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Farming for me started as a rebellion against the system. Ron Paul woke me up back in 2007. His ideas sent me down a rabbit hole of realizing how corrupt, broken, and evil our system is. I thought if I got involved campaigning, I could change the world. I eventually learned that we couldn't vote our way out. The corruption ran too deep, and every new law that passed seemed to make things worse instead of better.
I thought homesteading could be the solution. I could grow food, raise meat, live off the grid, and build a life I wanted. I couldn’t change the world, but I could eat healthy, live more like our ancestors, and not participate in this broken system, so maybe that would be my escape. My original plan was to have a couple of cows and a few chickens. Then I realized we had to find a way to fund this life if we actually wanted to live it, so we bought more cows and a few hundred chickens and tried to make it a business.
As the business grew, we drifted further and further from that original dream of homesteading as rebelling against the system. More cows required more land, which meant more debt, so the farm had to make a living. More travel meant eating more bad food on the road and spending less time at home cooking and eating healthy. Somewhere along the way, I realized I was right back where I started. I had built a business that depended on the same system I had originally been trying to get away from.
This was in the early days of Instagram, long before it was full of farm influencers. Instagram wasn’t full of movie stars showing off their hobby farms. This was long before Highland cattle became trendy and started showing up all over social media. Farming was still looked down on. It was a dirty job, and nothing about it was glamorous. People thought I was weird for taking pictures with my cows. I never expected any of it to become popular.
I started posting my life because I wanted to quit spamming my friends and family with cow pictures. So I made a farm account. I wasn't ever trying to build a following or become an influencer. I was just sharing cute photos of my cows. As my social media grew, I was no longer just the weird girl taking selfies with my cows. People started paying attention to me, and social media became another place where I had to conform. I worried about saying something that would make people unfollow me. I worried about posting the things that grew my numbers instead of just posting what I actually wanted to share. I always kept my phone on me so I wouldn't miss a notification or miss something I might need to capture for content. I thought social media was supposed to show the good parts of life. I thought people wanted to see a happy marriage, a pretty farm, and feel inspired. Before I realized, I was trapped back in the system.
Then my divorce happened. I couldn't pretend anymore because everyone already knew my marriage was falling apart. There wasn't a way to hide it or package it into something that looked perfect. Somewhere in the middle of losing everything I thought I had built, something changed in me. I quit caring so much about what people thought. I quit worrying so much about saying the wrong thing or losing followers. I didn't have a perfect life to sell anymore, so I stopped trying. I just started telling the truth.
Looking back, I think that was one of the best things to come out of one of the hardest seasons of my life. I couldn't pretend anymore, and once I stopped pretending, I realized how exhausting it had been trying to keep up an image that wasn't real. For the first time in a long time, I felt free to just be myself.
Now I'm at a place where I have a following, and I'm too far in to just walk away from social media and escape the system. I don't think disappearing is the answer. If I have this platform, then I want to use it for something that matters, but I'm not sure what that looks like or how to do it without getting consumed by people-pleasing again. I don't have all the answers yet. But I think I'm finally asking the right questions.
