Advice for crossroads of life

[bc30629]

So there is some crossroads coming in my life in the near future. I am at an age of a lot of change and need to make some pretty big decisions. I was hoping there may be some others out there who have gone through similar situations who would be willing to throw me some advice.

So my story goes...I want to be a farmer. I've wanted to be one my whole life. My parents weren't farmers but they were avid gardeners and I did spend many a weekend tending the lawn and garden. During the weeks at school I gobbled up information in the fields of biology and botany and anything pretty much having to do with the natural sciences. I followed my parents advice and the advice of our culture and entered into college in the field of biology. Now this is where the problems began to arise.

All this time I was in school the farmer within me was partially satiated by learning so much about the world around me. But being the farmer that I was it really wasn't curbing my need for the labor behind the love. I decided to drop from school and be a self taught entrepreneur of sorts. Now I didn't have the land to just start a farm plus I had very little capital to begin such a venture anyways. I did the next best thing I could do for myself. I applied to a small upcoming landscape company in my area and began taking horticulture course at my local community college. I even taught myself to weld and did some side work. The small company feed my hunger for nurturing a young soul and the landscape end curbed my need for caring for plants. Since i've been there the company has been doing great and I have been saving my money. With the money I was saving I built myself a large veggie garden at my fathers house and I began to buy supplies for a small ball python company and bought a handful of snakes. At about that point in life I figured I had it nice. And it stayed this way for some time...

Now I am a bit older. I have saved my money. It is time to move myself into my own home. Time to really become me. I have taken care of my garden and have been caring for my snakes. All the while working in the landscape field. But I still want to be a farmer. I am jealous of those who get to wake every morning to work their land and see what their passion and hard work have brought them. I was picking up a load of horse manure for my garden in one of the work dump trucks. The woman who was working the farm came over to me completely sweaty and covered in mud but still had a smile on her face and continued to chat with me enthusiastically. I knew she had that farmers spark and I knew that I needed what she had.

So this is my request for advice. It may have been a long post but I felt I needed to fully express my situation. I want to be a farmer. I really do. How do I even begin?

[Brimstone111888]

I may not know the path to becoming a farmer, but I understand where you are coming from. Do what you love and it will be that much better, don't worry about the money. I know so many people who went off to college for jobs because they pay good. Most of them have dropped out by now.

Goodluck and follow your passion.

[frankykeno]

There's a passion there that's easy to read in your words. I'd suggest you start hanging around your local farmer/feed supply store. Find out where the farmers gather for coffee. In my experience in almost any smaller community, there's a favored spot for that. Get to know some local farmers. Go to farmer's markets and talk to farmers. It's summertime, go find the small town fairs and hang out in the lifestock barns.

Those are some of the places to find the people that will really tell you the truths of farm life and will have the inside scoop of land coming available and so forth.

[bc30629]

I just spoke today with a friend and they told me about a farmers market on thursdays, plus im going to visit an herb farm a couple towns over in a few weeks. Maybe i can chat with the owner there a bit more as well. I learnt a lot about cooperatives today which was pretty helpful.

[dsirkle]

All the farmers that I have any personal knowledge of, aside from a couple of elderly farmers whose land holdings are large and were paid for a couple of generations ago, have to work a good paying full time job to support themselves and farm only as a lifestyle. Sometimes they make some money and sometimes they lose money by raising mainly soy beans as crops and buying and raising baby pigs and selling them when they get big and hauling the whole lot live to the butcher whose charges the customer to butcher them as the customer desires. If they had a mortgage on the farm and had to pay the bills from farming they couldn't make it. They work day and night and don't have much free time. Half of the years it rains too much or it rains too little and they don't make a profit on crops. One time a pack of stray dogs entered a pig pen in the middle of the night and killed all of one guy's pigs after he raised them all year. It is a rougher way to make a living than Green Acres makes it out to be.

[wilomn]

It is a rougher way to make a living than Green Acres makes it out to be.

Of course, depending on what kind of Green your Acres are composed of, you may well be able to survive this climate of hardship and toil that is the norm for farmers.

Some of the farmers I know do quite well.

[West Coast Jungle]

I would get a job at a farm and learn about it from the ground up.
One thing is knowing how to grow plants and animals and another thing is making a profitable business out of it. They are two very different mindsets and approaches.

I have my own business but only started it after I worked and eventually ran someone elses business for 10 years.

Its hard to run a business if you dont know hands on every responsibility each job takes to make it happen.

My younger brother graduated from cooking school and my Dad talked to me about helping him by a restaurant. I told my dad how can you run a business when you dont even have any experience working in the field. Not a good recipe for success.

Learn the business, feed the dream, gather experience, make a plan, set a goal and follow through day after day, year after year and you will reach your goal.

All good things come to those who(work) wait

[Dragoon]

one possibility is to get a job with one of the larger farms. the work will prepair you for what you want to do and on what scale to be financially stable. odds are you won't make much so you have to prepair to go through something like that.

[dsirkle]

Of course, depending on what kind of Green your Acres are composed of, you may well be able to survive this climate of hardship and toil that is the norm for farmers.

Some of the farmers I know do quite well.

[SapphireTigress]

Speaking as the child of the only farmer's child who didn't become a farmer herself or marry into the farming family...

Farmers are wonderful, amazing people. They're hardworking and deliberate, and you're right, there is a certain spark that my family has, but it's sometimes from limited success. The crops pay for the loans on the big machinery sometimes and that's it. My cousin ditched the milking and dairy herds, thinking he could make it, only to start boarding others' herds because farming just didn't cut it.

The gas prices are going up. My son did a survey for his high school on drilling in the ANWR. My aunt is a little fired up about this, as you can see:

Think about it. What do we use oil for? You go to the store to get food. Right? How does that food get to the store? How did you get to the store?

Someone in Florida or California, Michigan or Utah, just to name a few, used oil to plant, cultivate and maybe even water the lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, strawberries, etc that is on the shelf. How did it get to the store? Again oil, truck fuel or train fuel or maybe even plane fuel.

How about corn chips? We need fuel to grow the corn to make the corn chips and maybe soybean oil to cook them in. Oil to heat the fire to cook them and a truck to bring them to the store! Ice Cream and Milk! Same deal. The cows have to eat and they like corn and soybean meal, and hay. Need fuel to grow corn, beans and hay. Need fuel to cut the hay, bale the hay and haul it to the barn. We need fuel to cool the milk and haul it to market. Get the picture!

This country runs on oil, but the enviromentalists must think every thing grows on shelves in a store! They have lots of money and don't care if we have to pay four dollars for fuel. It doesn't concern them. They think that the store will always be full. But the farmers are wondering about using the high priced fuel to grow cheap food that they are not going to make any money on for their labor, or even loose money while growing food for people who do not appreciate it. Maybe we should eat the caribu! Oh, I forgot we can't eat them either.

I forgot about fertilizer! the price of anhydrous which we use to make corn grow has gone from $200 a ton to near $700 in the past two years because of the fuel crisis. (Same for other fertilizer)

We can import food from other countries and let their farmers make money, but we still have to get it here!

Having said that, as far as an investment, it's probably not a good time to start your own farm. However, these farmers are as prone to ill health/bodily injury more so than the rest of us, and them getting laid up is hard, unless you've got kids in the biz, too.

If you need to till the earth, I can tell you there's nothing quite plowing a field, or (my favorite) raking hay in the sunshine and smelling that...you can't explain it unless you've done it. I raked the hay backwards once, though, and my cousin let me have it. Put an ad in the small weekly paper down in farm country and see what kind of response you get to offering to cover for vacation or surgery with some training. And remember, never pull away from an attachment without unhooking the hydraulics. Or malposition the chute. ::clearing throat::

This isn't politicizing ANWR drilling; it's just to share the crunch that farmers are feeling from the oil crisis.

Bless your heart, I hope thinks work out for you. If you've got a burden, get together with an electrical engineering buddy and try to find ways to make a combine solar powered...