Blog Mirror with commentary*: NFU Series: Why I farm: Reflections on my absurd career choice.
February 11, 2021
NFU SERIES: WHY I FARM: REFLECTIONS ON MY ABSURD CAREER CHOICE
Just the other day, I ran a post from Lex Anteinternet that is highly related to this topic here. It was:
Lex Anteinternet: A Mid Week At Work
Conversation. Why you became wh...
I'd already started typing out this post when I did that. This makes this one slightly disrupted in some ways, and I've refocused it a bit.
Any, regarding the NFU writer and the question posted above, I don't think it is, but when you review it, you'll see that the young writer in question chose farming as she has very high ideals.
I wanted to be a farmer, but I didn't have high ideals.**
Well, I probably had some high ideals, and in many things they've become higher over time, which isn't to say that I'm close to obtaining sainthood by any means. But my career choice as not based on high ideals. Indeed, whenever I hear a practicing lawyer say they became a lawyer because they "wanted to help people", I automatically think, "oh bullshit".
I don't talk much on these blogs*** about my own early life or frankly my life in general. I keep that stuff to myself, pretty much. But I'll make a slight exception here.
I've wanted to be in the outdoors since I was small. I never imagined a career in anything else really. That's because I'm a nearly feral human, as odd as that may seem. That tracks a lot into my post about being from and of Wyoming, which was linked in above.
My only real vocation, in the deeper sense, is that of hunter. Well, frankly, that may not be true. At least that's not how outsiders view me. Indeed, a conservation of a year ago or so lead one of my legal colleagues to opine that a person such as me could have only two possible vocations, lawyer or priest. That was it.
That's was an interesting comment from a very highly educated person. He's a lawyer too, as noted, but he's also an industrial psychologist. I'm not sure exactly what industrial psychologist do, but they're some sort of psychologist. Obviously he has some insights that I may lack. I've pondered that statement since then and I don't know that he wasn't right.
He's also, I'd note, a German by birth, having come to the United States as a young adult. That makes a difference too, as culture heavily impacts your world view.
Be that as it may, when I was younger, I only wanted to hunt and fish. Frankly, if I could do nothing else but hunt and fish now, that's what I'd do. I'd be some sort of subsistence type character, hunt, fish, and garden. And probably read. What does that make me?
I've wondered if it make me lazy, actually, but I don't think so. I certainly didn't end up in a career for the lazy and as other people think I'm a workaholic, I guess I'm not. And somebody who eschews ATVs and who will go out in all weather and hike, often alone, for miles, isn't lazy.
Anyhow, with that sort of mindset, when I was young, I hoped for an outdoor career. Early on I thought about becoming a soldier as, in my mind, they were outdoors. As I aged into mid teens, however, I wanted to be a Game Warden, as they're outdoors.
Around about the time I was a high school senior I looked at trying to homestead in the Yukon, which still had land available to do it. It didn't seem quite feasible, and soon thereafter the Canadian government shut the door on that, probably correctly, but that option thereby seemingly closed with that door. Queen Elizabeth II apparently had other things in mind for her distant ex pats.
My father was a dentist. Whatever you are thinking that means, it doesn't mean that.
My grandfather on my father's side had owned, in his final years, a packing plant in our small city. He'd been in the packing industry most of his adult life, if you measure adult years the way they are measured today. If you measure them the way he must have, he spent a few years in the oceanic shipping industry in the office, starting when he was 13. But from his early 20s, he worked in the packing industry, which well suited his Iowa origins.
His later years were his 40s, and he died in his 40s.
I don't know what my father's early career goals were. He never said. As the oldest boy, chances were good that he was originally headed down to the packing plant. He did work there in every aspect of it, as my grandfather "wanted him to see what real work was like". The packing plant was sold, however, shortly after my grandfather's death, by necessity. He was still a teen.
Given that, he went to work, while still going to college. He worked at the post office and decided to make that his career, until my grandmother decided that wouldn't be his career. He started off in engineering but one of my uncles was becoming a dentist and he followed that path as well.
By all accounts he was an excellent dentist, but I never thought of him in that way.
Nowadays, dentistry is somewhat associated with wealth, but it wasn't then. Kids of dentists and doctors today will often flaunt it a bit, as it means they have vicarious money. We didn't. Rather, being the son of a dentist at the time meant that 1) people would tell you "I hate dentist", which they really didn't, but which you still hear today, and 2) they'd ask you dental questions, as if dental knowledge is genetic.
Dentists top the charts in professional suicides which says something. My father never commented on what it was like to be a dentist but once, which was to note how people complained about going to the dentist all the time. Anyhow, while conversations he had with other dentist and doctors were really illuminating and educational, outside of the office he didn't discuss dentistry. He brought it home, however, as dentist made dentures at the time, and that was done in his evening hours.
In our home, table talk was on history, nature and science. My father as an outdoorsman, preferring fishing over hunting but doing both. He also was a heavy duty gardener in the subsistence farmer category, really. It's from him that I received my love of the outdoors.
Where was I?
Oh yeah, I was leaving high school.
Well, farming in the Yukon was out and we didn't have a farm or ranch ourselves, so it was off to become a game warden. And then my father mentioned that there were a lot of people around here who have wildlife management degrees that didn't have jobs.
That was enough, from a person who rarely gave career advice, to send me off in another direction, and that direction was geology. Geology is all outdoors, right?
Well, ironically, it also lead to what my father had feared, unemployment. There were no jobs as I graduated into an oilfield depression. I tried to find a job for a year, and then back to school I went, as a law student.
Law student?
Yeah, a law student.
Being a lawyer, you might note, has nothing to do with being outdoors.
It was first suggested to me that I might consider the law as a career when I was a college student in community college.
The reason that it first appealed to me is related to the point linked in above, once again. It wasn't that it sounded like "an exciting career" or that it afforded an opportunity to save mankind. Indeed, when I hear people wo hare law students or contemplating becoming law students express really high ideals regarding being a lawyer, I know that they are in for a monster sized disappointment. "I'm going to become an International Law Lawyer and save the whales!". BS, you're going to litigate in small claims court in Dayton, Ohio, spanky.
What was the case, however, is that, like dentists, you could be a lawyer and be here.
Now, the reason that the law was suggested to me had nothing to do with that. Rather, my community college history professor thought I had an analytical mind and that suited me to become a lawyer.
The professor in question was one Jon E. Brady, and he was a great community college history professor. I think he would have been a great history professor in any institution. In fact both of the history profs I had at Casper College, Jon Brady and Dr. David Cherry, were great teachers.
Anyhow, it was Jon Brady's comment that started the wheels in motion. I didn't actually know that he was a lawyer himself at the time, and only learned that well after I was a lawyer. At least one other lawyer has told me that he made a similar comment to him, which is what caused him to become a lawyer, but that lawyer's on line career story tells a considerably different tale, so who knows. The truth is probably in the middle there somewhere.
And as a student, I was pretty feral. Living in my hometown while attending community college, I went hunting several times throughout the week as a college student. When I moved to Laramie to attend the University of Wyoming, I went hunting less, but still quite a bit. And I lived on wild game at the time. When I was first a lawyer I hunted and fished a great deal, and my father and I came close to buying a small ranch together, before he died. After that, I lived once again pretty much on wild game until I got married.
To make a long story short, my wife and I have livestock so in some ways I came back around to my original career goals, sort of. So is this a success story? I suppose it at least partially is. I'm still as feral mentally as I was when I was 16. I'm not outdoors in recent years, however, anywhere near as much as I'd like to be, and that's due to my work. It's also my own fault, to an extent, and at least according to my wife, it's a matter of perception, as she claims I'm hunting all the time.
My first day on the job, the office manager, who had worked for the firm for decades, and who had probably wearied of young lawyers by that time, made the comment that she hoped I would like being a lawyer and that I might end up "wishing I'd been a farmer". I recall thinking that if being a farmer was an option right then, that's what I'd become. It isn't an option for everyone, not anymore. The NFU writer's article doesn't really explain where she is now and what's she doing, but she is a climate activist and it sounds like she's worked at experimental farms. That makes a person a type of farmer, to be sure, but my guess is that it doesn't make a person a long term one.
Breaking into real agriculture today is really tough. In my senior year as an undergrad in geology I told one of my friends that what I really wanted to do was to be a rancher, and that I guess that I must just not be ambitious. He commented that he thought that a fine ambition. I've actually worked at it now for decades and I am that, but I don't support my family doing it, and I'm now getting old. I've done something else career wise, and I have to be honest about it. I'm never going to be a full time rancher or farmer. Never. When I die, and I find myself in that odd dream retrospective state represented in the final scene of No Country For Old Men now quite a bit, even if that day is a decade or two off (and we never know), people who didn't really know me as a person will simply categorize me as a lawyer, and the state bar journal, in whatever form it is in then, will run an obit like it does for every passing lawyer that hails your achievements, if there were any, in the profession. Lots of people think of me that way pretty much exclusively now, and one of my close friends in the law recently told me that "if I had your practice I'd be proud", which was an odd off hand remark to make (I'm not really sure what brought that up, and I didn't ask).
I'm not really a proud fellow, about anything, I guess, so it was an odd observation to hear. Of course, as Garrison Keillor says, "we always have a backdoor view of ourselves", which makes it hard, I think, for anyone but a narcissist to really be existentially proud of themselves.
Anyhow, is her career choice absurd? No, definitely not. Is the idealism behind it misplaced? Probably so. Idealism behind most careers of that type is misplaced, including the expressed idealism I sometimes hear about entering the legal field, which I tend to discount as self serving propaganda or words for other ears, not your internal ones.
Life is packed with endless compromises. What ultimately governs the success or failure of them isn't based on economics too much, but economics is a big influencer in them, to be sure. A lot of that has to do with your internal values, and if that value is money, you're not going to be a success no matter what. A lot of success can be measured in just how close we can get to what we'd do if we wanted, in a world where we really don't get to do whatever we want. Not too many people anymore can "choose to be a farmer" in the old time sense, i.e., buy a farm and farm it, or buy a ranch and run it, unless they're very rich. There are other ways to do it, but frankly it almost always involves family ties, which is just fine, or it involves working at something else which probably amounts to your main job. We'll take that topic up, the economics of land ownership, absentee landowners, and the wealthy in some other post.
Anyhow, farmers can help save the world. Lawyers can too. Youthful idealism is vital to all human endeavors. But in wanting to be a farmer, and in being a farmer, I tend to think that its something that is practically in your DNA if you have it. Hard to explain, but deep down.
Which I guess is pretty close to the concept of youthful idealism.
Footnotes:
*This is the first original content post on this blog, fwiw. It was originally going to be on Lex Anteinternet, and it actually will be, but here first.
**By farmer here, I meant farmer, or rancher. I frankly have always preferred animals over plants, so ranching would be my first choice.
***We run a whole platoon of blogs, the most active of which as a rule is Lex Anteinternet where this was originally going to be posted.
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