How to stay in tech and become a farmer
Published on 2025-05-25
"How to leave tech to become a farmer" via Dark Properties
This is the second time I'm aware of that Willa Köerner has interviewed someone about their experiences leaving the tech industry to return to the plough.
I love reading these articles because they resonate a lot with me. They give me hope that if things ever get bad enough in my own career that there are greener pastures elsewhere. But the more I read stories like this the more I feel conflicted.
Quitting tech to become a professional farmer seems to resonate with so many people that it's become a bit of a meme in the tech industry—particularly among people like me, who maybe like computers but think critically about the way they're used in society, and to what effect. The farm is this perceived idyllic alternative to the work we're used to, which can often be deeply unsatisfying whether or not we even like computers to begin with.
I've encountered people who challenge this idea by arguing that we're underestimating how hard farming really is—and sure, maybe we are—but I think that's a really weak criticism. I think the same can be said for critiques that focus on how the image of farming is rooted in nostalgia—you don't actually want that life; you just think you do, and maybe you're even being a little reactionary for thinking so. Again, both of these critiques are weak, because they miss the point. I don't think an innate desire to drag a plough over a field has anything to do with this. As far as I can tell, people are struggling against the fact that they feel alienated from their work, they feel they are being enticed to turn something they're passionate about into nothing (or worse, against the people they care for), and they're seeking to remedy that alienation in the only way they know how: to reconnect with the land from which they've been separated.
From the early days of the Luddites to the people that'd follow in their footsteps, early-industrial textile workers suffered from the same sort of alienation. People had spent their entire lives mastering their trades, working in their own homes on their own hours, and then one day, someone decided to capitalize on a new technology that could do their job worse, but much faster, for less money. All of a sudden, to compete, to even have enough money to afford food, they needed to relocate to a factory, working on someone else's clock, using someone else's machine. People were upset, and they wanted better.
There were many things they tried (famously, including smashing machines with sledge hammers), but one thing I've been thinking about a lot is how it was around this time that the cooperative movement got its foothold. In a cooperative mill, textile workers would share ownership of the machines, and they'd build an enterprise together where each of their individual needs was accommodated. While early industrial society never grew into a tapestry of cooperative mills in the way the movement's early members envisioned, it remained a sort of north star for the rest of the century—a vision of how things could be better. That if all else fails, at least we'd have each other.
That's something we don't see as much of anymore; certainly not in the tech industry. People seem a lot more interested in getting out of it than envisioning how it could be better.
I certainly don't begrudge anyone who wants to leave the tech industry. Quite often I want to leave the tech industry.¹ But I think we can do better. I think some of the work IT professionals do is incredibly important, and it would help to have people with a certain level of critical consciousness stick around. We need creatives and idealists who'll pave the way for better models of computing, and better teams to build them. That could be you, if you want it to be.
Footnotes
¹ I've found that being an IT worker is a lot more fulfilling when you're working for a company that isn't "in the tech industry." For example, Salesforce is in the tech industry. It creates technical services for technical companies. In my experience, you can go a long way towards bridging that alienation gap by working a lot closer to the practical applications of technology. Say, by building software in the agricultural industry. So, for the record, I don't want to leave tech, and I don't know if I ever seriously have, but there's some nuance to my situation.
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