippsland,” she says. “You have just got to watch the water go away.”
Nevertheless, she takes solace in the changing of the seasons.
“Even though the paddocks look bare, life comes back even when you don’t believe that it will, so stay hopeful.”
Shelley’s type of work has changed since moving onto the farm, becoming more hands-on and finding herself in much more physically labouring scenarios. Shelley assists with the management of the cattle by transporting them between paddocks, ensuring they have adequate food, and caring for them during calving season.
It’s obvious community is behind Shelley’s farm-life choices. Living in the same house, on the same farm as her best friend’s family has allowed them to share the workload in ways many farmers aren’t able to.
“We do it all together,” she says. “We like to have a joke and a laugh…you’ve always got that release, I guess.”
When asked for advice to anyone interested in becoming a farmer, Shelley says to just “do it”. She acknowledges how hard it is, harder than most people believe it to be with less return than expected, but thinks that if one wants to do it, then do it with friends.
Anderson hopes to keep farming “until we’re not physically able to”. It is difficult to make long-term plans for such a dynamic and ever-changing industry like farming, but when all is said and done, Anderson simply says, “We really love living here… We’re really lucky to do this.”
This story is part of a project exploring regional Victoria and the issues farmers are facing. See the whole collection here.
