As much as I loved meeting up with my fellow farmers at a big annual organic farming conference this year, I noticed something really disheartening…farmers are really prone to falling into the trap of self-limiting beliefs.
If you’re not familiar with the term, a self-limiting belief is a thought or belief that you have about yourself or the world that sets up an artificial mental barrier to achieving your full potential.
We see them pop up everywhere. And they’re terrible. That feeling of “I’m not good enough ” or “I don’t deserve this” or “I just can’t do this” limits us in so many ways.
For farmers, though, I’ve noticed that there are some pretty strong limiting beliefs around money in particular…the thing that no one ever likes to talk honestly about. And they sound something like this: “I’ll never be able to pay myself well for the work that I do.”
At the conference this year, 3 different presenters (who are/were farmers) joked or commented about how poor farmers are. One of them even said something about how “you can’t make good money raising pigs.” And I was livid, because even joking about these things sets up a subconscious belief that it just can’t be done!
It’s true that it isn’t easy to make a living farming…but let’s be real. That doesn’t mean it’s not possible! Or that it can’t be done! And that it shouldn’t be the goal of every single career farmer out there. For the love of god…being able to pay your bills and save for emergencies or retirement isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity.
I realize this path doesn’t look the same for every farm or every farmer. For us, we’ve always said that our goal is to earn a teacher’s salary doing the work that we love – protecting our land, taking care of our animals and growing exceptional food.
And while I’ll freely admit that we didn’t quite reach this goal last year (because we decided to pay off this gigantic loan instead), we’re aboslutely hoping and planning on hitting this mark this year.
On our farm, we work hard and we think hard, not just about the animals we raise and the food we grow. But about the quality of life we want and need to have as farmers. To do all this well, we have to be aware of where our beliefs limit us and slow us down.
Your Farmers,
Greg and Jenney