Brilliant piece. With some small alterations could be over here in UK. Heck, reading your posts make me realise UK and US farmers have more in common than I had realised.
Yes, and yes. But of course they didn't think it through, idiots didn't realise no farmers farming means no food. Mostly taken up by businesses that have no interest in real farming and now have acres of weeds and crap. But I am kept out of the red, just, by taking grants of £343 an acre to not use artificial fertiliser. Grants are however being slashed, inputs going up, cheap imports going up, our prices going down. Sure as hell none of it adds up. And now with the new inheritance tax why invest for the future. But farmers have always moaned and always will do.
Phew, that was exhausting reading that but yes I get what you're saying and agree. Even though I'm from the UK and walked away from farming more than half a lifetime ago I still take a keen interest in modern farming and all that goes with it.
Wow, there's a LOT to chew on here Adam! Stop putting the rest of us to shame and break these suckers into 3 or 4 posts, won't ya?
Want to really get your rant on? Watch The Biggest Little Farm! https://www.biggestlittlefarmmovie.com/ You can just spend the whole time screaming, "and where the F did they get the MONEY for THAT?" like I did but oh it's the darling of liberals who want to love farming but can't.
I'll push back on some of what you say though - you, a small time operator rotating more than 2 crops are in no way the majority. And rotating corn/bean/corn (but really corn/corn/corn when the price is right) in my mind is no rotation. It's tillage (still by the majority) and drugs every single season. It's soil wreckage. The difference between now and pre-tractor times was that one of the rotations was hay for the horses which gave the soil a rest from disruption for a while. It gets no rest on most farms these days.
I'm with you on this lady you so aptly describe. I don't need to look her up - I've seen ads along those lines and they make me sick too. But there IS something to be said for what comes next. Once commodity farmers finally finish collapsing into two categories - worker and boss - (and you sound an awful lot like you're there already) what's left to hope for? I'd say it IS agritourism and/or specialty crop farming in Cornville, which requires a shit-ton of dealing with customers that's a whole different skill set. It's labor intensive, which means jobs. It's an "experience" which means new money coming into small towns, even if it's just passing through. It also creates diversity on the landscape - economic, environmental and cultural - that will make our rural areas more resilient when Wall Street decides corn and soybeans will have a bad year or another Covid or bird flu shuts down the CAFO industry. And at least for the moment, those farmers are price makers, not price takers. While we might smirk or even grunt at such things, it's what a lot of younger farmers see as possibility and hope and they'll be the ones here when we're gone, so why discourage them?
I do appreciate the honest descriptions of how shitty it can be at times, though. Thanks!
ps Glad I'm not the only one who aches from turning around all the time! Maybe we should buy some mirrors!
Suzan, thank you for diving into the deep end with me on this one. Your response perfectly captures the nuanced complexity of modern agriculture.
About breaking these pieces up… (chuckles), I wish my brain worked like that, but these stories are like a field's drainage network. Everything connects. When you think you’re following one stream, it feeds into three others. That’s the beauty and the curse of documenting agriculture—nothing stands alone.
You’re right about rotations, and I’ll own my backyard bias. Growing up where we could plant everything from sugarbeets to canola probably shaped my perspective. When I hear “monocropping,” my mind jumps to “one crop,” but even a corn/bean rotation, while technically diverse, doesn’t give the soil the break it deserves. It’s like giving someone a 15-minute break during a 16-hour shift and calling it “work-life balance.”
As for barndominium culture and agritourism—I’m not against innovation or diversification.
I respect anyone making it work, whether running 10,000 acres or selling microgreens at farmers’ markets. What twists my niblets is when people sell a fantasy that papers over rural America’s real challenges.
Farm shops, event centers, and agritourism are valid survival strategies, but are they pitching them as easy solutions to complex problems?
That’s like slapping a Band-Aid on a blown o-ring.
The complexity of your response to my complex piece about complexity… lol. Maybe that’s the perfect metaphor for modern agriculture. Every answer spawns three new questions, every solution reveals two new problems, and we’re all just trying to stay afloat while swimming upstream.
Thanks for challenging these perspectives—this is how we grow.🌱
That's why I enjoy engaging with you Adam! Can't say it all on a screen and it would take too many beers or coffees too, but we both do appreciate the complexity. And I fully agree - this struggle for survival in rural areas is real. Kids come in with their parents paying for the land or people inherit land or start as their encore career coming in with a lifetime of savings from other jobs (like me, admittedly) and think they've got the same story as people paying for everything with 10% down and 5% interest. It's the debt that drives the poverty (or threat of) that among other things drives the stress.
I can't speak to farming life or InstaFarming life, either way. I came upon FFT by way of the InstaFarmer blog, though, and I consider that to be a happy accident of the Algorithm working as designed but maybe not necessarily as intended. While perfectly filtered photographs of brand new barns and happy little bunnies and superficial articles of idealized farm life do help lower my blood pressure, that's all they do. InstaFarmerville is like junk food: nice to snack on once in a while, but at some point, ya gotta eat some vegetables and get some real protein in there. I just upped my FFT subscription to paid. :-)
That's almost exactly how I feel about all the homestead Instas out there. Behind every Homestead Instagram is a spouse bringing home the bacon and the health insurance. I suppose I'm just jealous.
Daniel, I know what you’re talking about and I don’t think it’s just on the level of personal envy.
A very wise farmer I talk to a lot says that it creates a false economy for the farmers who MUST make a living at it.
I see that everywhere I look where I live.
“Show farms” and hobby farms get so much credit for doing things “right” because they have additional funding sources or they don’t need to rely on farm income. While the subsistence farmers lose in every round.
And don’t even get me started on all the grants… it’s a double-edged sword.
There is a taboo among farmers for having off-farm income and I think that’s a shame. Unless you inherit land and all the farming infrastructure, and don’t want to be in debt the rest of your life, but still want to be a farmer, an off farm job is necessary to front the bills, at least for the first 7-10 years getting up and running.
That said, I blow a fuse when I see Miss Green Barn Selfie Girl with her microgreens and massive “barn” with no animals.
Yeah totally, in my situation my wife has an off farm job and carries the health insurance because it’s the most economical option. But my farm salary is equal to my wife’s, contributes significantly to our retirement savings and net worth. If we didn’t have our farm income I’d need to have a different full time job to pay our bills.
I’m kind of obsessed with authenticity to a fault so it always chaps my ass to see a content creator selling a version of rural America that isn’t realistic for most. It’s just not the reality for most that you can be a 100% self sufficient, off grid homestead
I’ve seen it often where either at our farmers market or even some local non-profits undercut produces prices significantly because they don’t need to make the economic piece of the puzzle work.
I remind myself that they can’t compete with the volume, quality or consistency that we bring to our community and I feel a little better.
The only thing that will stop the agenda to destroy independent farming and their communities is to actively recruit people wanting to at least try it. I encountered a man on X who is seriously considering returning to his farming roots, if he can find the wherewithal. Thousands of people, young strong people ready to work hard, are living homeless and jobless in urban areas all over the country. If you don't want to end up surrounded by dilettantes, maybe the solution is figuring out where to find people who aren't.
A passionate piece, full of sharp images and deeply held beliefs. Would be curious to know if you think there's any authenticity at all within social media; if you've ever found an account that got at the truth of rural life, hydraulic fluid stains and past-due medical bills and all. Or maybe it's just pretense and posture and preening all the way down, and putting down the damn phone and getting to it is a precondition for honest labor.
As a man who grew up adjacent to farming communities in Montana, but was never truly of them, I'd be curious to hear your take. And as a teacher, I can relate to the beshittification of a proud profession by Hollywood production teams.
Illegitimi non carborundum est, and keep up the good work 👍
Jon Stevens Maple Grove on YouTube is a genuine guy searching for a better way. I’m sure there are plenty more I haven’t stumbled across yet. It’ll be like hunting for a golf ball in January, but they’re out there.
Beshittification is the coolest word I’ve heard in 2025. Here’s to keeping the bastards off our backs. 🌱
I love this. So raw, so real, so well written. Keep it up and some technology trillionaire will buy your farm for 5x the going rate and tell you that part of the deal is that you have to keep on talking. By the way, I bet Denis Quaid loves this too. By the way puck is the way - not football, but i'm french canadien so obviously i'm biased.
ALSO YOU JUST GOT A NEW ANNUAL SUBCRIBER (ps this worth 100$ a year).
PS-> Your take on the monsanto bs is the same shit i heard 10 years ago from one of my buddies from Philly who ran a research greenhouse for them. A couple of years ago, he said fuck it to them, ran a huge legal pot grow, got his pound of flesh and met a whole new cohort of people, and is now back where he started learning how to do big greenhouse grows in the first place, but now its all no-chemical/GMO, pure how to forge new paths and educate the next generation on using old world knowledge (companion planting, cross breeding, fixing the soil problem, and of course terra preta). Totally not against big rolling farms.
An old pot-growing hippie I knew back in another life taught me a lot about soil - not that I know much in the grand scheme. I haven’t talked to him in years, but I bet he still wakes up in acid-flashback cold sweats thinking about those spider mites chasing down his crop…
Anyway, I’m pretty new to hockey. It wasn’t exactly a hit around here, and I was a terrible skater, so I ditched it fast. That said, I'm happy my boy got into that instead of hammering his brain to mush on a football field.
Also, that tech trillionaire comment got me laughing. We're good as long as Quaid doesn’t play me in the movie.
Seriously though, appreciate the hell out of you. Thanks so much. 🌱
As a hobby farmer/"homesteader," I agree with you. I have personal qualms about calling myself a farmer because the truth is I'm not up to my eyeballs in bank notes and I work full time in manufacturing to pay the light bill. But I also work alongside dozens of "real farmers" who also have to work here just to keep their big farms afloat. It's pretty heartbreaking honestly. They come in smelling of cow shit and diesel, worn out from a long day of working the land, to work 10-12 hours in another equally exhausting job. Farming is broken.
I just don't know how long people can keep doing it for. A body can only handle so much and we've got folks who's bodies are worn out at 40. It's just plain sad. I often run on 4 hours of sleep during kidding season and if we end up with a pen of bottle babies it's not consistent sleep. But I don't have the added stress of paying off those massive loans so I consider myself very fortunate. (And keeping my herd under 100 head helps too. 😰)
Brilliant piece. With some small alterations could be over here in UK. Heck, reading your posts make me realise UK and US farmers have more in common than I had realised.
Are they really offering you money not to plant? Or is that misinformation? In the uk, I mean..
Are they really arresting people for internet posts and comments? In the uk.
Yes, and yes. But of course they didn't think it through, idiots didn't realise no farmers farming means no food. Mostly taken up by businesses that have no interest in real farming and now have acres of weeds and crap. But I am kept out of the red, just, by taking grants of £343 an acre to not use artificial fertiliser. Grants are however being slashed, inputs going up, cheap imports going up, our prices going down. Sure as hell none of it adds up. And now with the new inheritance tax why invest for the future. But farmers have always moaned and always will do.
Correction! meant £151/hectare !
Phew, that was exhausting reading that but yes I get what you're saying and agree. Even though I'm from the UK and walked away from farming more than half a lifetime ago I still take a keen interest in modern farming and all that goes with it.
Wow, there's a LOT to chew on here Adam! Stop putting the rest of us to shame and break these suckers into 3 or 4 posts, won't ya?
Want to really get your rant on? Watch The Biggest Little Farm! https://www.biggestlittlefarmmovie.com/ You can just spend the whole time screaming, "and where the F did they get the MONEY for THAT?" like I did but oh it's the darling of liberals who want to love farming but can't.
I'll push back on some of what you say though - you, a small time operator rotating more than 2 crops are in no way the majority. And rotating corn/bean/corn (but really corn/corn/corn when the price is right) in my mind is no rotation. It's tillage (still by the majority) and drugs every single season. It's soil wreckage. The difference between now and pre-tractor times was that one of the rotations was hay for the horses which gave the soil a rest from disruption for a while. It gets no rest on most farms these days.
I'm with you on this lady you so aptly describe. I don't need to look her up - I've seen ads along those lines and they make me sick too. But there IS something to be said for what comes next. Once commodity farmers finally finish collapsing into two categories - worker and boss - (and you sound an awful lot like you're there already) what's left to hope for? I'd say it IS agritourism and/or specialty crop farming in Cornville, which requires a shit-ton of dealing with customers that's a whole different skill set. It's labor intensive, which means jobs. It's an "experience" which means new money coming into small towns, even if it's just passing through. It also creates diversity on the landscape - economic, environmental and cultural - that will make our rural areas more resilient when Wall Street decides corn and soybeans will have a bad year or another Covid or bird flu shuts down the CAFO industry. And at least for the moment, those farmers are price makers, not price takers. While we might smirk or even grunt at such things, it's what a lot of younger farmers see as possibility and hope and they'll be the ones here when we're gone, so why discourage them?
I do appreciate the honest descriptions of how shitty it can be at times, though. Thanks!
ps Glad I'm not the only one who aches from turning around all the time! Maybe we should buy some mirrors!
Suzan, thank you for diving into the deep end with me on this one. Your response perfectly captures the nuanced complexity of modern agriculture.
About breaking these pieces up… (chuckles), I wish my brain worked like that, but these stories are like a field's drainage network. Everything connects. When you think you’re following one stream, it feeds into three others. That’s the beauty and the curse of documenting agriculture—nothing stands alone.
You’re right about rotations, and I’ll own my backyard bias. Growing up where we could plant everything from sugarbeets to canola probably shaped my perspective. When I hear “monocropping,” my mind jumps to “one crop,” but even a corn/bean rotation, while technically diverse, doesn’t give the soil the break it deserves. It’s like giving someone a 15-minute break during a 16-hour shift and calling it “work-life balance.”
As for barndominium culture and agritourism—I’m not against innovation or diversification.
I respect anyone making it work, whether running 10,000 acres or selling microgreens at farmers’ markets. What twists my niblets is when people sell a fantasy that papers over rural America’s real challenges.
Farm shops, event centers, and agritourism are valid survival strategies, but are they pitching them as easy solutions to complex problems?
That’s like slapping a Band-Aid on a blown o-ring.
The complexity of your response to my complex piece about complexity… lol. Maybe that’s the perfect metaphor for modern agriculture. Every answer spawns three new questions, every solution reveals two new problems, and we’re all just trying to stay afloat while swimming upstream.
Thanks for challenging these perspectives—this is how we grow.🌱
That's why I enjoy engaging with you Adam! Can't say it all on a screen and it would take too many beers or coffees too, but we both do appreciate the complexity. And I fully agree - this struggle for survival in rural areas is real. Kids come in with their parents paying for the land or people inherit land or start as their encore career coming in with a lifetime of savings from other jobs (like me, admittedly) and think they've got the same story as people paying for everything with 10% down and 5% interest. It's the debt that drives the poverty (or threat of) that among other things drives the stress.
love that show.
I can't speak to farming life or InstaFarming life, either way. I came upon FFT by way of the InstaFarmer blog, though, and I consider that to be a happy accident of the Algorithm working as designed but maybe not necessarily as intended. While perfectly filtered photographs of brand new barns and happy little bunnies and superficial articles of idealized farm life do help lower my blood pressure, that's all they do. InstaFarmerville is like junk food: nice to snack on once in a while, but at some point, ya gotta eat some vegetables and get some real protein in there. I just upped my FFT subscription to paid. :-)
Appreciate the hell out of this, Mark!
It means a lot knowing the FFT vibe resonates on a deeper level.
Welcome to the paid side of the ride—grab a fork, we’re diving into the good stuff. 🌱
That's almost exactly how I feel about all the homestead Instas out there. Behind every Homestead Instagram is a spouse bringing home the bacon and the health insurance. I suppose I'm just jealous.
Daniel, I know what you’re talking about and I don’t think it’s just on the level of personal envy.
A very wise farmer I talk to a lot says that it creates a false economy for the farmers who MUST make a living at it.
I see that everywhere I look where I live.
“Show farms” and hobby farms get so much credit for doing things “right” because they have additional funding sources or they don’t need to rely on farm income. While the subsistence farmers lose in every round.
And don’t even get me started on all the grants… it’s a double-edged sword.
There is a taboo among farmers for having off-farm income and I think that’s a shame. Unless you inherit land and all the farming infrastructure, and don’t want to be in debt the rest of your life, but still want to be a farmer, an off farm job is necessary to front the bills, at least for the first 7-10 years getting up and running.
That said, I blow a fuse when I see Miss Green Barn Selfie Girl with her microgreens and massive “barn” with no animals.
Yeah totally, in my situation my wife has an off farm job and carries the health insurance because it’s the most economical option. But my farm salary is equal to my wife’s, contributes significantly to our retirement savings and net worth. If we didn’t have our farm income I’d need to have a different full time job to pay our bills.
I’m kind of obsessed with authenticity to a fault so it always chaps my ass to see a content creator selling a version of rural America that isn’t realistic for most. It’s just not the reality for most that you can be a 100% self sufficient, off grid homestead
This 100%.
I’ve seen it often where either at our farmers market or even some local non-profits undercut produces prices significantly because they don’t need to make the economic piece of the puzzle work.
I remind myself that they can’t compete with the volume, quality or consistency that we bring to our community and I feel a little better.
Or a wealthy family who bought the pretty couple the land and buildings so they can play at homesteading.
The only thing that will stop the agenda to destroy independent farming and their communities is to actively recruit people wanting to at least try it. I encountered a man on X who is seriously considering returning to his farming roots, if he can find the wherewithal. Thousands of people, young strong people ready to work hard, are living homeless and jobless in urban areas all over the country. If you don't want to end up surrounded by dilettantes, maybe the solution is figuring out where to find people who aren't.
NZ too. Huge debt here; do the bankers want a Grapes of Wrath v2. Thanks for the essay.
Thank you for reading! 🌱
Very nice writing. I get it.
Appreciate you, Doug! 🌱
A passionate piece, full of sharp images and deeply held beliefs. Would be curious to know if you think there's any authenticity at all within social media; if you've ever found an account that got at the truth of rural life, hydraulic fluid stains and past-due medical bills and all. Or maybe it's just pretense and posture and preening all the way down, and putting down the damn phone and getting to it is a precondition for honest labor.
As a man who grew up adjacent to farming communities in Montana, but was never truly of them, I'd be curious to hear your take. And as a teacher, I can relate to the beshittification of a proud profession by Hollywood production teams.
Illegitimi non carborundum est, and keep up the good work 👍
They’re out there, but you’ve got to dig.
Jon Stevens Maple Grove on YouTube is a genuine guy searching for a better way. I’m sure there are plenty more I haven’t stumbled across yet. It’ll be like hunting for a golf ball in January, but they’re out there.
Beshittification is the coolest word I’ve heard in 2025. Here’s to keeping the bastards off our backs. 🌱
I love this. So raw, so real, so well written. Keep it up and some technology trillionaire will buy your farm for 5x the going rate and tell you that part of the deal is that you have to keep on talking. By the way, I bet Denis Quaid loves this too. By the way puck is the way - not football, but i'm french canadien so obviously i'm biased.
ALSO YOU JUST GOT A NEW ANNUAL SUBCRIBER (ps this worth 100$ a year).
PS-> Your take on the monsanto bs is the same shit i heard 10 years ago from one of my buddies from Philly who ran a research greenhouse for them. A couple of years ago, he said fuck it to them, ran a huge legal pot grow, got his pound of flesh and met a whole new cohort of people, and is now back where he started learning how to do big greenhouse grows in the first place, but now its all no-chemical/GMO, pure how to forge new paths and educate the next generation on using old world knowledge (companion planting, cross breeding, fixing the soil problem, and of course terra preta). Totally not against big rolling farms.
An old pot-growing hippie I knew back in another life taught me a lot about soil - not that I know much in the grand scheme. I haven’t talked to him in years, but I bet he still wakes up in acid-flashback cold sweats thinking about those spider mites chasing down his crop…
Anyway, I’m pretty new to hockey. It wasn’t exactly a hit around here, and I was a terrible skater, so I ditched it fast. That said, I'm happy my boy got into that instead of hammering his brain to mush on a football field.
Also, that tech trillionaire comment got me laughing. We're good as long as Quaid doesn’t play me in the movie.
Seriously though, appreciate the hell out of you. Thanks so much. 🌱
As a hobby farmer/"homesteader," I agree with you. I have personal qualms about calling myself a farmer because the truth is I'm not up to my eyeballs in bank notes and I work full time in manufacturing to pay the light bill. But I also work alongside dozens of "real farmers" who also have to work here just to keep their big farms afloat. It's pretty heartbreaking honestly. They come in smelling of cow shit and diesel, worn out from a long day of working the land, to work 10-12 hours in another equally exhausting job. Farming is broken.
This is the kind of truth that needs telling.
The system's so broken farmers work factory jobs to keep their farms and hobby farmers
who won't call themselves farmers because they can't afford to go broke farming full-time.
Thank you for sharing your perspective - it adds so much to the conversation.
I just don't know how long people can keep doing it for. A body can only handle so much and we've got folks who's bodies are worn out at 40. It's just plain sad. I often run on 4 hours of sleep during kidding season and if we end up with a pen of bottle babies it's not consistent sleep. But I don't have the added stress of paying off those massive loans so I consider myself very fortunate. (And keeping my herd under 100 head helps too. 😰)
As a gal from southern Illinois, this rings so true.