Our farm occasions a lot of queries from observers drawn to what appears to be a bucolic lifestyle. We try to answer their questions dutifully, but since they don’t farm, they have difficulty articulating what they really need to ask. And we seldom tell them the full truth.

What I’d like to tell them, when what they are really asking is, “Is the farming life for me?” is this: that the simple reality of farming is work, hard physical work. It is work that can’t be put off, work that piles up in ever-increasing amounts, overwhelms, floods over every moment of your life, drowns you in endless to-do lists and endless to-dos.

Farming is 98 degrees in July, flat on your back under a piece of equipment in a back field, coated in grease, dry hay in your eyes and down your shirt, with the wrong tool a half-mile away as you try to fix something you knew was ready to break and put off because of all the other things you knew were ready to break and did get fixed, or at least patched together.

Farming is having the flu and a fever, puking, weak, and barely able to stand as you go through your rounds feeding, hauling water, no sick days, earning way below minimum wage just for the pleasure of it. It is throwing out your back or neck or elbow, spraining an ankle, splashing tractor oil in your eye, when you live 35 minutes from the nearest hospital. It is cutting your own firewood because the utility company hasn’t trimmed trees since the last ice storm and the forecast is always for weather you didn’t predict. Farming is serving as chief veterinary officer and surgeon because vets no longer make farm visits.

Farming is blood and mud so thick on your clothes and hands that you don’t know which is which and whether they are from you, the ground, or the dying animal you’ve been trying to save. Farming is 12 degrees in January with winds gusts of 20 mph and sleet stinging your face, as you try to get a chainsaw to start to cut up the tree that fell across the fence, allowing your herd of cattle to wander the countryside.

Farming is your neighbor’s barn burning down due to faulty wiring, which in turn causes you to bump repairing your own faulty barn wiring from No. 375 to No. 1 on the list of this year’s tasks to complete. It is a customer so obstinate, so dumb, so plain unthinking that you are tempted to give up the whole enterprise or the human race or maybe both as a bad investment.

But farming is also the intensity of a redbud in spring that stops you in your tracks while all the other miserable sods are trying to stay awake in the office or factory. So achingly beautiful it keeps you rooted in place and doing nothing for the next 20 minutes. Farming is a perfect cone-shaped swarm of honey bees hanging from your peach tree, a swarm that is then easily captured as it drops as a single clump into your waiting hive box.

Farming is the ripe tomato, the hand-milled apple cider, the cellar full of potatoes, the ham curing under the stairs, the cold midnight alone at the top of the hill. It is bees bearding on the front of the hive on a summer day, cutting hay on a Memorial Day weekend, admiring a newly erected fenceline and the work that went into building it.

Farming is a barn stacked with the hay you just baled, a garden bursting with produce. It is freshly baked bread slathered with the honey that you harvested, hamburgers off the grill courtesy of the lambs you raised on the hillside behind the house, a bowl of homemade yogurt topped with blueberries plucked from the backyard. Farming is the joy of lambing, the loveliness of a newborn calf, the hatching of chicks, the “grin” on the ram as he is released onto the flock. It is a randy romp of fecundity from spring through winter. Farming is the birds and the bees all day and all night.

Farming is the pleasure of doing for yourself, caring for the land, caring for your customers (even that one), providing for your family and countless others. Farming is not about you. It is about the vegetables you raise, the livestock you rear, the land you steward, the wildlife you provide shelter for, the satisfaction of being a good tenant on this good earth.

Farming is not a career, it is life. 

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