It’s a tough life and an isolating one. You have to live in wide open spaces with no one else nearby, but it also isn’t the idyllic land you think of. Economics means getting cornered into maximizing what you can get out of the land. Think tearing it up with machinery and planting giant areas with monocultures of high yield GMO crops. A lot of people have a fantasy version of farming in their head, where you have small plots of land, with diverse crops, wildlife, streams, and natural landscapes around you. Instead what you end up with is sort of a harsh outdoor factory for converting local resources (water, soil, etc) and additives (seeds, fertilizer, etc) into a very low margin product. All you can see from your modest home that you went into debt for is giant plots of land that are dusty and ripped up or covered in a single crop as far as the eye can see. Meanwhile, everyone from seed companies, to fertilizer companies, to John Deere, to insurance companies, to buyers of crops are squeezing you into nothing.

Our system as a whole is problematic. We allow big companies to bully small players due to their capital or control over distribution or anti competitive practices or whatever. And farmers who are doing the actual work are in a place in the supply chain where they can be marginalized. Food is also insanely cheap for what it takes, when in truth it should cost more and reward these people for their hard work, which often leaves them with broken bodies. But when you are struggling to survive financially, and have a broken body, and have no community near you, and things are getting worse every year - it isn’t surprising where it leads.