By Ariel Pressman

Editor’s note: One decision many growers will have to make at some point in their careers is whether to stop farming, and if the answer is yes, how to negotiate the transition.

This article is the first of two on leaving farming. Both authors have recently stopped operating or scaled down their farms. Despite there being a wealth of good materials on starting up and operating a small farm, there is very little information available for producers who might be considering the hard choice of leaving farming as a full-time job.

My first experience farming came 10 years ago while WWOOFING on a CSA in central Vermont. Born in Philadelphia, I was the classic city kid turning towards farming for a change in pace and lifestyle. I vividly remember showing up to that first farm without the slightest notion of when the growing season had started or when it would stop. What I did know within a day of arriving was that I would spend the rest of my life farming.

Whether I had that level of certainty through some kind of cosmic insight, or just a general obstinance towards the life path my city upbringing dictated I should have, I can’t say. However, I was so serious about my newfound lifestyle that I quickly committed myself to moving halfway across the county, sight unseen, to western Wisconsin where I would intern on a CSA farm for the next three years.

In 2018, after having interned on organic farms for four seasons and then run my own farm for six additional years I came to the very difficult conclusion that there was no reality in which I was going to be able to continue farming for the rest of my life. Even more difficult was the realization that I likely couldn’t even commit to farming one more season.

In the six months since I’ve stopped farming I have been asked dozens of times why I quit. In these conversations I’ve often found myself falling back on simple and easy to digest explanations: I have a bad back, the stress and long hours were too much, running a farm by myself was too isolating. However, the reasons why I stopped are far more complex than these simple explanations can convey.

Over the course of this article I am hoping to not only explain why I decided to stop farming, but also how I came to that conclusion. In addition, I’ll explain the practical steps I took to unwind the different aspects of my farm so when I quit it was with closure, a clear conscience and solid finances.

Making the decision
In a lot of ways my decision to stop farming was several years in the making. As early as 2015 I can remember having some passing thoughts about how nice it would be to have more free time and less stress. To be able to leave the farm in the spring without worrying about my greenhouse plants frying, or to be able to leave in the winter without worrying about my greenhouses being pancaked by snow load.

However, these seemed like such off-limits thoughts that I never let them develop into anything more than isolated ideas. Further, I was so scared of being ostracized by my farming community for thinking of quitting that I never got up the courage to bounce my thoughts off of my peers. Finally, in 2017 I decided to actually sit down and look at a number of different scenarios.

I considered closing the farm, shrinking the size of the farm or possibly trying to hire a full-time farm manager. All of these ideas gestated in my head during the 2017 season without conclusion beyond the fact that a radical change would be needed in the near future if I were going to retain my sanity. By mid-season 2018 I finally got up the courage to admit to myself and those in my community that I simply couldn’t see doing anything but closing down the farm.

While shrinking the farm or hiring a farm manager may have lessened the stress or time commitment, they would have done little to dampen the emotional drain of the farm on my life. Even if I had found an excellent farm manager, I would still have been biting my nails every time a large storm came through, or a wholesale customer started to waver on their purchasing commitment. Further, even if in theory a farm manager was running the show, I simply couldn’t ever see myself not consistently getting up at 2AM to check that the greenhouse heater was still running.

After a lot of thought I realized being in a constant state of stress, always waiting for the next emergency, was the far bigger issue than how much time I was spending on the farm. And since I didn’t see myself being able to get away from that as long as the farm was running in any capacity, the only logical conclusion was to close it down.

Getting closure
Once I decided to close down the farm one of my biggest concerns was how I would go about finding closure on an experience that had been all-encompassing for both my work and identity during the entirety of my adult life. The largest piece of getting this closure was telling all of my friends, customers and peers about the decision I had made. I decided early on in the process that I would let anyone I had a real relationship with know about my plans in person.

Even though this led to a number of very difficult and draining conversations, I am in retrospect very grateful that I had these conversations one-on-one instead of letting people I cared about hear about my decision through the rumor mill. Every one of these conversations helped me clarify my own reasons for not farming; but just as importantly these conversations showed me that I had an enormous amount of support and empathy from my friends and peers. This gave me the confidence that even though I was leaving the business of farming I wasn’t going to be leaving my farming community.

There were a lot of other smaller parts of closure on my journey but in short almost all of them boiled down to being present. Farming is a highly cyclical and monotonous job – so sometimes it can be hard to savor an individual moment or milestone because you know you will be experiencing the exact same thing next season. Knowing that this was my last year, I tried my hardest to savor moments like the last vegetable harvest and the last produce delivery of my farming career. In retrospect I feel really grateful I was able to take the time to form clear pictures in my head of specific moments during my last season. Seasons 1-9 are a blur of weeding, harvesting and delivery – but season ten is the one where I have the most specific memories.

The practical side of closing the farm
Outside of the emotional considerations of closing my farm there were a number of practical items that I had to consider in both the lead-up to my decision and then after the decision was made. First, while I was still considering whether to stop farming, I needed to go through my books and figure out how much debt I had relative to my assets. Given that I was considering selling off my equipment it was really important to look at my debt to assets in a different way than a bank or accountant might.

For me, the key question wasn’t how much an item was technically worth, but rather how much it was likely to sell for at auction. If I overvalued my equipment, then I might be under the impression I could pay off my debt through an equipment auction – when in reality I might fall very short. I made the decision early on that I was only going to close down the farm if I could pay off all of my debt through the sale of my equipment. Quitting farming, but still having an enormous amount of debt hanging over my head did not strike me as an attractive option.

To make this calculation I added up all of my farming-related debts (mortgage, operating loan and equipment loan) and then made a spreadsheet with a line for every single item of value I had. For each item I put down three prices: the best-case scenario price, the most likely price and the worst-case scenario price. So, for example: with my Case 1190 tractor I figured the best-case scenario was that someone would pay me $4000 the most likely scenario was that I would get $2500 and the worst-case scenario was that I would get $1000.

This was a useful exercise because it gave me insight into how likely it was that my debts could be paid by an equipment auction. If my debts would be settled by even the worst-case scenario for all of my items then it seemed highly likely that I would walk away from an auction at worst having settled my debts and at best with some money in my pocket.

I have to admit that at first I approached the idea of an equipment auction with some amount of trepidation. After all, the reason I had been going to auctions for the past seven years was in hopes of finding equipment at well below its market value. However, conducting an auction ended up being a priceless part of closing down my farm in an orderly fashion.

In the day-to-day of living on the farm I really hadn’t considered how many random items were sitting around. Cans of oil, t-posts, row cover, etc. While I could have sold my larger equipment privately, trying to sell the smaller items one by one would have taken years. Further, without the larger equipment it wouldn’t have been worth another farmer’s time to bid at my auction.

After selling my equipment the next task was to look into selling my actual business to another farm. At the start this proved especially difficult because for some reason selling or transferring business accounts in sustainable farming isn’t nearly as common as it is in other fields of business. I ended up reaching out to a farm I knew of that was well respected in the local produce wholesale world and striking a deal with them to buy my business.

Along with the accounts we agreed I would provide a year’s worth of intensive consulting to help them understand how to best service all of their new customers. This ended up being a win for both of us as I was able to generate some additional income from the closing of my farm. The farm that purchased my accounts was able to grow their business very quickly, while keeping me on board as a consultant to ensure the transition went smoothly.

Unexpectedly, I also found that selling my business lent me a fair amount of closure. Seeing all of the work I had done over the past six years staying in one piece and getting to help another farm make that business workable has proven to make for a nice transition out of farming.

Spring with no farming
Six months after I stopped farming for good, I am going through my first spring in ten years without greenhouses, plant starts and tractor maintenance. This is the exact moment I had dreaded for years when I thought about quitting farming. However, now that I am here, I have to say that I don’t regret a thing. Farming takes an enormous amount of willpower and energy and I have no doubt that if I had farmed again this season I would have been seriously lacking in both. It feels vindicating to know that such a long and involved process led to the right conclusion for me.

Ariel Pressman spent the past nine years farming, first interning on organic vegetable farms and then eventually running his own farm, Seed to Seed. Seed to Seed operated for seven years selling 13 acres of certified organic vegetables exclusively to wholesale markets. Ariel currently lives in Minneapolis and is available for consulting projects.