I used to write a farm blog titled “Farming on a Dying Planet”. Now, I realize that what I was referring to was actually a dying empire.
In 2010, I wrote a research paper for my sophomore lit class on factory farms.
I was a part of one of those early waves of collective internet trauma that was the widely circulated videos of animal abuse in slaughterhouses and on farms.
I went vegan, and quickly realized I couldn’t afford the organic lifestyle I longed for. So I read my first gardening book. That lead to volunteering for a community garden. Then an internship for a nonprofit. Next, I joined the staff in managing a school garden program. My mom, a working class hero of the service industry, sighed and begged and criticized my decision to forego college in favor of this “gardening thing”, but I never listened.
After a few years of this urban-centered growing, I WWOOFed until I had enough experience to get a farm-scale job. I worked seasonally for a variety of different farms, from a small diary goat gig, to mushroom cultivation, to fruit production, and of course, veggies.
Now, after 13 years, I’m reflecting on the changes I’ve seen in the industry, and in myself. By 2017, I had achieved my dream of farming full-time. I never earned a college degree, not because I don’t think they’re useful, but because I wanted to avoid the debt my friends got into. You truly don’t need it to farm, and if you end up with significant student debt, it can be a barrier for entry. Keeping living expenses low is key. I’m also no longer vegan, but that’s a story for another time.
As it turns out, I regret nothing. As each year rushes past, the insecurity I felt about putting all my eggs in this proverbial basket has withered away. I was right to be concerned about climate change back then, and to choose a career accordingly. In all the strife of the past decade, I’ve not seen my profession derailed by shifting markets and technology. Farmers are a minority, and we are in demand.
To be sure, some of this demand is based on superficial hype. We have experienced our fair share of extreme weather events, land access debacles, hard relationship lessons, loss of funding, and crop failures. Instagram-ification will have people believing that farming and land work is all flowers and sunshine. I’m not innocent of that, because pretty pictures sell produce. Once you get a little closer to the world of farming IRL, however, I try to be as honest as possible without being a total bummer.
I often fail at that, though. When movies and TV series build a world in which farming and food systems are absent (like the Emerald City in Wizard of Oz, or Barad-dûr, in The Lord of the Rings) I can’t help but notice. In rarer instances, when depictions of farming are actually present in media, it’s given as a convenient plan B for the “end of the world”. I stopped watching The Walking Dead way back when they magically started a gorgeous farm in the gated prison yard with only some seeds and almost no previous knowledge. I don’t even watch documentaries about farming anymore. So often, they fall short of the details and nuance specific to different peoples and different lands that make food systems work. They tend to favor a silver-bullet, one-size-fits-all, and black-and-white solutions. Then, of course, there’s the rage bait that makes anyone with a heart want to overthrow the entire concept of farming in general.
The chasm between how farming works and how non-farmers imagine farming working is wide and deep. It can look like a white-washed, gentrified utopia, or cheap goods produced by invisible labor, or in the case of conventional agriculture, evil incarnate. This fails to make clear the major opportunities for change ahead.
I’m writing this not to discourage anyone from taking whatever steps available towards growing food. Quite the opposite. I am interested in setting people up for success, on whatever scale. To do that, we all need to appreciate that farming is a proactive practice that needs to be undertaken before true scarcity hits. It takes time to get to know each species you want to grow, whether animal, plant, or fungal. Most importantly, that it’s a process worth doing.
As time has passed, my mom no longer talks about me going to college. Her tone has shifted to immense pride for the work that I do, and she always offers to help on the farm when she visits. Instead of getting turned away from jobs for not having a degree, as I once experienced, I’m getting offers that I didn’t even ask for. Presentations to give. Events to make appearances. Articles to write. Markets to attend. Even interviewing for a podcast recently. This week, in a job interview that dovetails well with my farming schedule, I was told I was overqualified. I was floored.
Where it used to feel like a fight to stick with it, now farming feels like less of choice and more like an inevitable duty to fulfill. The reality is such that I don’t have many other viable career options even if I wanted to quit. I’m a one-trick pony with not only a whole community relying on me, but also my young family. No longer novel and cute, it feels needed and necessary. The empty shelves of the pandemic had people flocking to our CSA in overwhelming numbers. Each year since we have filled up early, to the point where we have to turn people away. People congratulate us when they hear that. I get a knot in my stomach knowing how big the need is, that it will only get bigger, and yet we are at capacity to meet it.
The supply chain is vulnerable to all of the 31 flavors of crisis playing out right now. Bird flu and covid, mass job losses, cuts to the EPA and FDA, less access to healthcare and food assistance programs. The people who grow the majority of the food are facing detention and deportation. Many of the same people who exalt these polices will pay the cost of them in the grocery store and with their health, along with the rest of us.
Watching the world’s first live-streamed gen 0 side puts food and farming into an expanded context. A major flaw of humanity is that we eagerly forget the feeling of hunger. We underestimate our universal vulnerability to it. We fail to recognize that all objects that hold any value at all would be traded in an instant to soothe the pain of starvation. Your grandmother’s golden ring, or great-grandfather’s watch? Your car? Your devices? The shirt off your back? The value of everything is subject to the availability of food and water.
If all of this sounds like fear mongering, that must be because I’m scared. I don’t know anyone who isn’t. I’m finding out fast that a lot of the philosophies I used to operate on don’t hold up anymore. An armful of small wins used to be enough. A pay raise, a convicted officer, some health insurance, and almond milk at every store felt like progress that might lead to significant change. Now, we’re watching all those little wins backslide. Resolutions repealed. Murders re-hired. And the same CEOs who gave concessions to workers are taking them right back. The monoculture of almonds, and the disaster of the pollinators.
Fear never stands alone, however. I also get waves of gratitude that can’t be overlooked. Now, in 2025, while giving an online presentation to 70 kindergarten-5th graders, I hear questions asked in little-kid voices that I never asked until I was in my 20’s. Do we save our own seed? What insects harm crops, and which ones help? How can they become a farmer one day?
Through everything that has happened in the last decade plus, I haven’t lost my career. While change happens at a break-neck speed all around us, my path has not changed direction much. I have more stability than a lot of my peers. I never had any money to put into the stock market anyway, so I had nothing to lose. It is time, however, to think about power differently. Growing food isn’t just a skill to be exploited, nor an casual hobby, nor a last resort.
Farming is the power to cure, not only the threat of hunger and malnourishment, but also the environment. It’s the power to build community around shared needs and combined abilities, across demographics. It’s a responsibility that I feel deeply inadequate to fulfill, as I look at the faces of the generations in front of me. They will need to know about seed saving, building soil fertility, and identifying and cooking with wild foods. Not in a prepper way, but in a collective resilience kind of way.
The questions of how this working-class generation and the next become farmers, how food will be grown and distributed, and how land access will be addressed are questions that I don’t have clears answer to right now. I can’t in good conscience send young people on the quest I undertook of working for free, for room and board, or for $50-$500 a month just to gain enough experience to get a job or start a farm. I can’t pretend that academia offers viable options either, especially if you have to go into debt to attend college. Land prices are only getting worse.
I’m afraid we’re going to have to shoot higher than I previously believed. We’re going to need a mass movement to first stop the harm being committed on each front, and then to build a culture and society that values all life. I’m afraid it’s going to get worse before it gets better. But the good news? We can start now. There is less comfort holding us back. There is a sense of urgency to mobilize.
If you want to grow food, in any capacity, don’t hesitate. Start the process of getting to know the foods you love as living beings now. Besides, the work is not only necessary, it’s nourishing. Every native pollinator that shows up is cheering us on. Every bite of food grown on the land where you live is the Earth telling you it’s here, that we’re here together, and that we belong to it. It’s not a back-up plan for calories “when shit hits the fan”. It’s the soil’s love language to our bodies. We each still have a chance every day to listen. Over time, we can gain proficiency enough to speak this language. It is a universal first-language, spoken in thousands of different tongues throughout our evolutionary history and the world.
If I can offer anything about myself, I can promise you and all the kids growing up right now that I will take the head start I have and use it to see us through to the next phase. That’s the reason why I’m writing, why I’m living. My capacity may not be huge in this season of life, and yours may not be much greater. But whatever we have to work with, we have got to use it.
so grateful for you, your devotion to community & land, and your wisdom 🩷