Where Our Story Begins

Marc

May 5

4 min read

Updated: Aug 11

There is an old photograph in our family that probably didn't seem particularly important when someone took it. It was around 1967, and in the picture a little girl of about five years old is standing outside on the farm where she grew up, holding a bottle for a lamb. There is nothing staged about it. No one dressed her up for the occasion or arranged the scene so that someday it could hang on the website of a family ranch. It was simply a photograph of an ordinary moment in the life of a little girl growing up on a farm. That little girl is my mom, better known to our family today as YaYa. More than half a century has passed since that picture was taken, and somewhere along the way an ordinary family photograph became something more. Today, as we build 5x5 Ranch with three generations of our family involved, there are sheep in the story once again.

It is funny how life sometimes brings you back around.

The Things We Carry With Us

When YaYa was growing up, caring for animals wasn't an extracurricular activity or something done for the benefit of a photograph. It was simply part of farm life.

Animals needed feeding. Chores needed doing. Somebody had to show up. Those experiences have a way of shaping a person, even when you don't realize it at the time. They teach you that living things depend on you, that work doesn't always wait until it's convenient, and that there is satisfaction in accomplishing something with your own hands. Those are some of the same lessons we want another generation of our family to have an opportunity to learn. That doesn't mean we're trying to recreate the farm of 1967. Agriculture has changed enormously since then and so has our family. We're building something new. But new things can have old roots.

Five Beside Five

The name 5x5 Ranch comes from the family itself: five adults standing alongside five children, building something together. That doesn't mean ten people will agree about everything. Anyone who has ever attempted a family project knows better than that.

What it does mean is that this ranch gives us a place to work alongside one another, to learn from one another, and hopefully to build something that none of us could have built quite the same way alone. Our logo tells some of that story too. Ten vertical lines represent the ten members of the family. At the center is a broken chain, representing our faith in Jesus Christ and our belief that He breaks the things that bind and divide us.

There is remembrance woven into the logo as well. Amateur-radio symbolism in the middle of the logo honors my Dad (Paul Baker), who would have loved the ranch but passed before it became a reality. The number 25 represents both the answer to five times five and 2025, the year 5x5 Ranch LLC was formed. It is a lot of meaning packed into one little ranch logo, but then again, this was never supposed to be just a business name.

Something Worth Passing Down

We talk a lot about building 5x5 Ranch for the next generation, but that doesn't mean deciding the next generation's future for them. We don't know whether every one of the children will someday want to ranch. Some may. Some may not. That's their story to write. Our responsibility is to give them the best opportunity to be successful. We want them to know what it feels like to care for an animal that depends on them. We want them to understand that food doesn't originate in a grocery store. We want them to know how to grow something, fix something, make something useful, and keep going when the first attempt doesn't work. If they carry those lessons into adulthood, they'll have inherited something far more valuable than land or money. They'll have inherited experience and character; the fundamental building blocks that will help them find success in whatever story they choose to write for themselves.

Another Little Girl, Another Lamb

That is why the old photograph means more to us now. Someone pressed the shutter on a camera almost sixty years ago and captured a little girl feeding a lamb. Nobody knew where the story would go from there. We have no idea exactly where 5x5 Ranch will be fifty years from now. In truth, we're still figuring out what it will look like five years from now. But that's part of the reason we started this blog. We want to remember the beginning. The successes will be here. So will the mistakes. We'll tell you about the animals, the land, the projects that work, the projects that don't, and the lessons that probably would have been easier to learn from somebody else. Perhaps decades from now, another generation will look through photographs from 5x5 Ranch and realize they were looking at the beginning of their story. If they do, we hope they'll recognize something familiar.

A family.

A piece of land.

A legacy.

Welcome to 5x5 Ranch. Our story is just beginning.