Additional Information
There's a lot to know to be a successful farmer. At the same time, formal
education is not required. Those who grow up on family farms often learn the
necessary skills from their parents. Others learn about farming by volunteering
or by finding paid work on farms.
"Most people, if they want to hire a head grower for a small market farm,
they may or may not care if you have a college education," says Barbara Moore.
She's the executive director of Harvest Mountain Farm Gardens in Lakewood,
Colorado. "They want to know how much you know how to farm."
Some high schools offer agriculture classes. This is much more likely if
you live in a small town or rural area rather than in a big city. Aspiring
farmers from big cities (or from anywhere) can attend an agricultural college
to learn how to farm. Many colleges offer farming-related diplomas or degrees.
If you plan to study farming, it would be a good idea to first get some
hands-on experience by volunteering on a farm to make sure the work suits
you.
"There are two different ways people go about it," says Moore. "People
go into agriculture programs [and then] there are small farms all over and
people just go and learn how to farm.
"And then [they must] prove... to the person who wants to hire a grower
[that] they know everything -- they know soil amendments (materials added
to a soil to improve its physical properties), they know seed selection, they
know crop production, they know everything they need to know to run a farm."
Starting out as a farmer can be tough. You won't be earning much while
you learn, and even owning your own farm is not likely to be a road to riches.
"If you go the route of just getting trained on a farm, you're probably
not going to make a lot of money, if it's really a small farm," says Moore.
Daniel Chappell and his wife Anna own a small farm. They both studied production
horticulture in college.
"Farming is really expensive to perform, and it's not a get-rich-quick
scheme, by any means, so you have to be passionate about it," says Chappell.
"It can be for a number of different reasons -- you can be passionate about
animals, or passionate about plants, or food, or land stewardship, but [passion]
certainly would have to be one of the biggest qualities."
Craig Rogers is a retired professor of mechanical engineering who owns
a sheep farm in Virginia. He says learning the necessary skills to raise sheep
was not quick or easy.
"I would go out to Texas and the Dakotas and I would help on sheep ranches,
really as an opportunity to also learn how to better train my dogs, and to
better work with sheep, and through the sheepdog world also had many mentors
in terms of the animal husbandry," says Rogers. "So it was a long process.
"But there are few ways to truly learn how to do this well other than hands-on
experience, because one of the realities is that the actual cost of the lamb
is typically less than the cost of a veterinarian visit to your farm," says
Rogers. "So the only way you can become a shepherd is you have to be the veterinarian
as well.
"If you have a problem with birthing, you're going to have to put your
arm in a uterus and figure out how you're going to turn that lamb around and
save the lamb's life and the mother's, and you're going to have to do it yourself,"
Rogers says.
"And you can read all the books you want, but until you are out in the
barn on a cold dark night with a ewe that is in trouble, and you know that
you only have a short period of time to resolve this issue without loss, do
you really get the education that's required."