Meet Quest Maker Mari Omland
Quest Makers are women in their 40s and beyond who've declared
"now it's my time," and then set off on their own journeys to realize their dreams. Every month a Quest Maker is featured in the FREE e-newsletter, Your Next Quest Chronicles. Click here to enjoy archived issues.
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Quest Maker Mari Omland
From a frenetic high-powered city life
to a deliberate life on her farm
In her early 40s, several young friends of Mari Omland's died. Then she was laid off from her high-powered job in D.C. Mari likens these life events to throwing a stick into a moving bicycle tire. It made her stop. That's when she reassessed what mattered to her and made the move home to Vermont and life as a farmer. At Green Mountain Girls' Farm in the heart of Central Vermont, she and Laura, her life partner, raise healthy (organic and sustainable), happy (free range and loved) animals and vegetables. In addition to raising tasty, organic food, their Barn Guesthouse provides a respite for guests where they can experience a bit of farm life, or just relax and have fun on the trails and in the pond.
When did you decide to embark on your journey?
Even though I had a pretty hellacious commute to work every day (from Washington, D.C. to West Virginia), I thoroughly enjoyed my work as Director of Conservation for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. I had no intention to change real quick because things were going so great. Then roughly 2 1/2 years ago when I was in my early 40’s, I got laid off from my job. Since my partner Laura and I had a lifelong desire to move back to Vermont where we are from, we started gelling ideas and playing with possibilities.
How has your quest unfolded?
The unfolding quest had some very old roots. I was in Washington for 15 years yet I was always still very connected to the place where I’d grown up and where my family still lived. I used to describe myself as being perched in D.C. I loved the chance to make a difference in a meaningful job and having great opportunities unfold before me, so I stayed longer than expected.
I spent a decade working at Conservation International which was almost dotcom like. It was a new, bold conservation organization that grew fast. It was great exposure for me because I had a chance to go from intern to a senior executive. I felt very lucky to stretch myself professionally and achieve so much there. In some ways, that aggressive early career as definitely a workaholic enabled me to climb the career ladder quickly and let some of the aspirations to climb higher rest.
There was an amazing first wave of major change in my life almost four years before I made the move back to Vermont. At the end of a decade with Conservation International, 9/11 happened and I got laid off there. During the same period, my mom became terminally ill. For a substantial amount of time, I was able to care give and be with my parents while my mom died. It was all very much part of the foundation for my jumping off point.
We also had two young friends die that year. Another friend died the year we moved. Having our young friends die made us stop and think about what mattered and why we were doing what we were doing and about what we wanted to do next.
Laura wanted to finish some important work and leave her job at the right time. Meanwhile, I spent about six months renovating our house to sell it. Then we sold our house and put everything in storage. We had put some criteria together. We sought community vibrancy, deep snow, accessibility to family and, accordingly, highlighted some portions of a map of Vermont in green. We set off for four months to explore them, driving drove down dirt roads, jumping on our bikes, meeting people and looking for a community to be our home.
Our first quest was really to find our place and community; it wasn’t necessarily to start a farm. Four months into our search we narrowed it down and made an offer on one property in a green part of the map but the deal fell through.
Originally Northfield was a yellow spot on our map. We were intrigued by some aspects of it. We had also been a little hesitant because it is thought of as possibly one of Vermont’s more conservative towns. We got wooed by this wonderful barn and nice, nice piece of land and house. There were other places that we saw where we could picture a life except with this place we felt that classic spark of intuition and something not rational. We loved it.
What changes did this bring to your life?
Well, this change included a loss of diversity. We had lived in a big city on Capitol Hill with a lot of great stimulus - cultural and culinary. The gain side of the equation had us outside a great deal, with two workaholics all of a sudden working together on projects.
We weren’t certain exactly what we would do here. When we did find this place we had decided to start a small farm. At first, it remained a bit of mystery how to do that because four inches of snow fell our first night here and the next night, seven more inches fell. The land was under snow so all we could see was what was in pictures. The winter was a continuation of our sabbatical. Where in the summer we delighted in the search for a place, in the winter we slowly got to transcribe those same questions onto a much more narrowed reality.
We have been thrilled with Northfield because we have the world’s greatest neighbors. As a lesbian couple, we felt very welcomed when we moved here. Moreover, people are incredibly excited about what we are doing, even though we've been doing a lot of infrastructure development and it’s still kind of messy. We have dirt piles and poop piles and other piles, yet it has just been a real positive feedback loop.
Looking back, what's one thing you wish you had realized?
I know one thing I am glad I didn’t know. After making this move, I had an elderly relative pass away. She shared a modest set of resources with me, so our financial situation changed a little bit. In some ways that inheritance made it all a little easier and there’s less of a financial risk now. I’m glad I didn’t know because I think it was better to sort of struggle through and see what we thought we could do with our own set of resources first and then have it get a little easier. One thing maybe I wish I’d known was that farming alone wouldn’t help me lose 50 pounds when I should have been more diligent about healthy intake along the way!
What is the one essential quality that you'd tell women to pack for their own path?
Curiosity about yourself - that drive to keep learning about yourself. Understanding that what you know about yourself has been shaped by the context you’ve been in.
It could be that you have strengths that you are blind to. At Conservation International, I spent a decade with a lot of really creative people. I saw myself as resourceful and that I could feel really good about. Creative was not how I framed myself. When I got to grad school, I read Julia Cameron's the Artist's Way with a bunch of friends over a number of months. I started to actually open up my view of myself as creative.
Where I had felt like plain vanilla at Conservation International, when I got to my new job at the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, I felt like I was sugar and spice. Creativity was a fun piece of my identity. I realized that I had pride in my creativity but somehow out of a desire for modesty and because I had been with even more creative people before, I hadn’t seen it as part of my own strength profile.
Can you describe how you dealt with any obstacles on your adventure?
You know, mood management has been an interesting thing for me. There are a lot of deliberate things about our life right now. I made the move to be here on purpose. I want to work outside, be part of the food revolution and sustainable agriculture. It’s all very deliberate but in the middle of my days there are still things that get far behind because I over program myself. Now that I am on this path of pursuing something I dreamt up and where I shaped just about every piece of it, I am intolerant of the low moments. I feel I should be enjoying the task or the overall circumstance I’m in at that moment.
There are plenty of frustrations, like today when I got my augur bit stuck in the hill. Here I was using a nice tractor and having the right things available to me but a combination of inexperience and bad luck left me in a very frustrating situation. I think I'm not tolerant of myself getting cranky because so many people wish they were doing something similar.
How did you make time for your dream?
Getting laid off was like throwing a stick into the moving bicycle tire. It was the thing that made me stop. Otherwise I would have probably kept going.
What helped you stay on your quest’s path?
Certainly the fact that it is a shared journey with Laura has made that viable. I am sure we have enough independence and respect for each other that it could have been done solo. Obviously it would be a very different outcome. But it has been a great supportive thing. I feel really privileged and lucky we have that compatibility and we are doing this together. I think also other people’s interest has really fed it, even those I thought wouldn’t be interested or supportive have been, like my mom’s elderly cousin Mary Margaret.
She lived about an hour away from my 92 year old Dad. We visited her weekly during that search to update her on the different properties we were looking at. I basically thought she would think “you are the kids we sent off to college” and she would not find what we were thinking about doing interesting or agreeable. We’d tell her that we might make goat cheese or grow gourmet mushrooms or start a little business. Then one day she said, “What you’re doing is farming and I think it’s great! My mom always said one us girls ought to marry a dentist and one should marry a farmer because in this family we all have bad teeth and we all love good food.”
It made me blush. It was a kick in the pants for me to realize I was patronizing my elders and thinking I was protecting them from worrying about us and perceiving disappointment where there wasn’t any. Instead she was very much up to the challenge of relating to our experimentation and excited about what we are doing.
What's been the secret to reaching your goals?
I guess probably the life altering perspective of the loss and grief associated with our friends passing away, especially. It is that perspective that allowed us to say “Sure, we’re leaving some other things behind but this is worth pursuing. Sure, this is unorthodox but life can be short.”
In some ways the unsolved piece of the quest is that we are still workaholics. In terms of meeting our goals, of getting this farm established and having momentum, our workaholism has been an asset in a way because without momentum one can easily get off course. We’re not necessarily focused, we’re highly distractible and we take on too much. Maybe that translates in the end to stamina.
What's the best advice for your quest that you've ever received?
A woman named Carol Delaney [Farmer Grant Specialist for NE Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education] stood up at the beginning of a workshop - I think on goat dairy development at the Grass Farmers Conference - and said “Yeah its’ great to have a business plan. Work on one and elaborate on it to the extent that you can but at the end of the day if that happens or doesn’t happen, the most important thing is that you know, or have clearly written on top of a piece of paper, what you want your life to look like. Then keep making sure your decisions support that.” It’s really saying that the most important thing is make sure you have clarity about what you want your life to look like.
Is there a particular quote, a movie, a book or a person that has sustained you?
I’m an input junkie and I am very intrigued by positive psychology. I’ve had a blast reading Now, Discover Your Strengths using the online tool called the Strength Finder.
Also our little animals and big animals sustain us in what we’re doing. We have amazing fresh food all the time at our fingertips. Definitely the yield from our farming is totally sustaining us and wowing us. We aren’t into providing all of our own food; we’re not the off the grid types. We just want to produce good food and do it in way that’s good for the earth and people and our community. How much literal sustenance and just spiritual emotional reinforcement we get from the beauty of it!
Our customers have been incredible, too. Laura and I think we’re marketing veggies, dairy, meat, eggs and fruit and they tell us: “We just love coming here and talking to you. We love what you’re doing. There are a lot of neat people in this neighborhood but you're finally knitting all of us together.” That feedback is very much a part of sustaining us and making it very worth continuing to quest on.
Do you have a new quest around the corner?
I usually think longer term. Even though I live TV-free, I want to be on Oprah or Ellen’s show!
This winter we will open our Barn Guesthouse, a finished space in our barn where guests can stay and have a chance to share the farm as well participate in whatever is going on that day. Guests will walk past animals to get to this comfortable place outfitted with a modern kitchen and full bath and a loft bedroom that can accommodate six comfortably. It’s well designed for a family.
Guests will be able to look out onto the animals on pasture and at the pond or in the winter look out on the sledding hill. They can either cook their own meals or they can organize a simple cozy meal prepared by us. There is also a space to have a catered event. They’ll be able to swim in the pond and participate, as our neighbors have, in the weekly farm share. Because we are right in center of Vermont, they’ll also be poised to go off and tour in any direction.
People around here call newcomers “flat landers.” I grew up here and my family has been here many generations. At the same time I spent 20 years away. In Vermont parlance I’m native because I was born here. In moving back to Vermont my other big quest is igniting a dialogue that makes us less inclined to think “them versus us” and more inclined to understand each other better and make a more peaceful place.
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
I’m a believer in following strengths and exploiting them. At the same time I feel it’s important to be deliberate about paying attention to our places of discomfort and what about our life in general, or our quest in particular, that makes us uncomfortable.
I just think there’s so much learning possible from our doing something different outside of what’s expected. In those margins there’s just such richness to exploit and explore. If you can, mine it and gain more enjoyment from the discomfort of being in the in-between ambiguous space. I think that it is such a truly powerful thing.
I guess the reason I come to share that is because of actually having grown up queer. I actually call it “queer privilege” now. I was outside of all the expectations. It was really uncomfortable for me for a while but it enabled me to stretch and learn and especially gain perspective about what others feel like in other situations.
I think whether it’s going off to start a farm as a mid-career transition or embarking on anything new, you are going to break from what people expect of you and there will be some discomfort in that. Be comforted by all the richness that can be tapped when you explore those margins.
Pork, chicken and eggs are available at the farm. Their eggs are also available at Hunger Mountain Co-op in Montpelier. The girls' Omnivore's Farm Share is available during the summer.
To learn more about Green Mountain Girls' Farm and the guesthouse, visit the girls' blog, send Mari an email, or call her at 802.505.1767.
Laura and Mari with chèvre made |
At the Northfield Farmer's Market |
Fife's piglets in snoozing in the hay |
Onions drying all in a row |
The new guesthouse barn |
The farm's pond |
What you can expect to find in every issue of YNQ Chronicles