The Stoicism of Farming

My first calf born in 2022 after I began raising cattle again in 2020 during COVID.

One of my calves died the other day.

Not from negligence, not from malice, not from anything I could have foreseen or controlled. It just… happened. As things do, in the quiet unraveling of the world. The kind of loss that doesn’t announce itself with drama, but still manages to sit heavy in the chest, like a weight you hadn’t noticed being tied to you until it tugged.

In farming, death is not rare. Nor is disorder. Things break. Animals die. Rain forgets to fall (or forgets to stop). Fences lean, tools disappear, and your best intentions get eaten by weather, time, or something with teeth. The land does not care how much planning you put into it. And yet, strangely, it teaches you to care more deeply, not less.

Epictetus said:

“With regard to whatever objects give you delight, are useful, or are deeply loved, remember to tell yourself of what general nature they are, beginning from the most insignificant things. If, for example, you are fond of a specific ceramic cup, remind yourself that it is only ceramic cups in general of which you are fond. Then, if it breaks, you will not be disturbed. If you kiss your child, or your wife, say that you only kiss things which are human, and thus you will not be disturbed if either of them dies.”

It sounds harsh to modern ears. But this isn’t indifference. It’s preparation. What the Stoics called premeditatio malorum, the premeditation of evils. Not to live in fear of them, but to rehearse their possibility, so that when the moment comes, and it always comes, we are not destroyed by surprise.

Interestingly, much of this wisdom doesn’t come from books, but from living—earned slowly through the habits of a life well-lived. One of my grandfather’s sayings has always been this: When you let the dog off the leash to hunt, you better understand that it may be the last time you see it. This isn’t fatalism. It is a quiet reminder that nothing, not even a return, is promised.

The cup may break. The dog may not return. The calf may die. But none of these truths make them less worth loving. If anything, they make them more so.

The loss of that calf was not the loss of a day-old creature. It was the quiet collapse of years: the long tail of gestation, selection, breeding, planning. Ten months to carry the calf, six more to nurse and wean. And because I raise grass-fed, things move slower. If it’s a heifer, it might take two years before she’s ready to breed. If it’s a bull calf, it’s often two and a half years before he finishes out for slaughter. The genetics I’d studied, the bull I’d chosen, the arc I’d sketched in my mind from cow to calf to cow again; gone, like stepping out of a dream mid-sentence.

The ones I raise are black baldies: Hereford heifers bred to a Black Angus bull, then crossed back again, sometimes to another Angus. You get hybrid vigor that way, meaning stronger calves, better growth, fewer birthing issues. Sometimes they come out all black, but more often than not, they keep that white face. That’s the image that stayed with me: black with a white blaze, just like the ones we had when I was a kid and my family first got back into cattle. I remember them from grade school mornings, standing in the cold, steam rising off their backs. It was a matter of continuity and memory braided together.

Farming, in this way, is a cure for the illusion of control. But more than that, it reshapes your sense of time. You stop living in hours and start living in seasons. You measure decisions not by days, but by generations. You invest not for quarterly return, but for the unseen good that may come, if the weather holds, if the soil forgives, if God grants you grace.

The modern world runs on urgency, on immediacy, on noise. But the farm teaches something slower, older, harder won: patience. Attention. Letting go.

This is the real Stoicism, not the cold acceptance of loss, but the daily discipline of planting again anyway. Of waking up and feeding, and fixing, and hoping, even as you remember: this, too, could be the last time—because there always will be the last time.

And doing it all willingly, graciously, and with open hands.