If you’ve ever felt that tug in your heart to farm, you know the impulse cannot be denied. You might end up in something else, but no matter what you’ll always find yourself wistfully dreaming of rows of summer vegetables, rich, loamy soil, the red splash of ripe tomatoes, and the taste that makes supermarket ‘vegetables’ unworthy of the name.

Of all the animals in the world, certainly we have the widest selection of possible foods; we can eat meat, vegetables, grains, legumes, dairy, and even industrial chemicals (apparently). And yet while a squirrel can look at an acorn and know instinctively that it is good to eat, we have to consider our food options. With so much variety, the only way we know what is good to eat and what isn’t is through trial and error, cultural norms, and our sense of taste and smell.

This is the omnivore’s dilemma, and it forms the basis for the book by Michael Pollan, which explores how we modern humans produce, acquire, and prepare our food.

The milk fridge is full. And the girls keep right on givin’. Which is because, unlike a lot of farms, we have some goats who kid in the spring and some that kid in the fall. So we have sweet, fresh milk even through the dark winter months when a lot of herds are dried off. We can make cheese. We can make ice cream. We can make several batches of horrible, foul tasting yogurt and still keep experimenting with it. But even if I don’t know the secret to making good yogurt, I do know the secrets for keeping goats in sweet, delicious milk.

The seed and plant nurseries have got us gardeners right where they want us at this time of year. We’ve had just enough time to rest from outdoor work; enough time to forget, perhaps, just how devastating last year’s failures were, and more than enough time to regain our optimism that this will be the year we revel in natural splendor and the most abundant harvests ever. We are ready to plan this year’s garden-to-be.

One Christmas a few years ago a dear friend bought me a burlap bag and, I think, a flock of chicks from Heifer International. I didn’t have to carry six furry, cheeping little birds home in that bag – rather, I had a small card noting that these chicks had been given in my honor, to a family who could use them to establish a livelihood for themselves.

We’ve had our massive snowmelt; we’ve made it through those early, chilly gray days of spring and the first glorious sunshine-and-blue-sky epiphanies. We’ve even had our hot spell in May that drove everyone out to the garden centers and the river shouting, “It’s here! Summer!” Now, we have our monsoon.

Direct-to-consumer sales, such as farmers markets, road-side stands, and pick-your-owns, are up from 0.3 percent in 1997 to 0.4 percent in 2007. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but it equates to $660 million in sales — pretty impressive. Small farms, or those with less than $50,000 in total sales, benefit from these selling channels more than larger farms, making a case for supporting efforts to sustain and grow these channels to keep small, family farms flourishing.

There are lots of causes for celebration on the farm (and lots of causes for whatever the opposite of that is), but yesterday was truly a day to be grateful for: My son coming down for the summer vacation and the first harvest of strawberries.

If seeing chickens raised in confined, inhumane conditions on an industrial farm disturbs you, then why would you choose to eat those chickens?

Everyone wants to see cute cuddly chicks and cute fluffy ducklings and cute playful goat kids. But the animals on my farm don’t do cute. They laugh at cute. They spit in cute’s eye. They eat cute for breakfast. They meet cute in the corral at high noon and say “Go ahead, cute. Make my day.”