What’s in a name.

For those of you who know us well, you know how much Michael and I enjoy organizing, categorizing, and naming things. However, the idea of naming a farm was quite daunting. We tried thinking of the characteristics of our land, stoney, lots of oak trees, very windy. One our first try, we came up with the name Oakstone Farm. It was a good starting place, but rather generic, kind of like the name of a street in a sub-development. Next, based on the suggestion of my brother, we tried Stoakey’s Farm, combining the letters in stone and oak. That was a complete 180 from Oakstone, but maybe a little too “hoakey”. Then, one day after reading one of my daily must-read blogs, and hearing the term “techno-pioneer” we were newly inspired. That was a perfect description for Mike and me. We both do very old-fashioned things like knit, sew, garden, raise livestock, but we do so with the aid of the internet, our iPhone, etc. We are techno-pioneers. We bounced that term around for a few days, and then, as Mike was finishing up a batch of soap, he did it. He came up with the name, Terrabyte Farm.

For those of you unfamiliar with computer language, a terabyte is a measurement term for a data storage device. In this case, it means one trillion bytes, which is a lot of information. Since we LOVE lots of information and are trying to make our farm as bio-diverse as possible, terabyte seemed like a good description for what we hope to have here. We decided to change the spelling from “tera” to “terra” meaning earth, land. Also, the word “byte” and “bite” meaning to eat, are homonyms, another play on words.

To us, Terrabyte Farm translates to “eating lots from the earth”. And that is exactly what we hope to do.