Firsthand: Reports from the Field

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Well, well, well. I certainly asked for it! I received 68 letters in reply, quite a few from Canadians one from Alaska and the rest from all over the United States. The most important letter, though, was from the man who would, before the year was over, become my husband, father to my two boys, and eventually the father of our own two children.

Through the spring and summer of 1974, Kip Sorensen and I wrote back and forth and talked on the phone; me from my farm job in Ontario and him from his job on a wheat farm in the northeastern hills of South Dakota. Early in August my 13-year-old son and I took the Canadian National Railway west from Ontario. We stopped in Winnipeg, crossed the border into South Dakota and met Kip. To make a long story short, we met, sparks flew, and on Sept. 24 my boys and I arrived back in South Dakota to stay. I've always been one to make my mind up fast.

When we began our life together we lived on a rented farm. The rent was cheap in exchange for overseeing cattle on several hundred acres of rolling pasture. In exchange for repairs on a sagging front porch, a neighbor gave us a flock of laying hens. For a sack of onions, another farmer gave us two bottle lambs. Sioux Bee Honey gave us 150 pounds of honey for letting them place a flatbed trailer full of hives in the pasture.

During our second summer together we moved onto the Sorensen's farm in Flandreau, South Dakota. Kip's grandfather, a Danish immigrant, homesteaded the farm in 1881. Kip converted the farm's granary building into a great house: one big room with three sleeping lofts and a greenhouse. Our old Home Comfort cookstove kept us warm and well fed.

Just after the birth of our daughter, Winter, we began to farm more. Kip grew edible beans (pintos and Great Northerns) while I milked cows and kept chickens, ducks, pigs, turkeys and sheep. The soil on our farm was wonderful, and with the aid of the greenhouse we grew almost three acres of veggies — enough to share with elderly in-laws, family and friends, and enough left to sell some at the Sioux Falls farmer's market. We sold all kinds of things from the farm: weaner pigs, lambs for slaughter, sheared wool for handspinners, chicken fryers and eggs, as well as yogurt and fresh cheese from our jersey cows.