People see the farm and think they understand what it takes.

They think about the physical work, the feeding, the mucking, the hauling, the endless list of things that need doing regardless of what your body is doing that day. They think about the money, the feed bills, the vet costs, the infrastructure that always needs something. They see a disabled woman farming in Alaska and they think, that must be so hard.

They’re not wrong.

But they’re not seeing the whole cost either.

Let me tell you what this farm actually costs me.

It costs me animals.

Not in the abstract. Not as a farming fact of life that you get used to and eventually stop feeling.

I never stop feeling it.

Every animal on this farm has a name in my heart even when it doesn’t have one on paper. Every one of them is part of the mission, part of the reason Eden’s Edge exists, part of the chain that gets real food to real people who need it. They’re not just livestock. They’re the whole point.

When I lose one I fall apart.

Not gracefully. Not with the stoic acceptance people seem to expect from farmers. I fall apart the way you fall apart when something you loved and were responsible for is gone and you’re standing there holding the weight of that and asking yourself every question you don’t want to ask.

Did I do enough? Did I miss something? Was there something I could have done differently?

Why do I try?

Why don’t I just quit?

I have sat with those questions in the mud more times than I can count. I have cried over animals in Alaska winters when the ground is frozen and the wind doesn’t care and there is nobody around to see it and nowhere to put the grief except into the next thing that needs doing.

And then — after the meltdown, after the questions, after the falling apart —

I try harder.

That’s the only answer I ever find. Not a philosophical one. Not a comforting one. Just get up, figure out what happened, do better, try harder. The mission doesn’t pause for grief and the animals still need feeding and somewhere out there a family is counting on what this farm produces.

So I get up.

Every time.

It costs me freedom.

Financial freedom first, because there is no such thing on a nonprofit farm run by a disabled woman in Alaska. Every dollar that comes in goes right back out. Feed. Supplies. Infrastructure. The endless hungry mouth of a working farm that is also trying to feed a community. I am on disability. I am poor. I built something that serves everyone around me and I do it on the financial edge of what is survivable.

I don’t say that for sympathy. I say it because people need to understand what nonprofit actually means at this level. It doesn’t mean comfortable. It doesn’t mean funded. It means you believe in the mission more than you believe in your own financial security and you make that choice every single day.

Personal freedom too. The farm doesn’t take days off. It doesn’t care about flare days or fainting spells or the fact that your neck has been screaming since November. It doesn’t care that you’d like to sleep in or leave for a weekend or have one day where nothing needs you.

Something always needs you.

I gave up the version of my life where I answer only to myself when I built this place. I knew that going in. Most days I don’t regret it.

But I want people to know it was a choice. A real one. With a real cost.

And still.

Still I am here.

Still the meltdowns end and the questions find their answer in the next thing that needs doing. Still the financial edge hasn’t swallowed me yet. Still the freedom I gave up feels, most days, like it went somewhere worth going.

This farm costs me everything some days.

And some days everything I’ve given it comes back in the face of a kid that made it through the night. In a senior who tells me they haven’t had real meat in months. In the particular silence of a farm at dawn when everything is fed and nothing is wrong and the thing you built from stubbornness and grief and refusal to quit is just… there. Alive. Working.

Worth it.

Ask me again on a bad day and I might hesitate before I answer.

But I’ll still answer yes.

Dana Eden’s Edge, Nikiski Alaska