"Anyone Can Learn This" - The Romanticizing or Dismissal of Farming

It makes me sad to see so many people lately expressing opinions that farming is for stupid people – that folks with any intelligence give up this simple, mindless, manual labor and move to the city for better, smarter opportunities. A presidential hopeful just said “I could teach anybody to be a farmer. It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.”

This general attitude goes even deeper with the common stereotype that rural Americans are stupid, uneducated, and backwards. I guess it doesn’t surprise me that people who have never spent time on a farm think its as simple as digging a hole and getting a corn, but I just have to say.. it’s not.

I think this problem largely comes from the fact that in a shockingly rapid amount of time (less than 100 years) the number of people living and working on land, farming as a living, has dropped from 90% in US colonial times to just 1.3% today. When people left for cities and suburbs, they quickly lost touch with what it meant to farm. Now, the vast majority of people have no experience with it. That lack of experience and understanding has created a lot of assumptions and misunderstanding of what is involved in farming or living outside of a city in general.  

Farming and rural living has both been romanticized (the idea of a quiet, idyllic homestead where you laze around under sun dappled trees enjoying fresh produce from your garden) and demonized (quaint, unfortunate idiots who can’t make it in the city or never aspire to anything else, so they poke seeds in the soil for a living).  As someone with no farming background who grew up in the city and moved to a farm as an adult, I have experience on both sides of this fence, and I just want to tell you with certainty that farming is NOT a no-skill, simple endeavor.

Though I grew up in the city, I also grew up around many animals and I didn’t think farming was going to be easy – but I wasn’t quite prepared for how overwhelmingly complicated it is, or just how incredibly knowledgeable most farmers are. Despite having done our research on what we were attempting to do (transition from city folk to country folk), as soon as my husband and I purchased land we were suddenly inundated with an entire, overwhelming world we knew nothing about. 

How about growing that simple crop in your little field? Just poke a hole and voila, right?

How about learning to read soil maps, analyze soil patterns, understand topography and water flow patterns? Understanding things like tiling (a system of underground pipes used to control flooding and drain marshland/swamps into useable cropland) – basically all of soil & water conservation sciences which are incredibly individualized to the particular piece of property you are working on and can vary widely even from acre to acre. Seed catalogs started arriving in the mail and they were like giant phone books – there are so many varieties within each crop and wow, they are expensive. Specialized equipment is used to plant them, maintain and harvest them, and a whole host of critters (fungi, insects, rodents, etc.) and environmental issues (floods, droughts, heavy winds, etc.) are just waiting to destroy your happy little plant. 

Consider what is in that hole (soil science), what you put into it (crop/agricultural research sciences), how you put it in the hole (equipment/mechanical sciences), how you water it and when (horticultural sciences). Are you going to drag 5 gallon buckets of water a mile to your multi-acre site, over and over, taking up an entire day each week – we actually did that when we started out because equipment is insanely expensive!. If you aren’t, you better have some equipment and understanding on board. Running a small home garden is already time consuming and challenging, running an acreage of cropland is much more so – and when your livelihood depends on its production you can’t just throw some seeds at the ground, shrug, and hope.

What you do when plagued by insects, bacterial infections or fungal infections of crops?  How you nourish and feed the crops so they grow? How you harvest, dry, store, move, sell, or use your crop.. all of the answers to these questions are entire fields of study on their own, and many farmers have an unbelievable wealth of knowledge and practical experience with these things and many others. And this is just one small part of a farmstead – crops – not even touching on livestock, living off the grid of public water systems. Not having access to things like high speed internet, not living with the conveniences of stores nearby or anything ever within walking or biking distance, a complete lack of delivery services or public transport options. 

Rural life alone requires its own skillset and knowledge, and while any single thing is certainly not impossible to learn, I can confidently say that if you didn’t grow up learning it, the sheer scope of ALL the different things you need to know and just how complicated each one of them is incredibly overwhelming! The idea you just dig a hole with a hand trowel, plunk in a seed, water and voila, you’re a farmer is incredibly naïve, offensive, misleading, and unfortunate. 

We started off, ourselves, doing everything by hand, since we inherited no equipment. The cost of farming equipment is shocking. New tractors can cost as much as houses, even old ones cost more than many cars. And you don’t just need a tractor – a tractor needs special attachments to do different jobs, needs maintenance, needs a truck/trailer to haul your tractor to your location or to service it. You need a skidsteer to do little jobs the tractor can’t do, can’t maneuver in (we still don’t have one and as such have had to pay to get our tractor hauled out of situations we shouldn’t have tried to put it in. All part of the learning curve..). It goes on and on how many things you have to hunt for at old auctions and find a way to buy to make your farming doable at any scale, or take out loans to purchase. 

It sounds romantic and friendly – not using fossil fuels, doing your own labor as people did for thousands of years – but it’s nearly impossible, at least if you want to have any life outside of farm work. You quickly see how it becomes beneficial to go from human labor to using animal teams (and why people had so many kids – they are important labor on a farm!). Those animal teams themselves produce more work - they need to be trained, cared for, vetted, and you have to feed them. They eat a LOT. If you are also growing the food to feed them how do you grow it, maintain it, harvest it, store it for winter, and move it to them in the first place (a large round bale of hay can weigh well over 1200lbs – and our small herd of yak go through one of those every few days for months all winter long). It becomes a cycle of growing food to feed the animals who help you grow the food – or you move up to machinery. 

After a few years of farming and trying to move heavy equipment by hand we were desperate for a small tractor. Farms are full of needing to move heavy equipment, like a necessary cattle containment system (squeeze chute), so we could restrain our yak for vaccinations and routine care. This large metal box cost thousands of dollars even used at auction and weighed over 1700lbs. We had to figure out how to move it into place by hand after it was delivered to our driveway. We did so, using round log fence poles underneath it, and long metal poles as levers. Very slowly, all day, like ancient Egyptians moving stones. We spent a few initial years cutting grass by hand with a scythe (which we had to purchase from Europe, they only place we could find a non-decorative, real one) – hard labor which takes all day to do a few acres of mowing. Eventually we saved up to buy a very old, small, beat up tractor. The tractor constantly needs work, which means by husband bought manuals, watches online videos, and spends his evenings and weekends learning its system to repair broken hydraulic cables or figure out why something new is now leaking. Farming friends helped us move and weld the giant bucket on the front which had large holes rusted through it. At least basic skills of a mechanic, welder, electrician, and plumber are essential to run your farm. Waterers break, rodents chew through wires, tractors get stuck, electric fences go down. 

I could really go on and on about all the things we never knew we didn’t know until we moved to our farmstead. It’s really hard to learn all animal husbandry when starting from scratch - taking care of a cow or pig is very different than taking care of your pet dog or cat! Even something that seems simple like hay – hay is grass and it comes in blocks or round things and you feed it to cows and horses. Right? Even hay is super complicated! Specific local soil compositions and different types of grasses mean different nutritional values, which can vary widely. How much protein and various macronutrients in a particular type of hay is important to the health of the animal you are trying to feed, as well as micronutrients like selenium or copper, which are particularly lacking in our local Minnesota soils. Hay itself is made up of all different sorts of grasses - what mix of alfalfa, clover, fescues, etc that you plant and how you manage the pasture or hay fields depends on what animals you are feeding. Even that can vary if animals are pregnant or nursing, or depending on the weather.  Hay quality varies if the hay is first, second, or third cutting in a season. Its moisture content when being bundled and stored is important. We have lost numerous crops of our own hay to weather (it has to be cut at a certain time, laid out to dry, then bundled and stored – rain while harvesting can leech nutrients from it and cause it to go moldy, or even worse it starts to compost, heating up and catching fire to your entire barn!). Late winter hay auctions during hard years become a frenzied sort of bloodbath, with prices commanding three to ten times the normal cost as everyone is desperate for the same thing. 

Really, what I want the takeaway to be to all of this is that the whole thing is a complicated issue, and farming isn’t simple or stupid. Modern farming has become highly specialized and mechanized and it’s not all bad that people have been able to free up manual labor in food production for other pursuits. But it’s dangerous when people who don’t have experience in farming think they do, or people think that farming is simple, stupid work for stupid people. Not every farmer is an expert in every aspect of farming, but every one I have met so far has been an incredible font of knowledge of their own land, soils, livestock, equipment, and so much more. They have valuable skills that most people are rapidly losing. A lot of people have a difficult time keeping basic houseplants alive but will dismiss a corn field as an easy, mindless thing. Please don’t. Farming in the US is far from perfect and there are some major issues that need to be tackled, but don’t help perpetuate the stereotype that it’s simple, useless thing that anyone could do. I promise you, it’s not.