Growing A Farmer - Part 2

After reading this book, I found his success in making a business out of his farm stems from his passion in farming. He seems to have an endless fascination with growing crops and his craft. It is very clear that he adopted a rather unconventional business model, where he is able to micromanage the farm himself, including “planting the seeds, watching it germinate and grow”. I admire him for chasing after his passion in life and sticking with it for so long despite problems encountered along the way including financial difficulties. His undying love for what he does might be the crux to why he was able to keep his business running. Despite being an autobiography, this book offers the reader a few tips for business or even life lessons—one of which is the importance of finding passion in your business. 

While other business-minded farmers would likely want to expand the size of their farms, he wanted to scale down his business from selling produces to grocery stores to local hardware store. Instead of solely relying on selling produces, he serves weekly dinners cooked with his own ingredients, which allowed him to cover some of his expenses. I believe all of these decisions were made by one thing and one thing only—his love for farming. As Steve Jobs once said, “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” I think this is a great motto to live by because this is the only way to not have work feel like work. Despite his determination to grow what he wants, he learnt that growing commodity crops is a bad idea, mainly because crops like corn and carrots are grown by large industrial farms at a much larger scale, which is much cheaper and efficient. He tried to switch to selling meat as he though it would be more lucrative but due to regulations of the government like permits and insurance premiums, it wasn’t practical. Eventually, he decided to be involved in value-aded food products that is cheese, which proves to be relatively profitable. At the end, he mentioned explicitly that “Kurtwood Farms is neither efficient nor particularly profitable”. It does not adopt the assembly-line model of most industrial production farms but instead grows a variety of crops at a rather small scale. It even looks old-fashioned like the French barns of the nineteenth century. In his book, he was willing to butcher a pig himself despite not being an expert butcher and reasoned that the best way to learn is "on your own, with some knowledge under your belt, but with no safety net”. This is again testament to his attitude of being a risk-taker. Being willing to try out new things and being unafraid of failure are often necessary ingredients for success. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the farming business or in being a farmer as he does go quite deep on his experiences for growing different crops and animals.