Exit Farming: How We Broke Free

Our website says we started farming to feed ourselves. And that's true, but it's not the whole story.

We didn't start a farm because we were chasing some pastoral fantasy or trying to live off the land in some Instagram-worthy way. We started because we were suffocating inside systems that demanded everything while giving back scraps.

The Golden Handcuffs

We had two six-figure jobs. On paper, it looked like we'd made it. In reality, we were dying a slow death by a thousand cuts. The work was relentless. Late nights bleeding into early mornings, phones buzzing with "urgent" requests at dinner, weekends sacrificed to projects that would be forgotten by Monday. We were traveling across state lines at a moment's notice, always on call, always available, always saying yes.

The more we gave, the more they took. The harder we worked, the deeper we sank. Success felt like quicksand.

And it wasn't just the corporate machine grinding us down. It was the invisible weight of expectations from people who claimed to love us. Family members who pulled and manipulated through guilt and obligation, who convinced us that walking away was selfish, that stability meant staying trapped. "Be responsible. Be available. Be the ones who don't rock the boat."

We were drowning in a life that looked good from the outside but felt like a prison on the inside.

The Breaking Point

We didn't leave for a change of scenery. We left to save our lives.

We sold everything that mattered to the old version of ourselves. We liquidated assets, cashed out retirement accounts, sold houses, cars, everything we'd accumulated in our climb up the corporate ladder. We cleared over half a million dollars of mortgage debt in one brutal, liberating move. We walked away from salaries, from security, from the approval of people who would never understand.

We moved onto a one-acre property in what is now our paradise, lived in a camper with no running water or electricity, and started from absolute zero. There wasn't a business plan. There wasn't a five year strategy. There was just the bone deep knowledge that we were done. Done performing, done pretending, done slowly disappearing inside lives that weren't ours.

What Exit Farming Really Means

That's where we started what we call exit farming for lack of a better term.

It's not off-grid living for the aesthetic. It's not homesteading for the brand. It's not about selling a lifestyle or building an empire.

Exit farming is a deliberate choice to stop feeding systems that grow fat while we grow thin. We farm to feed ourselves, not shareholders. We sell just enough to stay independent, not enough to become dependent on selling. We keep our lives deliberately small so we can keep them entirely ours.

This is how we broke free from the machine that was consuming us. This is how we took back agency over our time, our energy, our choices. This is how we built walls between ourselves and a world that sees our exhaustion as profit.

And yes, when you see our life on social media, it might look picture perfect. Because it is. Not because we're performing or curating some fantasy, but because we built something beautiful from absolute nothing. Every sunset photo and harvest shot represents freedom we fought for. The aesthetic isn't the point. The freedom is.

The Hard Truth

I won't pretend it was easy. Sleeping in a camper through winter storms, learning to grow food while fighting soil that seemed determined to stay barren, watching our bank account shrink while we figured out what the hell we were doing. None of it was easy.

But it was real in a way nothing had been for years.

For the first time in our adult lives, we weren't performing for an audience. We weren't optimizing for metrics that didn't matter. We weren't sacrificing our present for some hypothetical future that kept moving further away.

We were just alive.

This Is What We're Really Doing Here

Exit farming isn't a movement. It's not a trend. It's a lifeboat.

It's what happened when we stopped asking permission to live differently and started building something that couldn't be taken away by a bad quarter, a corporate restructure, or someone else's idea of who we should be.

This is what we're really doing here. We're staying out. We're staying free. We're proving to ourselves, every single day, that there's another way.

And maybe, if you're reading this while sitting in a cubicle or staring at another impossible deadline, you need to know that too.