A Year on a Dairy Farm

12. Chapter 12 Could You Do This

You have, almost certainly, thought about it.

Most readers of this book have, at some point in the last few years, imagined some version of the following. A farmhouse somewhere — Vermont, maybe, or western Massachusetts, or upstate New York, or the Pacific Northwest. Ten acres, more or less. A barn. A garden. Chickens. Maybe a couple of goats. Maybe a milk cow. A wood stove. A view. A partner who is in on the project. Children who grow up free of screens, with their hands in the dirt. A small income from the farm, or a remote job that lets you live this way. A life that is more honest, more grounded, more real than the one you grew up in.

This vision is real to you. You have seen it, in one form or another, in films, in Instagram posts, in cookbooks, in the lives of writers and homesteaders whose work you follow. You have, possibly, said something like this out loud to a friend.

The vision is not, exactly, wrong. People do live this way. Some of them are happy. Some of them are even solvent.

It is also not what you think it is.

The honest answer takes more than one sentence to give, but it begins with this: most people who try this, fail. The reasons they fail are specific and worth understanding. And the people who succeed at it are, much more often than not, people whose lives have prepared them for it in ways that are not obvious from the outside.

Let us do some arithmetic.

Ten acres of land in a part of the country where you would actually want to live — within driving distance of jobs and hospitals and grocery stores, in the climate zones that support the kind of farming you imagine — costs, in 2025, somewhere between fifty thousand dollars and three hundred thousand dollars for the bare land. The wide range is because land prices vary enormously: rural northern Maine is cheap, the Hudson Valley is expensive, Vermont is in between, the Berkshires are higher than Vermont, and a few miles can change the price by a hundred percent. For ten useful acres in a place you would want to live — call it the Berkshires or the Finger Lakes or central Vermont — figure something like a hundred and twenty thousand dollars for raw land.

But you cannot live on raw land. You need a house. Depending on the property, you might find a small farmhouse already on the land for an additional hundred to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, or you might need to build, which will cost three hundred thousand or more. You will also need a barn or some kind of outbuilding, which is another fifty to a hundred thousand. You will need fencing, which is more expensive than people think — figure two thousand to three thousand dollars per acre to fence properly. You will need water for animals, which means wells or hydrants or both. You will need machinery, even if you go small — a tractor, a truck, a chainsaw, a generator, smaller hand tools — and you will spend at least thirty thousand on equipment to start.

The all-in cost of getting onto a ten-acre farm in a desirable region of the United States, with a house and the basic infrastructure to operate it, in 2025, is somewhere between four hundred thousand dollars and seven hundred thousand dollars.

This is not money you can borrow easily. Banks do not lend against farms the way they lend against suburban houses. The USDA’s farm loan program exists and is helpful for some buyers, but it has restrictions and waiting lists. Most people who get onto a small farm fund the purchase with one of three things: family money, money saved from a previous career, or the sale of an urban or suburban home. This last one is how most of the people who write the books and run the Instagram accounts about small farming actually got started — they sold a house in Brooklyn or Boston or San Francisco and used the equity to buy land. This is not nothing. It is a real thing. It is also not available to a person who is starting from zero.

Then there is the work.

A working ten-acre operation, even on a small scale, requires somewhere between forty and eighty hours a week of physical labor from the people running it. The high end is during planting season and harvest and haying. The low end is in the depths of winter when there is nothing growing. The animals — and you will have animals, because vegetable-only farming on ten acres is even harder economically — will need to be fed every day, watered every day, managed for health every day, and dealt with when they are sick or dying or giving birth, which they will be, often. There are no weekends. There are no vacations. There is, in fact, in the early years, almost nothing else.

The work is also, by the standards most readers of this book are used to, physically punishing. It involves lifting things that are heavy. It involves working in cold and rain and heat. It involves bending, kneeling, dragging, hauling. It involves your hands being in dirt and water and animal mess and your own sweat for several hours every day. It involves the kind of cumulative repetitive strain that, over years, will show up in your back and your knees and your wrists. None of this is, by itself, a reason not to do it. People do this work. People love this work. It is, however, a kind of work most readers of this book have never been asked to do for a sustained period, and it is a kind of work that requires a particular type of competence that takes years to develop.

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