Helping and protecting our neighbors was more important than our appointment.

Teach 'em young and teach 'em right.

Damn straight! You help each other out because who else is gonna do it? Besides you want help one day too, right? “Be the change you want to see in the world” and all that.

That’s how I grew up. Unfortunately these days in my “neighborhood”, nobody really farm for themselves. I think my household with our early 1950s Fergie and 35 birds are the closest to farming anyone who lives locally does. My closest neighbors, which are a 1km drive away or a couple hundred meter if you gross the fields instead, are both renting their places, but only the old houses, while a couple of large farm operations deal with the actual farming. And when you have a 1200 hectares operation in Denmark, you’re too big to rely on neighbors for help, so you buy it from a professional instead.

I would have liked to have a friendly neighbor with a digger the first Christmas we lived here. Our plumbing was connected to a septic tank where “fluids” would drain into the nearby field. The added stress of twice the people flushing and showering, combined with some heavy rain and a leaky sewer, that let rain water into the tank, meant that the drainage couldn’t keep up. My elbows were sore for a couple of months after because of all the digging I had to do to figure out the cause problem: the +60 years old drainage system in the field had collapsed under the weight of the machinery, and the former owners had planted a large pine tree 20years before right on top of the pipe connecting our tank with the field.

Sometimes I wish that we had more handy neighbors, and that we had a history of helping each other. Instead my arms were still hurting when I transferred an exorbitant amount for a household water treatment system to replace the tank.