08/26/2026
Well said from our farming friends at Earnest Roots Farm â¤ď¸
âYou donât farm for the money. You farm because you love what you do and you believe in it.â
I canât tell you how many times Iâve heard my dad say that throughout my life. And Iâve heard it even more lately as weâve had some tougher conversations about farming.
Because the fact is, farming has always had high input costsâcosts most people never have to think about when they put a bite of food in their mouth.
âWow! Thatâs how much?!â is a statement farmers hear plenty.
And yet somehow, $7 for a coffee or $15 for a convenience meal packed with who-knows-what doesnât always get the same reaction. We pay for convenience without thinking twice, but food raised slowly, responsibly, and close to home can suddenly feel âexpensive.â
Farmers talk about high fuel costs. High feed costs. High fertilizer cost (for those who use it. Around here, we prefer chickens. đ ) But that barely scratches the surface.
Thereâs power. Water. Equipment. Repairs. Materials. Livestock. Processing. Labor. Infrastructure. Insurance. And then thereâs marketingâwhich, some days, is enough to make you want to stick your head in a dune of sand and leave it there.
There. Are. A lot. Of. Input. Costs.
And most of them happen long before we ever see a dollar in return.
The amount of faith required to farm is something I donât think you fully understand until you do it.
I donât care if youâre putting hundreds of acres of corn in the ground or buying weaned calves you may not see a return on for two years. Youâre working today and trusting that what youâre pouring your time, money, and labor into will make it all the way to the end.
And guess what? Sometimes it doesnât.
Sometimes a cow hits a water line and you lose hundreds of organically fed, pasture-raised chickens overnight.
Sometimes the floods come. Sometimes the rain doesnât come.
Animals die. Equipment breaks. Crops fail. Markets change.
Nothing is guaranteed.
But if Iâve learned anything after spending the past week working on our house and being completely exhausted, itâs that I have never wanted to get back to farming more.
Put me in the heat. Put me in the pasture.
Let me set up fence lines, move animals, watch them graze, get dirty, sweat, and spend my day outside in Godâs creation.
Put me there. Thatâs where I want to be. With my boys beside me for as long as I have that.
Because the truth is, we really donât do this for the money. We donât do it for the likes.
We do it because itâs rooted in us. Because we believe in raising good food. We believe in caring for the land and animals entrusted to us. We believe there is value in knowing the hands that raised the food sitting on your familyâs table.
But thereâs another side of âwe donât farm for the moneyâ that needs to be said.
A farm still has to make money to remain a farm.
If you think farming is only physical work, you donât know the half of it.
Farmer. Entrepreneur. Manager. Accountant. Marketer. Mechanic. Problem solver. Planner. And about a million moving pieces floating around in your head at any given moment.
Some days, the physical work feels like the easy part.
Small American farms and large American ranches alike are taking hits. And loving this way of life doesnât make a farm financially sustainable.
People choosing to support American agriculture does.
Choosing local when you can matters.
Buying directly from a farmer matters.
Understanding why responsibly raised food costs what it costs matters.
Because if we want our children and grandchildren to grow up in a country where family farms still exist, we cannot simply love the idea of the American farmer.
We have to choose to keep them farming.
No, we donât farm for the money.
But without enough people willing to put their dollars behind the farmers they say they want to see survive, there may come a day when farming like this really is a thing of the past.
And I, for one, think that would be an awfully big thing for America to lose.
