LoJo Farms
There aren’t a lot of pictures of me and Hardy from college. We’ve decided it’s because we never stopped talking long enough to take them. I knew I wanted to be Hardy’s friend from the moment I saw her. We were in Communications 101 at Mississippi State University. In a class of over 100, our professor made each of us stand on the first day and introduce ourselves. Hardy sat a few rows ahead of me and told the room she was from Oxford but had ‘never been an Ole Miss fan’ a brave thing to admit in Starkville. She seemed shy but very sure of herself, so I made sure I found her after class and struck up a conversation. We’ve been talking ever since.
Hardy Ryals comes from good people, I wish everyone in the world could meet her parents, Cary and Carol, but then maybe they wouldn’t be the hidden gems that they are. As I do with most of my favorite people, Hardy and I send voice texts to each other most days to make sure we stay in touch. And a few weeks ago, when we both felt very over stimulated by motherhood and adulthood, we decided over one of those text that our spring break would be spent with she and her family on their sheep farm that lies just on the outskirts of Oxford, Mississippi. When most people chose an overcrowded 30A, we chose Katahdin sheep during birthing season.
Hardy grew up on land. I asked her over and over again how many acres and she truly couldn’t remember. And it’s not just land—it’s gardens, and a creek, a pond, rolling hills, and her only neighbors are her relatives. It’s what so many people are dreaming of as the hustle of life and those Jones’ to keep up with keeps getting harder to reach. I found myself forgetting about regular everyday stresses as we slowly walked behind two sheep who were in labor, watching and waiting for new life to appear. When we were in college there was always a restlessness amongst my peers. What would we do after school? What would our careers be? And I never remember that curiosity from Hardy. Not as if she didn’t have goals or dreams, but because what was waiting for her back home after graduation was what people were searching for, and she had already found it.
“None of this is lost on me” Hardy told me as we sat on a bench, watching our husband’s fish and children splash in the muck. She knows what she has by pure luck and blessings is a gold-mine. She works for her father’s construction company, as does her husband and now they are all starting a new venture. LoJo Farms, named after her children, is what I consider the first seeds planted for the next generation. Sheep, cut flowers, organic produce, micro-greens, and maybe even catfish—it’s all coming from their hands, from the land that raised her. She and her family live in her grandmother’s home, an upgrade, as she says, from the 100-year-old farmhouse they started off in that is just up the hill.
During our time there we talked about balance and motherhood, recipes and being stumped on what to cook for dinner most nights, but there was an ease in the rhythm of her home. Her husband, Jesse, wakes up and makes a full country breakfast in cast iron skillet before he leaves to go check on the flock. Her babies wake up slow as the sun peaks through the front windows and you can see the sheep waking up from her front porch. We walked behind the sheep for several hours on Saturday. I desperately wanted to see a sheep give birth. Call me crazy but I thought it would be a sort of balm, a healing mend to my heart after years of infertility, a pandemic, stresses of life, and just living in another election year. I just wanted to see something take its first breath. While we never actually saw a lamb born in real time, we did see them prepare for birth and it was beautiful. Lots of walking, standing up, sitting down, lying on their sides. Sheep are protective of their own, certainly during a time like having a baby. As two labored, one sheep who’d had her babies the day before walked alongside them as a sort of midwife. On LoJo Farms, the back corner of the field is where they walk to find a safe hidden spot to give birth, they stay there for the rest of the day cleaning their newborns and nursing.
“If you want a successful flock, you need at least 3 or 4. Sheep need a group, they don’t like to be alone” Hardy told me as we watched from the fence. “Then I guess the one that left the 99 really must have been struggling”, I replied.
I hear a lot of noise on the internet most days. People are stuffed full of opinions about how to live, how to raise your children, how to school them, educate them, shelter them, and so on. My dear friend Hardy is one of those people who doesn’t concern herself with how other people do things. It’s refreshing and powerful. She is a good mother, who doesn’t bother with knowing how other people mother their kids. She is planting roots, slowly wrapping a gift that will be for her children and her children’s children—a gift of legacy and knowledge of the earth and how it’s creatures work, hard work and love that is sewn into seeds and bedtime stories. Though it’s just beginning I know that LoJo will be a wonderful contribution to Mississippi and I’m so honored, tickled as we say in the south, to have witnessed the first days.
