It seems to work out for people who have grown up in the farming world. For those who already live their life on a rigorous schedule, are physically fit, and don’t need shopping centers around the corner then maybe they have just as good a chance as anyone else at being successful farmers. We don’t need as many farmers as we once did, which is sort of a good thing, but it really is a common heritage for most of us because until recently most people were farmers. My grandmother told me that her father, a farmer, told her that farming was the only honest job. I don’t know what to make of that because he was last farmer in my family.
I didn’t. I love it.
I’ve run into a number of other people who became farmers as adults, and read about more – as well as those who grew up farming and hated it and couldn’t get out fast enough. Whether it fits you has little to do with whether you started off there.
It’s much easier (presuming that you’re one of those who love it) if you did grow up farming, of course; but it’s not required. And, at least in the USA, there’s now a whole lot of help available for new farmers, most of which didn’t exist when I started: because, while we don’t need as many farmers as we did in, say, 1900, we sure as hell need more than we’re going to have if we don’t get some new people in here, because the average age of the people doing active farm production has gotten way too high and we can’t keep this up forever. This has been noticed by both farmers and officialdom on all sorts of levels.
And my schedule’s more “wildly erratic and hard to guess what I should be doing at any given moment” than “rigorous” in the sense of “everything at the same time like clockwork.” Not everybody’s got livestock; and not everybody who does has dairy cattle.
Traditionally, the work/home dichotomy is understood to have begun with urbanization, because it was entirely meaningless on a preindustrial farm. Do you find that to be true on modern farms?
Modern farms vary a lot They very often include someone who works off the farm; and they’re occasionally run by people who have determinedly set “off-work hours” and manage to mostly make them stick; but there’s a classic joke which still applies to most:
Question to a farmer: What time do you go to work in the morning?
Farmer: I don’t go to work in the morning. I just get out of bed, and there it is, all around me.
– a joke which also works if one substitutes “SAHM” for “farmer”, I expect.
Brief words to describe that didn’t come to mind as I wrote my post. I’ve seen enough to know i wouldn’t do well. I’m there for the ‘wildly erratic hard to guess’ part because that describes my personality. It’s all the rest that can’t be put off or rescheduled or just dropped because I found something more interesting to do.
It’s the relentlessness of it that no one can prepare you for. Which, interestingly is also what I tell people about parenting.
I’ve never been a farmer full time, but I spent many Summers on my Mother’s family farm, and I do know what their lives were like. They had hands and helpers, but were never fully comfortable when away from the farm. They were always hoping for some new cash crop or method of bringing in more money. They had inherited land and machinery, yet still had nothing beyond what they needed. (They did have EVERYTHING they needed though.)
The few times when they had extra money they were too afraid to spend it. They always had the spectre of a bad year hanging over them like the sword of Damocles. Army ants, foreign fungi, beetles, viruses, not enough rain, too much rain . . . there is just so much to fear.
And remember, these were people who never had to pay for their land. They just had to make it through the taxes, and the seed, and the salaries, and the machinery maintenance, fuel costs, market fluctuations, and so on.
Weirdly, I don’t mean to talk you out of it. As a lifestyle, I’d say it has more going for it than most. But find a class that teaches you farm bookkeeping. You need to understand the myriad expenses that will pick you to pieces.
Back in the 2000s, my sister and BIL made the decision to buy a restaurant. They had both spent most of their adult lives in the service industry. They’d both been managers and both had tended bar. Sis had waited tables and BIL had been a cook. So when the owners of a Mexican restaurant near where BIL worked put their store up for sale, they made plans to buy it and turn it into a brewpub, or gastropub, I forget exactly.
It seemed doable. They had the advantage of the place they were buying being in a good location, and having been in continuous use for almost twenty years, so they didn’t have to chase a family of rats away from the hostess station. They drew up a budget that covered everything: what to buy, how much for remodeling, how much to pay the staff until they started seeing a profit. They called in their debts and got a bank loan, and that matched the budget, including what the owners were asking. So they were ready to go…
…until a week before closing, when the owners called and told them someone else had offered a higher amount, and could they match/beat that? No, they could not. It would have wiped out an entire line of the budget, and they were not about to start out in the red. They did wait to see if this was a bluff and the owners would accept the original offer, but apparently it was real, and the store became Asian fusion.
I heard about this from my mom, and the punchline was that someone close to BIL said, “Do it anyway! Sometimes you gotta roll the dice!” To which BIL said, “Rolling the dice was the decision, itself, to get our own place. After that, you don’t leave anything to chance.”