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As weeks passed and her future on the farm began to take shape in her mind, Lily asked if she’d also be able to have a horse. Her interest in equines surpasses the standard little-girl passion of collecting plastic ones with purple manes and tail; she’d lobbied for riding lessons before she could ride a bike. I’d long assumed a horse was on our horizon. I just hoped it could wait until Lily was tall enough to saddle it herself.

In the time-honored tradition of parents, I stalled. “With your egg business, you can raise money for a horse yourself,” I told her. “I’ll even match your funds—we’ll get a horse when you have half the money to buy one.”

When I was a kid, I would have accepted these incalculable vagaries without a second thought, understanding that maybe a horse was out there for me but I’d just have to wait and see. The entrepreneurial gene apparently skips generations. Lily got out her notebook and started asking questions.

“How much does a horse cost?”

“Oh, it depends,” I hedged.

“Just a regular mare, or a gelding,” she insisted. When it comes to mares and geldings, she knows the score. I’d recently overheard her explaining this to some of her friends. “A stallion is a boy that’s really fierce and bossy,” she told them. “But they can give them an operation that makes them gentle and nice and helpful. You know. Like our daddies.”

Okay, then, this girl knew what she was looking for in horseflesh. What does an animal like that cost, she inquired? “Oh, about a thousand dollars,” I said, wildly overestimating, pretty sure this huge number would end the conversation.

Her eyes grew round.

“Yep,” I said. “You’ll have to earn half. Five hundred.”

She eyed me for a minute. “How much can I sell a dozen eggs for?”

“Nice brown organic eggs? Probably two-fifty a dozen. But remember, you have to pay for feed. Your profit might be about a dollar a dozen.”

She disappeared into her room with the notebook. She was only a second-grader then, as yet unacquainted with long division. I could only assume she was counting off dollar bills on the calendar to get to five hundred. In a while she popped out with another question.

“How much can you sell chicken meat for?”

“Oh,” I said, trying to strike a morally neutral tone in my role as financial adviser, “organic chicken sells for a good bit. Maybe three dollars a pound. A good-size roasting bird might net you ten dollars, after you subtract your feed costs.”

She vanished again, for a very long time. I could almost hear the spiritual wrestling match, poultry vs. equines, fur and feathers flying. Many hours later, at dinner, she announced: “Eggs and meat. We’ll only kill the mean ones.”

I know I’m not the first mother to make an idle promise I’d come to regret. My mother-in-law has told me that Steven, at age seven, dashed through her kitchen and shouted on the way through, “Mom, if I win a monkey in a contest, can I keep it?” Oh, sure honey, Joann said, stirring the pasta. She had seven children and, I can only imagine, learned to tune out a lot of noise. But Steven won the monkey. And yes, they kept it.

In my case, what I’d posed as a stalling tactic turned out to be a powerful nudge, moving Lily from the state of loving something as much as her mother (or six-sevenths as much) to a less sentimental position, to put it mildly. I watched with interest as she processed and stuck to her choices. I really had no idea where this would end.

Chicks must be started no later than April if they’re to start laying before cold weather. We moved to the farm in June, too late. From friends we acquired a few mature hens to keep us in eggs, and satisfy Lily’s minimum daily requirement of chicken love. But the farm-fresh egg business had to wait. Finally, toward the end of our first winter here, we’d gotten out the hatchery catalog and curled up on the couch to talk about a spring poultry order. Lily shivered with excitement as we discussed the pros and cons of countless different varieties. As seed catalogs are to me, so are the hatchery