When I was a little boy, I never dreamed that I would become a farmer at the age of 50. It was never on my radar. If you had followed my journey over the last 5 or 10 years, you would not have seen any indicators that this was the direction I was going. This part of my journey started with a simple social media share from my wife.
She saw an advertisement for a Farm School program in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and she shared it with me with no deeper intention other than simply pointing out something of interest in our area since we had only moved here a few months prior. That simple little act has dramatically altered the trajectory of our lives and set us on the farming path.
I grew up in San Antonio, Texas, in the heart of a major city. I have never really had an affinity for growing things nor do I come from any farming lineage. As a matter of fact, I have had a shockingly high number of wide and varied jobs/careers over the course of my life that most people would see no through-line from. To me though, it all makes sense and is easily defined by my most fundamental character trait: I am a humanitarian.
As a humanitarian, I have always been concerned with the welfare of others. Humanitarianism took many forms for me including volunteering, public service, and even first responder jobs. Along the way I have come to see that the world is full of challenge, tragedy and need. Unfortunately, I have also seen that being a humanitarian is not as universal, or even prevalent, in others as I would hope it to be.
I think most do not walk the path of the humanitarian because we all are living the dramas and challenges of our own lives and those details can bury us each in worry for our own well-being, which makes it hard to look outward in those times toward alleviating the burdens of others when your own burdens are crushing your spirit. There was even a time when I tearfully asked my spiritual leader’s forgiveness for not being able to give to others because I was too broken and in need myself. But caring for others is such a part of me that I feel a pull to help at all times.
The biggest challenge I have repeatedly faced as a humanitarian is feeling like my drops of effort were pointlessly lost in an ocean of need. In those times of feeling overwhelmed, I often recall The Starfish Thrower story to reassure myself that all efforts are important no matter how small they may feel.
At 50, and after many many iterations of my humanitarian service, I realized that my efforts could be more effective if I focused on a single cause or else I would continue to feel as though my efforts were amounting to nothing. The cause I picked was hunger.
Food insecurity is a wide spread and devastating problem. It is part of the first, most basic, level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and is crucial to every other outcome in a person’s life. From birth to death, our need for food is universal and absolutely important to all. So once I settled on a cause to focus my humanitarian efforts on, everything else just began to click into place, which is how Farm School and the ability to grow nutrient dense produce makes sense as a career choice for me now.
Today, I work as a cook feeding people for a living. I volunteer with an organization to serve a free meal to my community every week, and I attend Farm School full-time where I am learning to produce food. See, I told you it made perfect sense why a city boy like me would decide to become a farmer in midlife.
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