Category: How to Live

For most of the last decade, I assumed the direction of my life had a natural progression. I am a farmer, and although the details were sometimes hazy, having my own farm one day seemed like the ideal destination. I spent years building the skills I thought I would need: vegetable production, irrigation, hoop houses, equipment, crop planning, organic certification, record keeping, marketing, grants, and all the less glamorous systems that keep a small farm functioning.

There is a line from Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America that has stuck with me for years:

“No farther. This is the place.”

I’ve always found that idea deeply appealing: to stop looking perpetually over the horizon, choose a place, learn it deeply, take responsibility for it, and build a life there.

And right now I’m doing almost exactly the opposite.

After spending months moving between farms in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, I’m less certain than I’ve ever been that owning my own farm is what I actually want.

That creates some conflict for me, because I haven’t fallen out of love with farming. I haven’t even stopped farming. If anything, I’m more certain that agriculture needs to remain a major part of my life.

What I’m less certain about is whether being a farmer necessarily means putting down roots on one farm.

WWOOFing Has Shown Me Another Version of Agricultural Life

One of the unexpected pleasures of WWOOFing has been entering a farm, becoming useful relatively quickly, learning how the operation works, contributing something, and eventually moving on. That is obviously very different from building a relationship with one piece of land over twenty years, but it has its own appeal.

Over the last several months, I’ve worked with unfamiliar crops, tools, climates, and production systems. I’ve lived with farm families, watched similar problems get solved in very different ways, taught techniques I already knew, and learned things I had never encountered before. Agriculture has become the thread connecting travel, cultural exchange, language study, and ordinary daily life.

I like being experienced enough to contribute while still being new enough to pay attention. There is something energizing about walking onto a new farm and trying to understand it. Where does the water come from? What is limiting production? Which jobs consume too much labor? What keeps breaking? What does this farmer care about? What are they unusually good at?

I find myself constantly asking what I can learn and where I can help. That curiosity may be telling me something about the kind of agricultural life that suits me.

Rethinking How I Contribute

I’ve always valued autonomy, and part of wanting my own farm was wanting control over my work. But I’m realizing that autonomy doesn’t necessarily require controlling an entire operation. What I seem to enjoy most is having enough experience and independence to solve meaningful problems.

Sometimes that means helping redesign an irrigation system or improve a workflow. Sometimes it means building a hoop house, troubleshooting equipment, helping a beginning farmer think through a production problem, writing a grant, or building a spreadsheet or website that saves somebody time. Those things can look unrelated from the outside, but to me they all feel like variations of the same work: understanding a problem and making the farm function better.

For a while, I thought of consulting and technical work as things I might do to support farming financially. I’m beginning to think that may be backwards. Perhaps those things are themselves ways of participating in agriculture.

My background now combines farming, software development, infrastructure, organic certification, grants, websites, mentoring, and international farm experience. Put together, they suggest a role I find increasingly interesting: someone farmers can call when there is a messy problem that doesn’t fit neatly into one category.

I think I care more about being useful than being in charge.

And if I can help several farms solve meaningful problems without carrying every responsibility of owning one myself, I’m no longer sure I should see that as something secondary to “real” farming.

The Part Berry Makes Difficult

This is where I can’t completely dismiss that line: “No farther. This is the place.”

There are things movement simply cannot give me.

I can arrive at a farm and understand a lot fairly quickly, but I don’t know that place the way somebody knows it after twenty seasons. I didn’t build the soil. I don’t remember when that tree was planted or what happened in that field ten years ago. I won’t necessarily be there to find out whether a decision that looks good today still looks good five years from now.

Farming rewards staying. Over time you learn where water sits after a storm, where certain weeds always return, which ground warms first in spring, and how the soil responds to years of management. Eventually the place carries a history that includes you.

There is a depth of knowledge—and responsibility—that only comes from remaining somewhere long enough to acquire it. That matters to me.

I also don’t want to turn mobility into another version of constantly believing that whatever is over the next hill must be better. There will always be another country, another farm, another language, another interesting person, and another possibility. At some point, choosing one thing means giving up the others.

That is the part of Berry’s argument that bothers me in a productive way. I can see the value of being deeply rooted precisely because I am currently enjoying the opposite.

But I’m Not Ready to Stop Moving Yet

At the same time, I like what movement is giving me right now. More specifically, I like living temporarily in rural places.

I like staying somewhere long enough to develop routines instead of simply passing through. I like working with people, eating with families, hearing their stories, learning bits of language, and seeing how agriculture changes with climate, cuisine, labor, and culture. I like being shown places that would never appear on a tourist itinerary and slowly becoming useful somewhere that was completely unfamiliar a few weeks earlier.

Importantly, I’m not sacrificing farming to do those things. The farming is what makes much of it possible.

That has been a major change in how I think about my future. I used to imagine mobility and farming as competing desires, but over the last several months I’ve discovered that they don’t necessarily have to be. A farm of my own would give me roots; this life lets me keep farming while moving between places, people, cultures, and agricultural systems.

Right now, I’m not ready to trade that for permanence.

There may be a version of my life that moves seasonally between different kinds of work: an intensive period on a farm, a stretch of consulting or technical work, some time abroad, and then another growing season somewhere else.

A few years ago, that would have sounded unfocused to me.

Now it sounds increasingly coherent.

I Haven’t Given Up on the Farm

None of this means I’ve decided that I will never own land.

I still imagine it sometimes: a small place with good soil, enough infrastructure to work efficiently, a greenhouse, a workshop, and maybe an acre or two of serious production. I still want the experience of knowing one piece of land deeply and watching the consequences of my decisions accumulate over years.

What has changed is that I no longer need that image to be the inevitable conclusion of my life as a farmer.

I don’t need my name on the deed to prove that I became a “real” farmer. I already am one.

If my future involves helping ten farms instead of owning one, I’m starting to think that could be just as legitimate. Maybe even more interesting, at least for me.

The Dream Changed Shape

For a long time, I thought owning a farm was the destination.

Now I’m starting to think farming may be the constant while the form around it changes.

I still want agriculture, rural communities, physical work, and meaningful problems in my life. I want enough independence to choose work I believe matters, and I want to keep learning from people who farm differently than I do. At least for now, I also want enough freedom to keep moving.

Maybe someday I’ll reach a place and know:

No farther. This is the place.

I’m just not there yet.

I have spent more than a decade farming, so when I tell people that I’m traveling through Asia by living and working on farms, there is an obvious question: Why?

I’m not doing it because I need someone to teach me how to weed a row, transplant seedlings, run irrigation, harvest vegetables, or survive a long day outside. I already know how to farm.

That turns out not to be the point.

What keeps me coming back to farms is that agriculture gives me a way into something I care about even more than agricultural technique: the life of a place.

Working Changes How I See a Place

Despite my Las Vegas roots, I prefer the country. Cities can be interesting, but I don’t really want to spend months moving from landmark to landmark, sleeping in hotels, eating every meal in a restaurant, and observing a place from the outside.

I want to know what ordinary life feels like. Working on a farm changes the way I enter a place. I’m not only looking at the landscape; I’m participating in it.

I start learning where the water comes from, what grows well, what the weather does, when people eat, how the workday is structured, which jobs everyone hates, and what has to get done before rain. I learn which roads farmers actually use, where supplies come from, which crops matter locally, and how much of rural life revolves around things tourists rarely notice. The landscape stops being scenery and becomes something people are working with every day.

Food Begins With Place

Part of my attraction to agriculture is that it sits very close to the root of settled life.

Human culture existed long before farming, of course. But once people began producing enough food to support large, specialized societies, agriculture became deeply entangled with almost everything that followed: towns, trade, religion, craft, politics, cuisine, and eventually the modern industries that seem completely removed from a field.

You can still see those connections when you spend time on farms.

The crops tell you what people eat, and the food reflects climate, preservation, history, and taste. Machinery tells you something about labor, while the size of farms reveals something about the availability and value of land. Even the age of the people doing the work can tell you something about what is happening to rural communities.

In Korea, vast fields of peppers make more sense after seeing how deeply gochugaru runs through Korean cuisine. Soybean fields make more sense when you see the jars of doenjang and ganjang made from them. In Japan, crops I might have treated as ordinary vegetables became tied to specific dishes, seasons, and ways of preserving food.

A crop plan is never only agronomy. It is also culture.

Work Gives Me a Role

There is a big difference between visiting someone and working beside them.

As a tourist, I’m mostly a customer. I arrive, consume something, pay, and leave.

When I arrive at a farm to work, I’m still a guest, but I also have a role. I can harvest, weed, seed trays, pack produce, fix something, move materials, wash vegetables, or simply help finish whatever needs to be done that day.

Because I already have years of farming experience, I can usually become useful fairly quickly.

That changes the relationship.

Conversations happen naturally while working. People explain why they do things a certain way. They complain when something isn’t working. They joke, tell stories, and ask how I would do the same job back home. Sometimes I can offer something useful from my own experience in return.

After enough days of working and eating together, the relationship starts feeling different from simply being hosted somewhere.

You stop being only the foreigner passing through.

You become, at least temporarily, part of daily life.

And that is when a place starts opening up.

The Land Leads Somewhere Else

One of the things I value most about this way of traveling is how often the farm opens the door to everything around it.

A host tells me which restaurant is actually worth eating at. Someone recommends a mountain or a stream. I’m invited to a family meal, a festival, a temple, a market, or a gathering with childhood friends. A place I never would have found in an English-language travel guide becomes one of the things I remember most.

Language works the same way. When you live and work with people, you hear the same expressions over and over—not just formal language, but instructions, jokes, complaints, filler words, family conversations, and local pronunciation.

In Japan, where I had already spent a lot of time studying Japanese, farm work gave the language context. Words stopped being vocabulary cards and became attached to tools, vegetables, meals, weather, mistakes, and people.

Even in places where I know much less of the language, being around ordinary conversation changes how I experience it. A host becomes an informal cultural interpreter. I can ask what something means, what I should eat, why people do something a certain way, or whether a place is actually worth visiting.

Google Maps has never told me, “My childhood friends are going to the stream this weekend. Come with us.”

And once those relationships start leading outward, the days can go in directions I never would have planned. Farm work has led to karate, mountain hikes, racetracks, night markets, streams, temples, and being naked in a hot spring with a bunch of Japanese uncles.

That unpredictability is part of the appeal. I don’t want every part of travel optimized in advance. Some of the experiences I remember most happened because I was already connected to someone who belonged there and was willing to say yes when the day went somewhere unexpected.

Land as a Doorway

Agriculture gives me a way into places I probably would never understand as deeply from a hotel room. The work gives me a reason to stay, and farming gives me something in common with the people around me. From there come the meals, conversations, friendships, language, local knowledge, and strange adventures I never could have planned in advance.

Agriculture even provides a kind of common language when the spoken one fails. I may not know how to say very much, but I understand the urgency when rain is coming and something needs to be harvested. I understand a broken irrigation line, a weedy field, a heavy box, and the satisfaction of finishing a job before dinner.

I already knew how to farm before I started working on farms across Asia. What I didn’t know was where farming would take me.

The land is the doorway. What I’m really trying to understand is the life that opens up when I pass through it.