Fivefold Fathers # 3: Shawn Dougherty
From Franciscan University Instructor to Sustainable Farmer
In our third “Fivefold Fathers” episode of the One More Soul podcast, I interview farmer Shawn Doughtery, father of eight. This series is meant to be a resource for young couples looking for guidance and inspiration for welcoming multiple children. The full video is available on YouTube. Here is an edited transcript.
David Stiennon, Chairman of One More Soul: I’m happy to be joined today by Shaun Dougherty, who is a farmer in Ohio, a father of eight children and author with his wife Beth of books on sustainable farming. Thank you for joining me, Sean.
Shawn Dougherty: Happy to be here.
OMS: So, when you were first married, was eight children in your mind?
Shawn: Oh, unlimited was in our mind. I come from a family of six. My wife, family of four. And we certainly were open to whatever God would send us. We knew that children were going to be a blessing. I’ve always thought of children to me as the jewels in the crown. So yeah, very open to children. OMS: When your first child arrived, how did that change you? Shawn: It’s a refocusing. One of the things that we often see there’s a difference between marriage with children and marriage without children. It’s almost a little bit like being single to marriage. The movement from marriage with children refocuses you, really makes the family come alive at that point. So we had been wanting to go that direction. So it wasn’t a big psychological change for us, but, yeah, I think that it centers us more. The community that we always wanted to be a part of starts with that.
OMS: Were you operating a sustainable farm when your first child arrived?
Shawn: Oh, no, no, no. My mom and dad and Beth’s mom and dad both were and our grandparents were dry farmers. They were farmers when there really weren’t grocery stores. There weren’t feed stores. So, you really did farm from the land and you had to improve the land. By the time my parents and Beth’s parents had left the farm, they loved the farm, they had farms, but they were no longer [farming], they were professionals now. So, it was a big shift. What we did on the farm was now kind of a hobby. It was fun. But it was not sustainable. It was not important that we get food from the farm. It was just nice to get the food from the farm. So we were not at that time [farming] when we first met. We met at the University of Dallas. We were in college together. We both knew we wanted to farm, but we didn’t know how that was going to happen and we didn’t have land or anything like that.
OMS: So you have one child and then the second child comes…
Shawn: Right, that makes a big change. We were not sure [what] we wanted to do. We liked farming. I also had a theater background. So, , I was in graduate school at the University of Oklahoma, and back in the theater. Then we got a job at Franciscan University [of Steubenville] where I ended up teaching for about twenty-five years. When we had just gotten to Steubenville was when our second child was born. So these two loves played out in our lives. The love of farm and then my personal love for theater. My wife is a potter. So we both were artists doing things but we were again focusing more and more on the family children. We were learning more and more that those are the most important things that we can do in our lives. Not the career. The theater was important to me. I enjoyed doing theater. I enjoyed teaching but the family was always what we were about. That was my primary vocation--not the teaching. Those were the ways that we made money.
OMS: Did you find a change when you had three and there were more kids than you two?
Shawn: Sure. When you start that role of them outnumbering you, that changes things a little bit. But, again, one of the things that we had some very dear friends before our first child was born, and Beth and I knew that Beth was going to be the heart of the family. She was going to be making most of the choices that had to do with how we lived as a family. She was thinking, this birth will be in a hospital and everything will be as normal as we see now. These things are what we would have seen as normal. This very dear friend-- we happened to see them right after their baby was born and they had had a home birth and this girl was the peak of health. She was doing really well. She loved the whole home birth and we thought, “Oh, that’s interesting.” And my wife said, “That’s what I want to do.” So, we did home birth and that was the beginning of a whole trajectory of pursuing the alternatives: alternative birth, alternative medicine, alternative education, alternative monetary system. Taking a job at a Franciscan university, you’re not going to make a tremendous amount of money. But we wanted to be able to provide for ourselves. Beth was not going to work, and what that meant was that we would live frugally. So, the farming actually came out of … we both had some background in it. Both loved it. But a lot of it came out of frugality—that this was going to be the cheapest way that we were going to be able to get food. And that’s what we’ve continued to do. We raise about 90 to 95 percent of what we eat and what our animals eat. So we don’t go to the grocery store very often. We don’t go to the feed store. This is all about the farm sustaining. And I think that that’s one of the things that made us completely unintimidated about having children was that this was not a huge cost. We saw them as advantages to us. We were looking ahead as we had children and recognizing that as a family we can get so much more done toward these things than if we just had two children or something.
OMS: How old were your kids when you started your farm?
Shawn: I think that my oldest was 11 to 13 somewhere in that range. So they were they were relatively young. They [made is so we were] able for us to do things that we wouldn’t have been able to do. We had a neighbor up the road who butchered pigs. He knew how to do that. He had grown up raising pigs and butchering pigs and he needed help. He wanted to be able to do it. He had three boys and a girl and they had gone into the Legion, the Legionnaires. So they weren’t around to help him with the butchering. A couple of them were still around and we had a lot of children who would be able to help with the butchering. So we would team up together and do butchering together. These are things that we couldn’t have done without children, without children who also were very willing to work and and enjoyed this lifestyle.
OMS: You mentioned alternative education.
Shawn: When we came to Stubenville, we were right in the middle of Stubenville and there were all the co-ops and things like that. We tended to do almost all of our education at home, although there were some extensions out to some of that. And our kids went through homeschooling. All of them went through homeschooling through high school. and then some of them have gone on to college. But we don’t necessarily see college as necessary. What I think that my kids got out of the homeschooling and living on a homestead schooling is that they are really, really good at problem solving. So, a lot of them are in blue collar work. I’ve got a sheep shearer. I’ve got an architect, timber framers. Our house burned down about two years ago. To me it was a wonderful thing. It was a hundred year-old house. We had cobbled it together and we had always done all the work on it, but my sons by this time were adults and, they said, “We’re going to rebuild.” So, with the insurance money--and then there were some GoFundMes--we were able to hire them to rebuild this house. It’s all timber framed. It’s just gorgeous. We changed all the problems that we had had originally with the 100-year-old house. We were able to correct and fix and it’s been just a wonderful journey to work with them as adults rebuilding this house.
OMS: What’s the age gap between your youngest and your oldest?
Shawn: My oldest is 39, I think, and my youngest is 18.
OMS: My nephew, Marco [Tejeda, Episode #1, transcript here] talks about the joys of the “caboose baby.” He’s got sixteen years between his oldest and his youngest. And he said it brought him great joy to see the interactions of his older children with the baby. Did you experience things like that?
Shawn: Oh, it was absolutely wonderful. I mean, that’s, you know, as the children, as the numbers grow, they certainly become not the primary caregiver obviously, but they become helpful with all kinds of things in those early days--washing dishes and cleaning and cooking and participating also in raising the children. The youngest one, it’s a fact that everybody loves … ours is a Raymond. He happens to be a Raymond. Everybody loves Raymond as in that show. But everybody did love Raymond and he couldn’t walk into a room without people wanting to pick him up. And you know there’s something really beautiful about being the youngest of a big family.
OMS: I’m the youngest of seven. I see that. How do you think having multiple children affected your marriage?
Shawn: It is the foundation. I mean a marriage is foundational in itself. The sacrament is foundational, but children are what holds it together. I would not want to have had a smaller family. I think the church talks about planning out your children with natural means. I think leaving that up to God is a much better way. That’s what we did all the way through, and we had natural child spacing. Beth nursed the children wholly. and I think that that really helped with the spacing. I think when the parents have five under five, that’s hard. Ours were spaced out about every three years. And I think that that did help, but that was all natural. We didn’t plan any of that. Although, again, with natural… with total nursing, I think it did help space out the children.
OMS: What do you think has been the hardest thing about having and nurturing children?
Shawn: I that’s an interesting question. You know, it’s easy for me to see all the positives. There’s always struggles with raising children. Our children are all practicing. That would have devastated me if the children were not practicing. It’s a humbling experience. I think that you really learn your weaknesses. I do see when I see a weakness in them, I know it’s my weakness or it’s not necessarily my weakness in them, but it is a weakness in myself. So it’s really good for me to watch them grow up and to watch them parent. The struggle of humility is there.
OMS: And taking the flip side, what do you think are the best things of being a parent?
Shawn: Well, I think what we have always hoped is that my children would be friends with each other as they grew up and that has absolutely happened. The thing that they love most is working together. So, every summer as I taught, I would take my summers off and we would work on a project. It would be the year of the barn or it would be the year of something. I thought all those days were gone. and then the house burned down. So, it was actually a delight for me that my children would come around again and they all came around at different times. We had two that were onsite a lot and then we still had three at home. And one of the things we loved was that our oldest was our general contractor returning and the three that were the youngest that he didn’t know quite as well--because he had left the home when they were still tinies--they became his crew (one boy and two girls) and they helped him with everything. Then others would come around. I also have a son who’s an architect. So he did all the design work. It was wonderful to watch them work together to become very dear friends. And again, that’s what anytime that any of my sons has a problem wants a house rebuilt or anything like that, we all kind of come around and we work with him together on that. So, that’s [what] my favorite thing is, working with the kids and watching them work together so well and and be such good friends.
OMS: It’s beautiful. So how did you and your wife share the parenting? Were you working on the farm while she’s in the house?
Shawn: I was teaching, you know, for the twenty-five years or so. So my youngest was four when I took the job at Franciscan and then I was there for twenty-five years. We would be farming. Beth would be in charge of the house primarily and she was the one primarily in charge of the farming, but as soon as I could get home, [I’m asking] what are my duties? What is it that I need to do to help on the farm? Beth did primarily the homeschooling. We had a couple of children that they would consider them, medically, a failure to thrive, which just meant that were not always hungry. So, they would not put on the weight. So, Beth would end up spending a lot of time nursing and taking care of them. And during those windows of time, I did a lot of grocery shopping. I did a lot of the cooking or kind of corraling the family in terms of the workload. But primarily Beth was in charge of the household and I was bringing in the money. I would try and encourage the kids to be involved. Oftentimes I would have a play with children in it and I would be able to cast them in it. So they were involved in some of the work that I did at the university.
OMS: I notice your particular expertise in sustainable farming. What would you say to the young parents who are thinking, “well, I’m open to more children, but that’s going to be costly. How will I ever support all those kids?”
Shawn: I do think that one thing that people need to do is really challenge themselves with where the money is going. We shopped at Goodwill. What’s where our clothes came from. We got the cheapest food that we could buy until we were able to grow our own. And growing your own is, I mean, you save tons of money that way. Whenever we did work on the house, we did the work. We didn’t hire it out. I didn’t know carpentry. I mean, I’d done some, but I didn’t know carpentry. I didn’t know plumbing. I didn’t know electrical. And we learned how to do it. We would talk to somebody who did that work and they would coach us through those. You can live on an awful lot less than I think a lot of people feel like you can. If you’re frugal--and my wife was a master at frugality!
OMS: How has your view of God changed due to family life?
Shawn: The thing is, and we have this with farming as well, if you farm or if you raise children according to God’s pattern you will have an incredible abundance. It’s not without difficulty. It’s not without challenges, but the positives far outweigh any negatives that come. When you start out this way, it is: do we really believe that? Is God setting us up for a fall? Is God involved? But as you choose the right thing, as you choose the good thing, and then it’s rewarded--that comes from God. And it really helps you believe that we do have a good God who wants us to live well, who will provide for us. Before I was married I was asked I was talking to my mom and I said (or maybe it was afterwards) but I had the fear, why will my marriage work? Why won’t it end up in divorce? Why won’t it collapse? and it was after I was married that I was talking to my mom and I said, “I don’t have that fear anymore” and she said “Well, that’s the sacrament, the grace of the sacrament at work.” You take those steps and God doesn’t pull the veil back ahead of time. But often in hindsight we see that he was there and if we trust [in God], it works.
OMS: Let me ask you about your relationship with your grown children. A young person might be just thinking of, well there’s babies and such but maybe not thinking about the relationship that he’s building for the future.
Shawn: That’s when the payoff happens! and one of the things that was always important to me was that, if my children liked me… we played a lot, we did all those kinds of things, but being their buddy was not as important to me in their early ages. What I really wanted was when they were 30 that they would say, “Dad, you raised me well.” That was what was important to me. And it’s been quite fun to watch my children parent. My second [child] says to me, “Dad, I find myself doing exactly what you did, the same games, the same!” And that’s really fun for me. But I do think that the relationship I have with my adult children is very special. We can work together as a team. Some of them are close, some of them are not so close. But they want to know, as they face challenges, what made it work? Help me. And to be able to work with them on the raising of children, my grandchildren, their children, it’s been really tremendously rewarding.
OMS: If you could speak on our podcast to those young people maybe who aren’t even married yet. Can you give them any particular advice about being open to children?
Trust that God knows better than you do and be a little bit reckless.
Shawn: Children, as I said earlier, are the jewels in the crown.The big families that we know now are the families that are the happiest. The families where the bond is inseparable. I like to say, “Enter marriage with reckless abandon!” Don’t think about the problems. Don’t think about, well, what if my kids don’t go to college? Just live the moment with your children and be very open to life. Don’t get in the way. Trust that God knows better than you do and be a little bit reckless.
OMS: Beautiful advice. I was looking at your web page and I see that today is the release date of your new book with your wife. Could you say something about The One Cow Revolution?
Shawn: Our first book was called The Independent Farmstead, and that is a focus on how you take land, any land... our land is terrible land, very steep and considered by Ohio not suitable for agriculture, and we have fashioned it into a farm that feeds us. Our first book was about, how do you take a piece of land and turn it into an ecological system that works with God and feeds itself? The center of that, we discovered. is the dairy cow. The dairy cow only asks for grass. If you take good care of it, the grass gets better. and it feeds everything on the farm. Our second book focuses just on the dairy cow, on how the dairy cow works, how to make it healthy, how to take care of it on the homestead, with few to no inputs. And now Chelsea Green [publisher] is asking us to write a whole series of books on homesteading that takes each the of the different areas of the independent farmstead and take a deeper dive into those.
OMS: Thank you, Sean. That’s a beautiful thing you’re doing there. Thank you for joining me on my podcast.
Shawn: Happy to be here.
One More Soul is a nonprofit in Dayton, Ohio, seeking to share the blessings of children and the harmfulness of contraception. Visit our online bookstore at onemoresoul.com. Support our mission with a donation through DonorBox.