Social Media Burn-out

I have been homesteading since 2013. I used to enjoy sharing our homesteading life on social media. It felt like a community of people genuinely excited to share with one another and learn. Over the past few months, I have struggled with immense writer’s block and a general disinterest in sharing. ‘Is this burnout?’ I’ve asked myself so many times. But, I don’t think it’s the sharing or the farm itself that I am fighting against. It’s the social media platform. What used to be an encouraging and welcoming space, now feels like walking the halls in high-school while the mean-girls sneer and whisper about you, her, each other, everyone. This homesteading space has become saturated, overly-curated, cut-throat and competitive. Nasty competitive. The new norm seems to be to take someone else’s ideas, fluff them up, and call them your own because they’re on trend.

Remember when we would share pictures on Instagram simply for sharing’s sake? When we could express an opinion or way of doing something without the keyboard warriors coming out of the woodwork? When 50% of social media accounts weren’t bots?

I miss the good old days of blog posts. A slower pace. I know I’m not the only one. While I fully intend to keep my social media presence for both The Chatty Goat and my new one, Pivot DogWorks, I think I am going to come back here for the writing. I need to find that joy for writing about our homestead and our dairy goats that I have lost somewhere along the way. I enjoy sharing snapshots of the farm on ‘stories’ and certainly see the value in the social media accounts for maintaining our business, but there needs to be some joy in it, too.

I am excited at the thought of sharing our homestead life in this space again. The farm is in full swing, bustling with life and projects. Summer is my favorite time of year and we are working hard to balance the busy-ness with leisure and play. Tommy and I are bringing three incredible new goats to the farm soon and I am excited to have their genetics here and share more information about them when they finally arrive!Breeding season is upon us for the dairy goats who will be kidding December/January. Our first round of meat chickens are ready to be butchered in just a couple of weeks and our second batch of chicks arrives this coming week. We are taking a break from breeding rabbits with the summer heat (did you know buck rabbits become temporarily sterile when temperatures climb above 85*F?), our newest livestock dog, Tucker, is settling in to his new routine here, and a couple days a week I am training and trialing Smidge (pomeranian), Creamy (mini-dachshund) and Pivot (border collie) in the sport of agility, after a 15 year hiatus.

Oh, our garden this year is incredible! I haven’t had a garden for the last two years because so much else was going on, but we prioritized it this spring and decided to utilize landscape fabric since I knew weeding would not be happening! It was definitely the right decision. The garden is bountiful, and seems to appreciate being planted in two years of waste hay and sheep/chicken manure. I think the plants are the most robust we have ever grown. My original plant spacing did not account for the Jurassic-sized crops, so the pathways are long-gone, but it is bountiful none the less. I crawl and climb and tiptoe around to harvest and am making notes about better spacing for next year.

What are some projects you are working on, or areas of joy for you this summer?

-Morgan