Seeing ag through another’s eyes.
By Jenny Ring, ACN Board Member
My husband and I both come from quintessential, multi-generational Midwest farm families. By all accounts, we should be farmers. But for the longest time, we’ve wrestled with an identity crisis. Are we really farmers?
When you’re young and living under your parents’ roof, you can claim that you are a farmer. Your family farms, so that means you do too, right? When friends would ask what my parents did for a living, I was quick to say, “We’re farmers.”
Then we moved on to college, and we were students. That’s an easy identifier! It’s temporary but accurate. Upon our parents’ encouragement, we both pursued degrees in agriculture, knowing we wanted to find our way back to the farm someday, somehow.
Once we graduated, and for many years into adulthood, we found ourselves unsure of where we fit. Our families both farm, but we have day jobs in ag and help on their farms after hours, so does that just make us hired help now? We are both high achievers with a high ownership mentality, so we didn’t find it fair to piggyback off our families’ legacy.
If you’ve ever found yourself in succession planning talks with your farm family, I’m sure this scenario has come up in conversation. The problem in our case is that neither family is ready to willingly talk about succession planning with us. For some reason, it’s a forbidden secret that many farm families cling to for far too long. So we’re stuck in limbo. Waiting, wondering and not quite belonging anywhere in the story yet.
Where We’re at Now
In the meantime, we’ve built our own paths within agriculture. Nathan, my husband, is a talented precision technology expert who enjoys helping farmers solve problems on their planters. We’ve rebuilt a few planters of our own, and he’s run plenty over the years, which gives him valuable, real-world experience to share with his customers. He’s inched into equipment ownership over time, which will help us lessen the burden when farming one day.
I am an agriculture communicator and marketer by day, hobby photographer by night. I’ve always had a passion for making things look good and sound good, which has taken me across multiple related roles in my career thus far. I also enjoy working with my hands and bonding with my husband over planters, since that’s also related to my day job. Together, we have a beautiful little daughter who already loves the farm and all of the animals that come with it.
We both serve in various leadership roles across the agriculture industry and give back to our communities through agricultural education experiences. But with each introduction and bio that is given, we feel like the black sheep who can’t say that we’re full-time farmers.
The Year We Became Real Farmers
For all this time, we wouldn’t claim to be farmers without owning or renting our own farmland. This year, in 2026, we bought our very first piece of land. Finally, something that was ours. Finally, we can call ourselves farmers.
This isn’t the first attempt at purchasing land, though. We’ve been fully prepared to use the USDA beginning farmer loan and get into farming sooner, but each time we went to auction, we were outbid at an unreasonably high amount. Sadly, the market hasn’t really come down at all.
I’m going to run out of space if I share the backstory of this purchase, so I’ll save that for another day. Just know that we finally got our Cinderella story, where a farmer came to us directly, and we bought the ground privately without any competition at auction.
However, we did go straight into a corn crop and spent most of our cash on inputs last fall before we signed the papers for the ground in January of this year. Our predicted balance sheet proves that farming doesn’t exactly pencil out these days. With two land payments due, we will not break even this year, and we’ll need the extra income from our day jobs to pay for our farming debts.
Maybe being a farmer was never about when we started, but how long we were willing to stick it out.
So, did we overcome imposter syndrome? Yes. But not in a self-help, mindset-shift kind of way. It cost us a lot of money.
– Ring is strategic communications manager at PTX