There is nothing easy about being a young farmer owning and operating your own business. In just the 10 years that we have been farming, we have experienced some tough times and also very good times. You know what has gotten us through the tough times ... our faith in God, our family and probably a bit of stubbornness.

Speaking of those good times ... my husband and I recently received a top award from our state farm bureau organization recognizing our achievements as young farmers. The award is such a great honor and we are absolutely humbled to represent Indiana at the national competition next month in Phoenix.

But as we begin to prepare to compete in the national contest, we are reminded that we didn't get here alone. Any success we've experienced growing our farm business goes back to the unrelenting support of our family.

In more ways than we can count, we would not be here today without their support, without them challenging us, without them believing in us.

Despite an industry and a hog market that seemingly doesn't want us to survive as independent young producers, we have prevailed and will continue to fight as hard as we can.

We are grateful for our family for believing in us even when we didn't believe in ourselves. We are grateful for our family for instilling a love of agriculture and perhaps some of that stubbornness that I mentioned earlier.

And beyond our family, there are many others who have supported us along the way.

We are grateful for our landlords who were willing to work with a young farmer with not so fancy equipment at first.

We are grateful for our seed, feed and veterinarian partners for their counsel, support and encouragement.

We are grateful for our ag lending partner for believing in us every step of the way and working with us to grow our business year-after-year.

We are grateful for farm bureau for engaging us into leadership opportunities on the county, state and national stage and for rewarding hard work.

We are grateful to have a small, yet super strong circle of friends in the farming community to share ideas with and to laugh with. Never understand underestimate the importance of laughter.

We are grateful for our hired help who support our farm and care for our livestock as much as we do.

We accepted the Young Farmer Achievement Award from Indiana Farm Bureau this past weekend and we were beyond proud to have our family in the audience supporting us and cheering us on just as they have our entire lives.

We are grateful for everything our family has sacrificed to give us the opportunity to live out our dream to farm.

We are grateful for our family for being our everything.

To learn more about our farm operation, check out the video below!

At times, completion of the Big White Farmhouse second floor renovation seemed distant and unattainable. 

But God bless hope. 

After nearly 6.5 months of demo, dust, drywall, water line busts, electrical blow outs, waiting, waiting, waiting and then more weeks of finishing work, we finally completed work on the second floor. And it was worth every single day of every week of waiting. 

The second floor is everything we've ever dreamed and we are loving it. That's right, we officially moved houses in late March and are loving our new bigger space, closets and our three bathrooms. And a custom closet built for dreams, my friends. 

We still have some work to do on the main floor of the house, ie. the kitchen and painting and what not to make it our own, but we are here and it's home now! 

So to catch you up, here are some pictures of the last few weeks of renovation and then the BIG reveal of the two new bathrooms and our new master custom closet. Or if you need a refresher on the entire elephant of a project, check out Part 1, 2, and 3. 

"Shine bright like a diamond."

Paint up in Miss Ruby's bedroom.

Drywall finished and paint up in hall. 

New layout of hallway, just waiting on carpet and well ... clean-up.

Vanity lights up in master bath.

Bathroom is coming together. Love the blue-green paint that compliments the mosaic bath tile.

Original woodwork was all completely refinished. So beautiful and worth the extra time.

Love this original door all shined up like new.

Finishing work complete on girl's shower/bath.

Girls' bath room is ready for little hands & toes!

Love the white vanity with soft close drawers and marble counter.

Miss RayRay's walk-in closet and new sub-floor.

Ruby isn't sure this shouldn't be her closet....

Miss RayRay's room full of contractor gear but almost ready for carpet.

Hall looking from RayRay's room to the master.

Loving these original brass door knobs. Gives the house character and authenticity. 

Now .... The BIG REVEAL .... otherwise known as the after-photos.

Shower in the master bath with custom built glass doors and rain shower head.

Large marble soaking tub. Ahhh...

Tub and shower with new commode (with a soft close seat - I highly recommend - no more slamming!).

White vanity with marble counter and Allen and Roth mirror. 

Loving the views from the Big White Farmhouse. Key word with this post is clearly ... LOVE!

In case you wondered what lotions and body spray I use. 

No linen storage in the bathroom so I purchased this brushed nickel shelf from Wayfair and it fits perfect in our bath.

 The master closet designed with the help of California Closets. Those guys are closet geniuses. But really, they do amazing work and offer a tremendous value. We are so happy we had the opportunity to work with CC. We love our new closet space!

Plenty of shelving, even for a few personal items.

And storage for shoes of course.

Drawers and plenty of room for shoes as well as a pull-out hamper for Big D and myself. 

Window bench with storage.

Big D's side of the closet. He does own more than five pairs of shoes I promise. But many of them have pig manure on them so they don't get to see the likes of this lovely closet!

Drawers, shelves for shoes, hats, jeans, sweatshirts, etc and four hanging bars. The man also asked for a valet bar to set his clothes out for special occasions. He got into the design of the closet a lot more than I anticipated, but I'm not complaining. 

My side of the closet. Plenty of shelves, hanging rods and long hanging rods. 

Rod for long-hanging items, ie. dresses. 

New soft-close drawers replaced our large dresser that is now in Miss RayRay's room.

Crystal chandelier from Pottery Barn to add a little glamour to the closet space. Because why not. I don't plan to move ever. again. 

This is now hanging in our bedroom (thanks Hobby Lobby). I love it. ;)

Finished view of the girls' bathroom. I went very girly with ruffles (Lauren Conrad from Kohls), lace curtains (not seen here from Country Curtains) and vintage hand towels from Target.

Again, no linen closet, so I found this white linen cabinet on Wayfair.com and it's the perfect size and compliments the space nicely. 

Big girl potty and baby girl potty. 

Miss RayRay wanted the bathroom to be My Little Pony, but I went the classy route but appeased her anyways with this princess nightlight.

Someone loves having her own bathroom in what other color, but pink of course! 

More photos to follow from our bedroom, the hallway and the girls bedrooms. And we will begin renovations on the first floor at some point in the next few weeks. The kitchen will be the last big project for 2015 and I'm super excited to share our plans with you and friends and family.

Sometimes friends ask me if I'm tired of picking out colors, trim, decoratives and making plans. Not yet. I love the creativity that our contractor has afforded me and thank goodness for the folks on Pinterest and Houzz for inspiring me with color, design and so much more. It has been a fun, though exhausting process for everyone involved.

This house has been a dream worth waiting on and I can't wait to raise our girls in this beautiful family home. This house was built to make memories in and I'm ready to start our new journey!

Continued from Part 2 ...

I took a class at Purdue on applied animal management better known to my fellow Boilers as "Pet-a-Cow." Part of the class included on-site laboratories at each of the university farms - beef-sheep-poultry-swine-dairy. So er "pet-a-cow, pet-a-pig" ... you get the picture.

I remember distinctly the class lab at the swine farm when we processed baby pigs. My brother raised feeder hogs in FFA, but aside from that, I had VERY little experience with hogs. Each student was asked to step forward and process AT LEAST one baby pig. This included snipping their tail to only nubs (to limit tail biting and aggression), castrating the males and ear notching (for identification). I was so nervous. But I wanted an A, so I grabbed a baby pig notched his ears, snipped his tail and castrated him (I won't go into vivid detail with that last one).

As I finished "processing" my second pig, the farm manager turned to me and said "You are really good at this, perhaps you should marry a hog farmer someday."

Ha! I laughed it off ...

Little did either of us know that in fact, someday, that shy, dairy girl from Ohio would MARRY a hog farmer after all. Legit!

When I first saw Big D from across the room, I thought he was out of my league and honestly I could've cared less if he grew up on a farm at all. I don't believe in love at first sight. But I was definitely interested in getting to know this guy. That was the fall of 2003.

We spent the next several months getting to know each other and sharing our dreams and aspirations. We quickly found that we both shared similar ambitions and hoped to one day own and operate a farm.

Nine months later ... Big D proposed.

A year and two months later, we were married.

We started our own farm operation just a year after we were married. Big D grew up on a small hog operation, but his family liquidated the hog herd shortly after we were married. We saw an opportunity to start farming through a partnership with the farmer Big D worked for. We didn't have a whole lot to lose, so we ventured in the world of farm business. It was tough. I think most people thought we were crazy, insane.

But through all the ups and downs, our farm was able to grow to the point where we were marketing thousands of hogs a year.

We are still small relative to the industry, but to me, it was an adjustment to be raising more than like 50 pigs at a time. Raising hogs in general took a little getting used to and I still have so much to learn. But it's been an adventure and while I don't work in the hog barns, I'm happy to support Big D and help in any way that I can. Sometimes I'm just the ear that he bends and I'm ok with that.

I could've never imagined that I would sometime be a farmwife and co-owner to a hog operation marketing over 12,000 pigs a year. But the industry is growing and to stay competitive and support our family, we had to grow. And it's ok. We are very much your typical family-owned business.

We are independent so there are no other parties aside from the government telling us how to raise our hogs. Good animal care practices are absolutely a number one priority on the operation. We're not perfect, but we are constantly improving and re-evaluating our operation for areas that can be fine-tuned.

Expansion, sure it's always a possibility. I want to give my girls an opportunity to come home and farm someday and raise their families on the farm, so to do so, we may need to consider new opportunities in the future.

Despite the fact that we own and operate a large farm now, I'm very proud of my small town, small time dairy roots. But I'm also appreciative of the fact that now I have a broader understanding of modern agriculture systems and that it truly takes all kinds and all sized farms to feed our world. There are still plenty of 36-cow dairies still running strong and there are a few multi-thousand cows dairies as well.

So today, I'm not just a voice for small family farms, but also mid-sized farms and I'd be glad to stand up and support larger farms as well, because we're all on the same team. A team working together to feed the world and there is no other team that I'd rather be a part of.