Have you ever been on a working, family farm?

[BECLAZONE]

Yes, and the only advice I can give, is to never ride on a trailer behind a tractor, on a dairy farm. I had to replace all my clothes after that trip!

[GrouperK]

Yes and I loved it. I was shipped to Illinois every summer break to work at my godmother’s farm. After she passed away I worked for a few equestrian farms. Hoping I can farm again.

[Avondalist]

I still have relatives who work family farms in Iowa, and I spent some time there each summer growing up.

Farming in 20th-21st century USA is not bucolic.

Once you understand how it all works, you realize you are living in the middle of a gigantic industrial food factory. There's very little small town life left. The smells of animals especially pigs can be bad. At least on the prairie there is very little tree cover and few bodies of water, so it's just fields and fields of crops.

My relatives all trained in light mechanical work like car maintenance or tool and die use as part of their education. That's because being a car mechanic has more in common with being a farmer than being a gardener. If you need to pay someone to fix your equipment whenever something breaks the numbers go sideways. Even that is under threat with anti-right-to-repair warranty terms and other stipulations from the vehicle manufacturers.

As to the ag part of it, the big agribusiness outfits genetically engineer crop strains and then try to lock farmers in to their use with restrictive contracts. Farming is actually pretty high tech; my relatives subscribe to weather prediction services on their computer and purchase crop insurance based on that info. Weather is still the biggest variable. Lots of chemical use: fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. That's all necessary to maximize yield. They uniformly cultivate corn and soybeans as those are the most profitable. There haven't been chickens in the chicken coop since the 1940s, and the cattle were all sold off in the 00s. Specialization and cash crops are the name of the game.

Financially it's very little pay per hour. They work 14 hour days, albeit at their own pace and direction. The sale of a crop can bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sounds good, right? Not when you realize how most family farms operate: the farmer takes out loans to cover operating costs every single year and tries to pay them back with each harvest. Sometimes you save, sometimes you have to dip into savings or sell off land to square away your debts. Far from being a self-sufficient unit living off the land, you are probably more entangled with banks than an employee at a corporation paying off their mortgage.

About the only thing I can say to recommend modern farming as a lifestyle is that each of those family farmers is sitting on probably $1-2 million of land, equipment, and livestock. Land rich, cash poor is the saying. Otherwise it's an extremely difficult way to make a living and one particularly unsuitable for someone who was not born into it and will not inherit land.

I did not speak to the plight of tenant farmers, which is even more difficult. All the farmers I know own their land.

[Charlestondata]

My mother was the fifth generation born on a 300-acre farm in southern Orangeburg County, South Carolina. She’s still alive, but my dad wasn’t a farmer and she left the farm life. But every summer growing up I stayed with my grandparents for two weeks, and we lived only an hour away so we visited many times a year. When I was 19 I moved there and worked on their farm for nine months. Half of me never wanted to leave. Going there still does something to me. My first cousin bought the land and still farms it. He just bought the last of the land that my mom and her siblings inherited.

(Cows, pigs, chickens, horses, a mule, cats, hunting dogs, and an assortment of crops - the whole nine yards)

[BigCityDreamer]

Are the Amish and Mennonites in Lancaster family farms, or more like communes?