**sigh**

Well, you gotta hand it to the gov't officials. They are one clever lot...evil, but clever.

Tom went into town to file some paperwork on our acreage so we can keep our agricultural exemption. You have to have a certain number of livestock on a certain number of acres and if you grow a garden you have to sell a certain amount of produce to qualify.

For goodness sake. We don't want to go into business. We just want to grow our own food. The rules are many and include something like one cow per two acres (or is it three?), but three goats per one acre. So we'd have to have a whole bunch of goats - far more than I care to bother with. And I didn't want to have cattle, but it looks like we're just going to HAVE to. And our donkeys don't count unless we have an ungelded male. I don't have the skills to handle a full grown Jack donkey. And what if he somehow managed to get in the pasture with my neighbor's mares and produced a bunch of mules?! What a nightmare - Appaloosa mules.

And produce...well, to get the exemption, we have to sell the produce. To sell the produce, we'd have to have a much bigger garden AND, worst of all, we'd have all the gov't regulations for food handling to contend with.

So, they get us either coming or going. If we don't fulfill all the requirements for the exemption, we get hit with a huge tax burden. If we try to fulfill the requirements, we have all the regulations, paperwork, and fees associated with that - or we kill ourselves with working the land and livestock.

Tom is researching the issue some more to see what the easiest way for us will be. I'm hoping it will be as "simple" as putting a few head of cattle out there and just letting them eat the grass year round.