Off-farm Income

Today I’ve got a story for you all that I think illustrates a point about goal setting. As I have talked about, many times in the past, I grew up in a very small town in the Central Valley of California called Valley Home.  It is a tiny, triangular shaped farming town north of Oakdale and east of Escalon.  It lies right in the northern sliver of Stanislaus County where the county seat is Modesto.     Valley Home was originally named Clyde, when a tiny train stop of the Southern Pacific Railroad was created between Stockton and Oakdale in 1871.  Clyde remained just a small stopping point for the railroad until about 1903 when a bunch of German immigrants moved to the area and created a settlement.     Chief among these immigrants was FD Volkman, and the house I grew up in had actually been purchased from his family by my parents in 1972.  FD convinced the railroad to build a depot there, and this led to many other German’s settling the area and starting farms.     There happened to be another trai