A Year on a Dairy Farm · Could You Do This?

Could You Do This?, part 3

Most of them, within five to ten years, were gone.

The reasons varied. Some discovered they could not handle the work. Some discovered they could not handle their partners or their communes. Some discovered the romance of poverty wears thin around the second winter without heat. Some discovered, having left the city to escape conformity, that rural communities had their own forms of conformity, and that being a long-haired stranger from Cambridge did not always read locally as a free spirit. Some discovered that their bodies were not as durable as they had thought. Some had children, who required schools, healthcare, social lives, and could not all be raised on lentils and herbal tea.

The ones who stayed, again, fell into the categories described above. They had local family. They had outside money. They had real apprenticeship. They were, in a few cases, just exceptionally stubborn and exceptionally lucky.

What this period left behind, beyond a generation of people with a story about that one year in Tennessee, was a set of practical institutions — small farm programs, organic certifications, sustainable agriculture research networks — that exist today and which are useful, in real ways, to anyone who wants to try this. The wave failed at its individual ambitions and succeeded at building infrastructure. The reader who eventually goes onto a small farm will be standing on top of that infrastructure, whether or not they know it.

A particular kind of person is now telling the story of small farming, on Instagram and on television and in books, in a way that has begun to feel like the dominant version of the story.

These people are not, generally, lying. They are showing parts of their lives. The parts they are showing are real. What is missing, often, is context. The young couple in the renovated farmhouse with the immaculate garden and the photogenic chickens has, in many cases, an inheritance, a successful spouse with a remote tech job, a book deal, a brand partnership, a substantial Instagram income, a partial retirement from a previous career, or some combination of the above. The labor in the photos is real. The land is real. The way they came to be there is, often, not what the photos suggest.

This is not a moral failing of theirs. They are not obligated to put their tax returns on Instagram. But it is useful, when looking at this kind of content, to remember that what makes the life sustainable for them is, often, not what is being shown. The aesthetic and the economics are separable. The aesthetic can be reproduced almost anywhere by a person with means; the economics of small farming are what they are, regardless of how a sunset looks on the chicken coop.

If you are going to use the work of any of these creators as inspiration, use it. There is real value in seeing a life that is different from your parents’. But understand, before you make decisions, what is and is not visible in what you are seeing.

There is another version of this worth knowing about, although it does not exactly answer the question this chapter has been asking.

The example comes from the memoir of Hank Paulson, who served as Treasury Secretary of the United States during the 2008 financial crisis. Before he was Treasury Secretary, before he was the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, before any of his career had happened, he was a young man recently married to a young woman named Wendy. They had met at college. He had grown up on a farm in Barrington Hills, Illinois, outside Chicago, where he had milked cows as a boy before school — a thing he writes about in the memoir at greater length than he writes about most things, the way some men in his industry write about prep school. The two of them, when they were starting their lives together, did not move to an apartment in New York or Chicago to be near his work. They bought a piece of his parents’ farm, and they built, themselves, by hand, the first home they ever shared. For many years it was a loft. Wendy did the wiring. Hank, by his own admission, was clumsy with his hands, and let her.

They did not, after that, leave. The career happened around the house. He commuted, often long distances, sometimes by plane, sometimes only on weekends. The house was where they came back to. The land was where their children grew up. The job, however demanding, however prestigious, was the thing that was elsewhere. The home was the farm.

This is a lifestyle choice that almost no one in the audience of this book has been told they have. The default story most readers have absorbed is that a serious career means living near it — in the city, in the suburb of the city, in the apartment with the doorman. The notion that you could put your stake in a piece of rural ground when you are twenty-five, build a loft on it with your own hands and your spouse’s, finish the wiring on weekends because someone has to, and keep that as the place where you live for the next fifty years while a career happens somewhere else — this is not the story that usually gets told. But Hank and Wendy Paulson did it. So have other people. The lives they built are not, on the whole, lives they regret.

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