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

Could You Do This?, part 4

This chapter cannot tell you whether such a life is the right one for you. That is a thing you will figure out, slowly, as you go. But it is a thing worth knowing — that the choice between farmer and not farmer is not the only choice. There is also the choice of farmer-rooted, in which the work of your life is not farming but the place of your life is the farm.

If, having read all of this, you still want to try — and some of you will, and a few of you should, and the world will be better for the few of you who do it well — then a sensible smaller-scale entry point is goats.

Goats are not cows. Goats can be kept on smaller acreage. Goats can be handled by a single person without specialized equipment. Goats are forgiving of mistakes that a cow would not be forgiving of. Goats can be milked by hand. The capital requirements for a small goat dairy are a fraction of those for a small cow dairy. Goats produce a value-added product (cheese, soap) that can be sold directly to consumers at farmers markets, which avoids the commodity-pricing problem that destroys most small cow operations.

Goats are also, it should be said, mischievous. They escape. They eat things they should not eat. They have personalities. They get into fights. They will, on the day you have an important meeting in town, find the one weak spot in the fence you did not know was there. None of this is a reason not to keep goats. It is, however, the reality of keeping goats, and you should know it before you commit.

A small goat operation — twenty animals, two acres of pasture, an outbuilding, basic milking equipment, a small certified kitchen for making cheese — can be entered on a budget of less than a hundred thousand dollars. It will not, by itself, replace a salary. It can, in combination with a part-time job or a remote income or a working partner, supplement a household. It can, over several years, become a real business. The path to viability is harder to find than it sounds, but easier than the cow-dairy path, and it is something a person without a farming background can plausibly learn.

There are people who have done this. There are books written by them. The books are useful.

If you want to do this, or if you want to even think about doing it, here are the resources that actually help.

The first is your state’s Cooperative Extension Service. Cooperative Extension is a nationwide network of land-grant university programs that provide free or low-cost agricultural advice, classes, soil testing, and consultation to anyone who asks. Cornell Cooperative Extension, in New York, runs a Small Farms Program that has guided thousands of beginning farmers through the practical questions of starting a small operation. Every state has an equivalent. You can call them. You can take their classes. You can attend their field days. They are, in most cases, staffed by people who are good at this and who are paid by the state to help you.

The second is the federal Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program, known as SARE. SARE funds research on sustainable farming practices and publishes a substantial library of free guides on everything from rotational grazing to small-scale dairying to financial planning for small farms. The guides are not exciting. They are correct.

The third is your state’s small-farm advocacy organizations. New York has the Northeast Organic Farming Association. Vermont has the same plus several others. California has CCOF. Most regions have one. They run conferences, mentorship programs, apprenticeship networks. They are run by people who are trying to keep small farms alive and who can, often, connect you to a working farm willing to take an apprentice for a season.

The fourth is the people themselves. Most working small farmers will, if approached politely and with seriousness, talk to a beginning farmer for an hour. Some will let you work on their farm. Some will become mentors. The American small-farming community is small enough that most of the serious people in any region know each other. If you are willing to apprentice, with humility, for one or two or three years before starting your own operation, doors will open for you that will not open for someone who buys land first.

This chapter is not trying to talk you out of it.

There are reasons to live this kind of life that have nothing to do with money or with whether you will succeed at the business of farming. There are real things this kind of work gives a person — a relationship with land, a relationship with animals, a relationship with weather and seasons, a kind of competence that almost nothing else in modern American life delivers — that you cannot get any other way. The fact that the project is hard and that most people who attempt it fail is not, by itself, an argument against trying. Many things worth doing are like this.

What this chapter is trying to say is something a little more specific. It is trying to say: if you are going to try this, try it with clear eyes. Know what it costs. Know who succeeds. Know why most fail. Know that the path with the best chance of working is the slow one — the apprentice, the second job, the years of learning — and not the fast one. Know that the version of this life you have seen on Instagram is not the version most people doing it actually have. Know that the people for whom small farming is not a choice — the people whose families have been doing it for generations, in poverty, around the world — would mostly trade places with you in an instant.

And know that the system that produces the food on most American tables, the system this whole book has tried to describe, runs on a small number of farms and a smaller number of farmers and a kind of work that no one is currently lining up to do. There is a real shortage of young people willing to milk cows and fix fences and feed calves at four in the morning. The country needs them. If you are going to be one of them, the country is grateful.

The country will not, mostly, pay you what you are worth.

That is the truth, told as honestly as one chapter can tell it.

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