How to Become a Farmer

Farming is a noble occupation but is not for the faint of heart. It requires hard physical labor. And yet those who farm would not do anything else for all the money in the world. That's why many farms are handed down from one generation to the next. It's a call of nature as old as time and is one of the most rewarding jobs in the world.

Instructions

Difficulty: Challenging

1. Learn options available for the different types of agriculture. Many farmers today hold college degrees in agriculture, and some hold advanced degrees. While a college degree is not required, a farmer must be committed to staying current with new trends in agriculture.
2. Buy or rent land. Whether the farmer owns the land, has a mortgage on the land or leases the land, it is an expensive operational cost.
3. Buy or lease equipment. If the focus of the farming operation is grain, there can easily be hundreds of thousands of dollars tied up in equipment. Even if the farmer leases the equipment, it is still a major expense. If the farming operation focuses around livestock, there is still equipment to buy or lease to produce food for the animals.
4. Finance the farm operation. A farmer must have cash flow in order to buy the food, seeds, equipment and other materials that he needs as well as the basics for his family. If he's lucky, the land has been handed down to him from his family. If not, quite often the farmer's wife and sometimes the farmer himself have to work off the farm in order to meet living expenses. Otherwise, a farmer must budget his family's living expense for a whole year. This is especially true of grain farmers who only harvest grain annually.
5. Prepare to take on large amounts of debt. If the farmer has purchased land, equipment, seed stock, animals, livestock building and all the various other items for a farm, he and his family may be looking at long-term mortgages.
6. Stay current on technological trends. For example, many farmers use the Internet to contract favorable market prices for their goods. Global positioning systems (GPS) are rapidly becoming standard features on many new tractors.

Tips & Warnings

• Farming depend on markets. Sometimes the markets are really well, and sometimes they do poorly. A farmer has to be able to plan far enough in advance to make his payments, regardless of what the markets do.
• Farmers are at the mercy of the weather. A stretch of unfavorable weather can ruin a crop in no time.
• Farming involves a great amount of government regulation. These rules are an everyday part of a farmer's life.

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