I would rather be farming.
Not as a metaphor. Not as a brand. Not as a lifestyle product sold with good lighting and a shallow depth of field. I mean farming the way people have always meant it: land, animals, weather, work, and the quiet dignity of knowing where your day will end.
I have one hundred acres. That sounds like abundance when you say it out loud. It sounds like freedom. It sounds like enough.
It isn’t.
On a good year, one hundred acres might carry twenty, maybe twenty-five head of cattle. That’s not factory farming. That’s not industrial scale. That’s the kind of farming people like to romanticize because it fits neatly into a story about self-reliance. But stories don’t pay feed bills.
Cattle cost money to raise. Everything costs money. Even the grass costs money. Grass doesn’t grow by itself. It grows alongside weeds and things that can kill what you’re trying to raise. You either feed cattle directly or you feed the land so it can feed them. Either way, resources are consumed.
In a good year, if the weather cooperates and nothing breaks at the wrong time, optimistically, that might net twenty to twenty-five thousand dollars. That’s not nothing. But it’s not a living. By the time taxes show up, it’s closer to eighteen.
We do not live in a world where eighteen thousand dollars is a life.
That’s why most farmers you meet are older. The farm doesn’t support them; it supplements them. It sits alongside retirement checks or off-farm careers. It becomes something you maintain because it already exists, not something you can step into fresh and survive on.
I tried value-added. I sold my product differently. For a while, before COVID, it worked well enough. Still not viable at my scale, but workable. The processor charged money. They should. I understand that world. I wrote books. I taught. I pieced together a life the way a lot of Americans do now, stitching income streams together and calling it stability.
Then COVID happened.
People who had never processed cattle before suddenly did. Mostly for themselves. The appointments disappeared. What used to be a steer every six to eight weeks became a handful a year, if you were lucky. Now, USDA inspection costs a small farmer about the same per pound as Walmart beef.
That isn’t an accident. That’s a system working exactly as designed.
So I taught math for a while. Teaching was fine. I watched students learn how to think instead of memorize. How to reason instead of repeat. That mattered.
Now I work on HVAC systems. That’s fine too. I solve problems. I help people stay warm, cool, or safe. I leave places better than I found them. There is dignity in that.
But I would rather be farming.
Small-scale regenerative agriculture isn’t a hobby. It isn’t cosplay. It’s physical, mental, and unforgiving. Nature does not care about your intentions. It cares about preparation.
Today it’s eight degrees. If I were at the farm, I’d be chopping ice with an axe while livestock watched and waited. They don’t complain. They don’t rush. They understand order.
My family’s first year on our farm. The one we bought. The one where I built the house myself, myself. Not paying for labor, but being the labor. The water trough froze solid. Not slushy. Solid. The solution was five-gallon buckets filled from the house and carried out, one at a time. My wife helped. My eight-year-old son helped. It looked like something out of an old movie, a bucket brigade fighting a fire.
The cows waited their turn. Every one of them drank. We did this for two days. It was our first or second year. People who’ve never done this will tell you how it should have been done differently.
Multi-generational farmers had time. They had infrastructure before land prices exploded. They bought when mistakes were survivable. They learned the language young and speak it fluently now. That isn’t a moral failing. It’s inheritance.
Hobby farmers have money. Hobbies always find funding.
And then there are the cosplayers. Generational wealth dressed up as grit. The customers aren’t buying food. They’re buying a feeling. A story. A version of rural life that never really existed the way it’s presented.
This isn’t an attack. It’s an observation.
What exists is a caste system. And the thing about a caste system is that it doesn’t announce itself. It quietly decides who gets access, who gets grace, and who gets unlimited retries.
Am I jealous? Of course I am. Anyone who wants more is jealous. The people who say they aren’t usually fall into two groups: those who’ve accepted the ceiling, and those who never had one.
I started lower than where I am now. I understand that. I also understand that I hit a ceiling. And every new path I’ve tried has its own version of the same ceiling.
People like to talk about money as the barrier. Money matters. But the greater barrier is social capital. It’s knowing the language before you need it. It’s cadence. Vocabulary. Instinct. You don’t remember learning your first language. You just speak it.
Some people grow up bilingual. Most don’t.
Upward mobility has a language. I don’t speak it fluently. I can translate. I can approximate. But I don’t sound native, and systems know the difference.
So I work. I build. I fix. I teach. I farm when I can. I don’t believe proximity to power is the solution to my problem. I don’t want to stand near the throne. I want a system where ordinary people don’t have to ask permission to live a whole life.
I would rather be farming.
Not because it’s easy. Because it’s honest. And because a country that can’t make room for honest work without pedigree isn’t broken by accident.
Sam McClure
Copyright 1/25/2026 McClure Magazine.
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