The Best Way to Start Farming

Read this before you do it backwards

Chris Newman
8 min readSep 18, 2022
  • I run a small-ish ranch in Virginia with one full-time employee (me) and a half-dozen people working a day or two a week, and doing about $300K/year in sales.
  • The farm is profitable, pays a minimum wage of $20/hour, and provides me with nearly a full-time living.
  • It was a very, very difficult journey to get here (I talk about this journey in detail in my book, accessible through Patreon)
  • I’m writing this essay to spare you as much pain as possible if you are, in fact, determined to try your hand at farming for a living.

And now that we know each other…

via Sylvanaqua Farms

Launching any new business is risky, but farming is in a class of its own because it often involves…

Learning an entire trade that you’re not really familiar with

There’s a really big difference between working in your home garden or raising backyard chickens, and growing things commercially. Being a good gardener or homesteader doesn’t hurt, but it’s kinda like how being a decent college football player says very little about how you’d do in the NFL. But imagine that you weren’t just trying to figure out pro-level football, but also basketball, hockey, and baseball…

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Chris Newman
Chris Newman

Written by Chris Newman

Building a new, accessible, open, and democratic food economy in the Chesapeake Bay region @ Sylvanaqua Farms

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