Don't Talk With Your Mouth Full
The Case for Giving Agriculture a Voice on Substack
They say farmers feed the world. Funny how no one wants to hear what we have to say.
I was 14. Third farm job. Third farmer.
One of those moments that doesn’t change your life but sticks in your skull like a roofing nail.
The guy had just bought a new farmyard and shop from some old hoarder who hadn’t cleaned it in twenty years. So the first few days? Nothing but fire and garbage.
Sorting, scraping, dumpstering.
Burn barrel out back, flames rolling like they were trying to purge the sins of the previous owner.
August of ’99 was a greasy bastard in northern Minnesota. Foggy. Damp. Everything soaked in mildew and resentment.
Nobody was happy—crabby crew, tension thick in the air.
Everything felt one spark away from detonating.
I was just a kid, 14 and hungry to prove something. I didn’t care about the mustiness, the tension, or the garbage detail. I wanted a seat in the tractor. I just wanted in.
I didn’t know what I was feeling back then, but I know now. It was awe—fire in my chest—even if I had to clean mouse nests out of toolboxes to get there.
The yard smelled like burnt oil, wet grain, and old mice. Every step kicked up stale diesel and soot. I didn’t care. I kept my head down, kept moving, waiting for the day they’d finally let me in the cab instead of hauling junk out back.
Out front sat this rotten-apple red truck—an old ’75 Chevy C65 twin screw, short box. Barely fit four hundred bushels and took every ounce of horsepower to move.
But once she got rolling. 427 gasser. 13-speed. Oh man. Screamed like hell on asphalt. You could feel her rumble through your boots before you even dropped the clutch. Loud enough to rattle the windows in the shop. Ugly enough to make you proud to drive her.
Then came one box—old books, some papers. Nothing special.
So I tossed it into the burn barrel like all the rest.
As soon as it hit the flames, the papers curled, and there it was:
A whole box of .22 shells.
I clocked it, diving behind the red Chevy like I was in a jungle foxhole, pinned down in ’Nam. The rounds snapped like popcorn in hell.
Second day on the job and the guys in the shop are just watching out the window like: “Who hired this dumbass?”
When the shootout finally died down, I stood up—still jittery, still dumb—and smoked my head on the edge of the box.
Dropped straight to the ground, rubbing the lump.
Half-laughing, half-wincing, still hearing phantom gunfire in my ears, I looked up … and there it was. Rusted, sun-bleached, barely clinging to the back of that old red box.
A bumper sticker.
“If you complain about farmers, don’t talk with your mouth full.”
You might thank God before a meal.
But when’s the last time you looked a farmer in the eye and said “thank you?”
It hit me, even then.
Like … damn. This is farming.
Not just the planting or the harvesting, but also the cleanup.
The chaos.
The danger.
The parts nobody sees on a grocery store shelf.
And that story? That wasn’t even the worst.
My dad nearly lost his foot to a combine auger—those long, twisting blades that suck grain out of the machine like a metal throat.
He was seven.
Got a little too close. Caught his shoe.
It damn near chewed his leg off before he clawed his way out.
Grandpa hauled him twenty miles to the hospital—pedal to the mat, white-knuckled the whole way.
“Don’t let em’ take my foot, Dad.”
Just the thought of him saying that—a seven-year-old kid—still makes my stomach turn.
I’ve burned my arm. Lost fingernails. Smashed my thumb flat as your iPhone and spent two years hooked on Percocet to prove it.
And I’m one of the weak ones. I don’t work half as hard as most of these guys.
You can bust your ass all season, make every right move, and still get wrecked by one storm, one market crash, one early frost.
Farming isn’t just dangerous.
It’s unstable.
It’s gambling with your soul every spring.
One of the deadliest jobs in America—riskier than law enforcement or construction. But you won’t see Netflix greenlighting a docuseries about a guy losing his hand to a post-hole digger.
Most of us know someone crushed by a cultivator, sucked into a grain bin, or chewed up by a PTO shaft.
No headlines.
No documentaries.
Just silence.
They kept working … if they were able.
And here’s the crazy part:
Barely any of it even counts as “farming.”
Not on paper. Not officially.
Just another day, holding the line.
People don’t know this world. They don’t see it. And when something’s invisible, it’s easy to ignore. Easy to pretend it doesn’t exist.
That’s how it starts every time. A great civilization forgets who feeds it.
Rome didn’t fall overnight. It fell after it forgot about its farmers.1
We’re here—living it, bleeding for it—and still, no one sees us.
While our communities rot from the inside out—not because we’re dying—but because we don’t fit the version of “farmer” you’ve programmed yourself to believe.
The old guy in bibs who “comes to town once in a while.”
Or the shiny preacher-farmer with a hay-bale stage and a brand deal stuffed in his back pocket.
That’s not the whole picture.
We’re not a postcard.
Not your childhood memory. Or a conference keynote.
We’re still here—burning out while you scroll past.
We’re the people behind the food on your plate.
Intelligent. Hard-working.
People with stories.
Families with scars.
And they’re wasting away while you’re looking for your next Netflix binge—killing themselves with stress, addiction, and silence.
Because nobody gives a shit about their story unless it fits a Hallmark card, a Whole Foods campaign, or helps someone feel righteous about quinoa and feel-good packaging.
It’s the kind of erasure you can’t compost.
Life isn’t about knowing your own little corner.
It’s about perspective—about listening.
Really listening.
To people who don’t live like you.
Don’t think like you.
Don’t shop like you.
Don’t show up in your feed, but hold up everything beneath it.
Because if you never hear from us, it’s easy to believe we don’t exist.
And it’s not just me yelling into this blizzard.
There are voices everywhere—farm writers, rural thinkers, truth-tellers—pushing back against the silence.
People who know what it costs to feed a country.
People who bleed quietly, just to keep things going.
Half the time, we’re ignored. The other half, we’re ridiculed.
People gripe about chemicals, crop choices, and how we should grow kale while hugging the soil. But none of them have stood in a firestorm of .22 shells or pulled a buddy’s arm out of a grain auger.
They don’t know what it costs to feed this country.
Not just in money, but in time, in risk, in pain, and blood.
So yeah—this started as a story about a box of ammo and a bumper sticker.
But it’s about so much more.
About the people holding up the world while everyone else scrolls past.
About why these stories need space, why people need to see the backbone holding this whole thing up.
Because it’s not about politics.
It’s not about whining.
It’s about telling the truth from the dirt floor on up.
Substack has given so many of us a voice.
Now it’s time to give that voice a home.
We’ve earned it.
And maybe that’s why Farming Full-Time started in the first place.
Not just to tell stories, but to bring back something we lost.
When I was a kid, there were always people around. You could stop at the co-op or the grain elevator and swap crop talk, lie about yields, and cuss about rain.
(The local elevator wasn’t just for dumping wheat or barley—it was for chewing the fat, passing time, being seen. It wasn’t just about grain. It was about gathering. Connecting.)
Now? The old guys are gone. The young ones move away.
Most days, you drive to town and back without seeing a soul.
But I still believe in community.
Two farmers. Elbows on the hood, exchanging field notes like it still matters—because it does.
We don’t have coffee shops full of growers anymore.
We don’t have elevator offices anymore—no folding chairs by the scale window, no radio humming low while three guys solve the world’s problems between loads.
But we do have this.
Substack. Comment threads. Notes.
Late-night emails. Unexpected friendships.
We built something here—something real.
Sometimes, that’s all you need: a spot where people know where to find you.
The irony?
By being ignored, we built something better.
We found each other in the quiet, in the dust.
No spotlight. No handout. Just grit.
We built our own damn gathering place—not with lumber and bolts, but with comment threads and late-night replies.
Farmers from around the world, swapping stories like they used to swap seed tips over coffee at the Cenex.
Turns out, you don’t need four walls to build a community.
You just need people willing to show up.
And we showed up.
So maybe it was meant to happen this way.
Amor fati—the love of fate.
The idea that even the hard shit was part of the plan.
You don’t have to believe it.
But I do.
And here’s what I didn’t realize until I sat down to write this:
I couldn’t have done it alone.
This community—this strange, scattered, glorious mess of farmers, thinkers, rebels, and writers—we didn’t just survive the silence.
We grew something in it.
We’re rebuilding what we lost.
Not the building, but the soul.
It’s funny … I’m still that 14-year-old kid.
Still pacing.
Still waiting for the right time to roll.
Still watching the neighbors go early and wondering if I should, too.
After all the years—all the wreckage, all the new tech, all the weight—I still just want to get behind the wheel.
That’s what this whole piece is, really.
Me, standing by the tractor.
Heart thumping.
Waiting for the signal.
Just like I did, back when the smoke cleared and the shells stopped popping.
So if any of this stuck with you, don’t just scroll.
Stop. Look. Say something.
Share a story.
Tell someone about the burn barrel.
About the blood, the silence, the weight.
Look a farmer in the eye.
And maybe, just maybe, listen.
Because we’re still here.
Still holding the line.
Still feeding you, even if you’ve forgotten.
And we’re not going away. 🌱
https://www.green.earth/blog/key-factors-in-the-fall-of-the-roman-empire-unsustainable-farming-practices-and-deforestation
Nice work again, Adam. You're a poet. But remember - Most women didn't get to do any of that. We didn't get to hang at the co-op or help clear out the barn. If we did, we suffered the slurs about being "butch" or "dyke." Most of us/our mom's generation were in the kitchen cooking the meals for the guys because sharia law lives in rural America whether we admit it or not. It's a different kind of community - maybe not as dramatic, but just as meaningful I suspect. (Hope the "whining" and the "postcards" cracks weren't aimed at me! You get where I'm coming from...I think...)
Adam. We see you. This time of year tends to give me anxiety. I don't farm myself (other than research plots) but rather work with farmers to help them produce more productive corn and soybean in NW MN.
Why am I anxious then? Long hours, stress and heavy machinery are a dangerous and even deadly combination for those that I work with, regardless of the time of year.
In fact, one on my most memorable encounters was holding a reluctant farmer as he sobbed - heartbroken with hot, bitter tears. He had left the farm to seek employment elsewhere and years later got called back when -right after planting and before post-emergence herbicides needed to go on- his dad died when the tractor he had been driving mowing ditches rolled over on top of him.
Heartbreakingly routine tasks can prove deadly. Just this Sunday, a farmer near Brooten, MN died when his planter crushed him underneath.
Augers, PTOs, heavily used machinery and implements constantly in need of repair, being strapped for time: guys and gals - take that extra beat to pause and let someone know you'll need a spotter. Have a fire extinguisher, first aid kit, hearing, eye, sun and bug protection handy along with any PPE to be as safe as possible. WE NEED YOU.