Growing power, growing food

An old joke goes, “The best way to make a million dollars farming is to start with two million.”

As is the case with most good jokes, there’s a pretty big (and pretty painful) nugget of truth behind this adage. I never realized that until I became a farmer myself.

We didn’t start a farm to get rich. My husband, Josh, and I started farming because we realized, at age 22 (before we were even married), that we enjoyed raising our own chickens. We were entranced by this agrarian lifestyle and in love with the idea of producing all our own food and some for friends, family and neighbors. Our small flock of laying hens quickly grew, multiplying into 50 laying hens, 450 meat chickens, dozens of pigs, some turkeys, a dozen beef cows, and 200 ewes. We dumped thousands of dollars into pursuing our dream, both of us working, second, third, and fourth jobs to support our very expensive passion. By the time our son was born in 2020, we realized that not only did we have a profound love for farming, but we desperately needed to find a way to make money doing it.

Making money while farming is an oxymoron. It’s something we didn’t truly realize in full color until early 2021, when we met with our accountant to go over our returns from the previous year. “Well,” he said with a sigh, leaning back in his chair, “it’s common for a farm to show significant loss in the first year.”

“Significant loss” was putting it gently. Our expenses were more than double what we actually brought in. The farm owed us a lot of money. By 2021, I was working from home as a freelance writer and enjoying it (and the higher paycheck it brought) more than teaching, but Josh was getting more frustrated by the day. He wanted to leave teaching, too, and to do that, he needed to find a way to make the farm pay for itself. The expenses piled up. It seemed like no matter how hard we worked, we just had more debt, more stress, and a significantly smaller savings account.

It wasn’t the lifestyle we imagined when we decided to get into farming, but unfortunately, it’s a reality that’s shared by just about every farmer we know. According to the US Department of Agriculture, the median income from farming in 2024 was -$1,830.* Yes, that’s a negative number, and no, it’s not a typo. Based on that dismal income projection alone, it’s no wonder farmers are leaving the profession in droves; between 2011 and 2018 alone, the United States lost more than 100,000 farms.

Josh and I understood why so many of our fellow farmers were getting out, but that wasn’t a choice we wanted to make. After all, we were just getting started. And we already had dreams of passing down the farm to our son, who, even before he could walk, was expressing a profound love for the natural world.

We had begun to research our options for making the farm more lucrative as early as 2019, when we had our first inkling that small-scale livestock farming in and of itself wasn’t profitable. We knew we needed another way to make money with the farm.

At that point, there were plenty of talks on the table about marijuana being legalized in New York State, so we had our fair share of (mostly) joking conversations about how we might have to pivot from raising grass-fed lamb to growing weed (a different type of grass entirely) for our customers. But then a farmer friend offered us a new solution. It was one that would not only allow us to keep farming and make a decent profit, but it would also help us give our animals the space they needed to be healthy and happy.

It wasn’t magic.

It wasn’t a trust fund.

It certainly wasn’t a grant or a loan from the US Department of Agriculture.

It was something as simple as the sun: solar panels.

Excerpted with permission from Agri-Energy: Growing Power, Growing Food by Rebekah M. Pierce (2025, Island Press).

* This number was updated from the original text to include data from the most recent year available.