I believed we could build our farm together by being good at business and I didn’t realize she needed me to be good at romance.
Which is more important to the success of a farm: business sense — or romance? You may be surprised to hear that, after wrestling with this topic for the last five years, my answer is romance. The quote above is from the conclusion of The Hands that Feed Us, summing up what I’ve learned from looking at how farmers live — and what makes them successful.
My conclusion is not intuitive. It doesn’t match our collective ideas about how we think business works or what we think success looks like. We think of financial success as a form of prudence: Count your pennies; don’t spend too much; charge a profit margin above your production costs. And there’s something to that. You won’t last long if you are constantly spending more than you bring in. A modicum of financial sense is certainly necessary. But it doesn’t create success.
When I started working on The Hands that Feed Us, I thought the hardest part of making the film would be convincing farmers to open their books to me and show me how much money they were — or weren’t — making. While I was filming, I had a lot of frank conversations with farmers about their financial situations, but I never actually got to the point of asking to see their books because the more questions I asked, the less clear it became what looking at the numbers could actually tell me about their success.
Pretty much every farmer I talked to had significant debt. The cost of the land alone is more than most farms will earn in a lifetime, so if a farmer has to buy their farmland, it’s pretty much a guarantee that they are in debt (and land is far from the only thing a new farmer has to buy). That debt shows up on the farm’s balance sheet as a massive liability. That liability is balanced out because the land itself is an asset — one that tends to rise in value, regardless of what else is happening on the farm.
So, in this hypothetical, you can look at the balance sheet of the farm, see that the value of the land is higher than the amount of debt that it took to buy the land, and call the farm a success. But here’s the thing: Because the land is worth so much more than the revenues that the farm can generate, the only feasible way of paying down the debt is to sell the land. But the farm doesn’t exist without the land; selling it guarantees that the farm will fail. In other words, if you judge the success of a farm by the number on the balance sheet, that number probably includes an assumption that guarantees the failure of the farm. It assumes that the land will be sold. For the farm to be a success, the land has to be in use — it needs to be valued for its ability to produce food, not for the amount of money it could make when it is sold.
Knowing this, maybe you shrug your shoulders and conclude that yes, farming involves debt, and, no, the land can’t be sold if the farm is to continue, but maybe that’s just the nature of owning a farm, and maybe the balance sheet doesn’t tell us much about whether the farm is successful. The problem is, debt comes with an interest payment, and that payment can’t be ignored if the farm is to continue. Debt creates a condition of failure — if the debt isn’t paid, the bank calls in the loan, the land is sold to pay off the loan, and the now-landless farm fails. If the farm is to succeed, that interest payment has to be made.
How can we be sure that the payment is possible? We have look a bit farther down the ledger, at profit and loss. If the farm is bringing in enough revenue to cover the interest payment, at least we know that that particular condition of failure can be avoided. But, it’s not enough for the revenue to just cover the interest payment and nothing else. There are a lot more costs to running a farm than just interest — the farmer’s living expenses, for example. Also, feed costs, fertilizer costs, labour costs, seed costs, etc. You can add up all the costs, add up all the revenues, and if the revenues are higher than the costs, then the farm is profitable. But is it successful?
I think the most that can be said about a profitable farm is it is avoiding financial failure. For now. There are a couple issues with looking at profit and loss as an indicator of success. The first is that it only sees a moment in time, typically a single year. But a year isn’t long enough to know if a farm is successful. A year is one growing season, and a good harvest or a bad harvest can very easily be the difference between being profitable or not profitable in that year. But, it’s not the difference between being successful or not successful; a successful farm weathers the bad years as well as the good ones.
And that brings me to the second issue with using profit as a measure of success. Like debt, profitability can be a condition of failure if insisting on profitability makes it impossible to continue in the future (by causing the farm to miss enough interest payments that the bank repossesses the land, for example). A good harvest and a profitable year doesn’t guarantee success. All it does is avoid a particular mode of failure, for that particular year.
These are the realizations that convinced me I couldn’t determine a farm’s success by looking at its books. The books could tell me if a farm owned more than it owed; they could tell me if it was earning more than it was spending, but knowing those things didn’t make the farm a success. Most of the farmers I talked to had financial challenges. They invariably had huge debt loads, and one in particular hadn’t been profitable for his first twelve years of farming. And yet, they were still there, regardless of the numbers in their books. And by being there, by the simple fact of their existence, those farmers demonstrated their success.
How had they done it? How could a farmer lose money for his first twelve years of farming and still keep going? How had he avoided the repo man and the bank foreclosing on his land? The same questions applied to all my farmers. In the face of financial adversity, their farms were successful. Why?
Why? Romance. There are more prosaic answers as well: The farmers kept their farms afloat by working off-farm; they bought land from family members below market value; they were supported by their spouses; etc. But the prosaic answers answer the how, not the why. They explain the various ways that farmers overcame adversity, but they don’t explain what prompted the farmers to go find those prosaic answers. They don’t explain why continuing to farm was worth it. And that’s really what the question of success is about: A successful farm is a farm that has a reason to keep existing. It’s a farm that is providing a good living to the farmer who runs it, good food to the community that buys it, and a healthy relationship between the farm and its customers. It’s a farm that everyone believes in.
I’ve come to the conclusion that success is a matter of belief more than anything else. A farmer has to believe that continuing to farm is a worthwhile, and the farm’s customers have to believe that it is worth buying from. Profits and a healthy balance sheet provide evidence that that belief exists, but they do not create it. What creates the belief in success is romance.
Romance is an aspiration, a dream. It’s a vision of what could be, coupled with the desire to make that vision a reality. We are used to talking about romance in the context of relationships, but not in the context of business or farming. Romance is stereotypically what young women ask of the young men who are courting them, and, having once been a young man myself, I can say I’ve been utterly clueless about what those young women were asking of me. It took a year of observing how farmers live for me to understand what romance is, and why it matters for both relationships and for farms.
Romance is belief in a future. Not just any future, but a very specific, personal future. For a relationship, it’s belief in building a life with a particular partner, and for a farm, it’s belief in building that specific farm. And, at least at the farms that I visited, those two beliefs weren’t all that separate. Family farms entwine a farm business with a farm family, and the success of one is very much the success of the other. When I asked my farmers why they did what they did, raising their kids in the “right” way was always one of the first answers. They were able to fight through the financial adversity of starting a farm because they believed in what the farm could be — both as a farm, and for what it meant to their family.
There’s a lot of romance around farming. There’s a whole back-to-the-land genre of farming documentaries that showcase young farmers living out their ideals on the land. When I started working on The Hands that Feed Us, I was determined not to romanticize farming in this way. I wanted to show farming as it actually was: the challenges and struggles of everyday farm life, and, especially, the extreme financial stress of trying to build a business at the bottom of the economic totem pole.
While I was filming, a documentary called Biggest Little Farm came out that showcased a Los Angeles filmmaker who decided to start a permaculture farm to revitalize the land. How that filmmaker managed to pay for 200 acres of prime California farmland out of the proceeds of selling at farmers markets, all while investing heavily in the large-scale earthworks necessary to put their permaculture ideals into practice, is not part of the film. Because of that, my own reaction to the film is that, beautiful as it is, it feels more like a fantasy than a documentary. It’s a very romantic film, but, unless you are an independently wealthy L.A. cinematographer, it doesn’t seem like a very realistic one.
There’s sense of the word ‘romantic’ that implies a lack of realism, especially as it applies to the world of business. We have a cultural attitude that being romantic is all well and good, but eventually you have to stop dreaming, buckle down and earn some money. The business of real life is decidedly not romantic. How many marriages have dissolved after one too many arguments over whose turn it is to change the diapers? How many farmers have given up because, after selling a year’s bounty, they ended up deeper in debt than they started the year? Surely it is foolish to keep our romantic dreams under such circumstances. Knowing that, how on earth did I come to the conclusion that romance is more important to success than business sense?
Foolish it may be, but in the critical moment of decision over whether or not to keep farming for another year, the deciding factor is whether or not the farmer still believes in the future. Is there a vision for the farm or not? Sometimes, the finances are so bad that a future is impossible, and in those circumstances, of course continuing to believe is foolish. But other times — most of the time — there are prosaic answers. The farmer can work off-farm to bring in money, or ask their spouse for support. Even a financially stable farm isn’t going to continue unless the farmer has a vision for what the farm could be. If the romantic vision isn’t there, financial stability just means it’s a good time to sell the farm and cash out. The finances are a factor in deciding whether the farm continues, but they probably aren’t the determining factor.
In other words, success depends on romance, not finance. That’s the central thesis of my film. I stand by my goal of not romanticizing farming in The Hands that Feed Us, and I think I succeeded. Farming is hard work, it’s financially fraught, and the results are uncertain. The film is full of those moments. But it’s at just these moments, when farming is at its least romantic, that romance matters the most. Having a romantic vision of what the farm could be is what makes the moments worthwhile. When difficult circumstances make us question why we are doing what we are doing, we’d better have an answer, or the natural response is to stop. Romance gives us the answer; it creates success by giving us the imagination to overcome whatever obstacles stand in our way.