A Year on a Dairy Farm · Could You Do This?

Could You Do This?, part 2

You will also be, much of the time, alone. The romance of small farming includes other people — a partner, a community, a network of friends — but the actual hours of the work are mostly hours of one person doing physical things in a field or a barn, by themselves, for stretches of three or four or six hours at a time. A reader who has spent most of their life in school, in cities, around peers, in conversation, may not know in advance how their mind responds to this kind of solitude. Some people are nourished by it. Some people are slowly hollowed out by it. You cannot, easily, predict which one you will be.

The people who succeed at this kind of life, in the United States in the twenty-first century, are not a random sample of those who try.

They are, overwhelmingly, one of three kinds of people.

The first kind are people who grew up on a farm. They watched their parents do it. They know, in their bodies, what the work is. They know what equipment is, what animals are, what weather is, what a bad year feels like. They are not surprised by the long hours or the physical toll because they have seen it their whole lives. Most successful small farmers in America today come from farm families. This is not a story about heredity. It is a story about apprenticeship — about the long years of unconscious learning that happen when you are a child watching adults do work you will eventually do yourself.

The second kind are people who married into a farm family. The dynamics are similar. They had, before they did this, a partner who knew how. They had a family that taught them. They had a way in.

The third kind are people who came to it as adults, but who came with two specific things: enough capital to absorb several years of losses, and enough humility to apprentice themselves to people who already knew how. The most successful adult-entry small farmers I have read about all spent at least two years working on someone else’s farm before starting their own. They did not buy land first and figure it out. They learned the craft first, slowly, on someone else’s nickel, and then bought land, and then made the mistakes you can only avoid by having already made them.

The people who fail — and most of the people who try, fail — are usually some version of the same story. They had the dream. They had some money, but not enough. They had no farming background. They did not apprentice. They bought the land and tried to learn on the job. The first year was hard but exciting. The second year was hard and not exciting. The third year was hard and lonely and broke. Sometime in the third or fourth year, almost always, something happens — a marriage strain, a financial collapse, a serious injury, the death of an animal that the owner cannot bring themselves to face — and they sell. The land goes back on the market. Someone else buys it. The cycle continues.

A specific word for the reader of this book.

You are, statistically, smart. Your education has been good. Your parents have arranged your life carefully and, on the whole, lovingly. Much of what that arrangement has accomplished is to protect you from physical labor, from discomfort, from failure with your hands. These are not bad protections to receive. They are also not the protections that prepare a person for small farming.

Small farming requires a competence with one’s body, and with the slow ungainly mistakes physical work demands, that has to be built — by years of doing the work, by tolerating the early failures, by accepting that there is a long stretch in which you are bad at the thing you are trying to learn. Most readers of this book have not been asked to spend any sustained period being bad at something physical. The schools you have gone to do not, mostly, teach this. Your parents, however much they love you, do not, mostly, model it.

This is not a reason not to try, if you want to try. It is a reason to be honest about where you are starting from. You are not starting from zero. You are starting, in some respects, from below zero, because you have to unlearn an unconscious expectation that work yields to effort and that effort yields to talent, neither of which is reliably true in farming. The first year, for almost everyone in your position, will be humiliating. The second year, less so. By the fifth year, you will know whether this life is for you.

There is no faster path to that knowledge than five years.

This is not new. Americans have been doing this for a long time.

There were waves of back-to-the-land settlement throughout the twentieth century, and they followed roughly the same arc. The largest and most studied was the wave of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when several hundred thousand mostly young, mostly white, mostly college-educated Americans left cities for rural land — Vermont, Tennessee, New Mexico, northern California — to start farms or communes or homesteads. Many of them carried specific ideological commitments: anti-consumerism, environmentalism, skepticism of urban industrial society, an interest in self-sufficiency.

All 14 chapters of A Year on a Dairy Farm · Library · All courses