This decision was largely made for us back in February. Our largest account closed with no warning, we learned about it on their Instagram page, a $60,000 – $70,000 deal gone without so much as a phone call or email.

Just poof.

We came into 2026 resolved to let the data decide our farm’s future. Trend up and we push forward on our growth path. Trend down and we get jobs in town.

At the same time, if you’ve ever started a small business, you’re always holding on to a lottery ticket. “If this one thing happens… maybe… just maybe.”

It’s a fantasy every small business owner holds onto.

And you know what? Over and over in my career when I held out hope for something big to happen it did.

Back in February, we decided to continue on with the Summer CSA and make a decision by August 1st.

Starting in late Spring I was holding out hope that I’d find something, a project or a new line of business, to keep the farm growing.

And late in the game I thought I found it.

I was given the opportunity to pitch a project in the area that would have kept the farm operational financially in its then-current form through the end of 2026, at least. That would give me time to find the next project that’d keep us going until the spring when our next nursery season hit, which rolls into our Summer CSA.

Translation: If I could land this deal I could probably get us to fall 2027.

Once again, as I’d done for most of my adult life, maybe I could pull a rabbit out of my hat?

Survive at all costs vs. Live to Fight Another Day

Fight or flight, basically. I’m hard-wired to fight but experience has taught me that sometimes flight is the best path to long-term survival.

That’s the paradox every small business owner faces at some point.

But at what cost?

The client was really excited and seemingly motivated. And most importantly, they had budget to make it happen.

I sent them a well-vetted proposal with an aggressive timeline. I could get started right away and have their project completed before the winter set in.

Just give me a green light and magic will happen.

They stalled.

Then they pushed back on costs without adjusting the timeline or scope.

Then they just dropped off the face of the earth without making a decision.

I’ve done a ton of project work, albeit in website development, but it’s not altogether different. When a client starts balking and flaking out like that I know those are red flags. I’ve learned it’s better to simply walk than to try to keep negotiating as the project will disappoint everyone.

We moved on and that was that.

Then they came back to me recently to try to renegotiate one more time. I had to give them a hard no because in this case, “Live to Fight Another Day” for us is far less costly to my body, family, and budget than taking on a “Survive At All Costs” project.

Hard pass. No hard feelings. Thanks but no thanks. Not this time.

Unable to pull a rabbit out of my hat we proceeded with the data-driven decision we’d laid out earlier.

“Let’s get off-farm income like 75% of small family farms in the United States.”

And you know what? Living to fight another day is farm more hopeful in this season of life than surviving at all costs.

This is original content from Adam McLane. © adam mclane

This is going to be my new response when people talk at me about being against “farm subsidies” – a blanket term people are using for the system of grants, loans, and financial programs the government has to keep both the farms and the food chain alive. 

Here’s the quick version: If you don’t subsidize the costs of running a farm– leveling out the farms wins and losses– people won’t be able to afford food and farms will go out of business. 

Period. End of story. 

It’s happening at a faster and faster rate right now. 

It costs more to produce food than people are able to pay. Without the governments help people will starve– which was common in the United States prior to the creation of our social safety net. 

I know history is hard. And I know economics is harder. 

But tax incentives are a thing that you benefit from in so many ways whether you agree with it or not. Without this system there is no middle class. 

If you’re a W-2 employee your employer is covering half of your social security tax. Why? Because without it you wouldn’t be able to save for retirement on your own. 

If you have a mortgage you already know the value of the mortgage interest tax deduction. Without it you likely couldn’t have afforded to buy your home. That’s why that mortgage is 4% instead of 15%.

If you’ve got health insurance through an employer you’re likely paying a fraction of the true cost of your insurance through a payroll deduction, they are covering the rest, and they get a tax incentive to do it so that you don’t end up without insurance. 

When you buy a t-shirt at Walmart that’s only $12.99 because of a free trade agreement with Guatemala, which keeps the price artificially low by moving operations to a place where the companies can pay 1/10th what they’d pay a U.S. worker. You might not like that but you benefit from it nonetheless. 

You complain about paying gas taxes at the pump but you also complain when there are potholes or insufficient road signage, largely paid for, in part, by vehicle license and gas taxes. 

Most of what you buy is subsidized in ways you may or may not see or agree with. But together they’ve created the middle class. 

Farms are no different. 

If it costs me $7 per pound to grow tomatoes that you’ll only pay $4 for who is covering the other $3? 

The government or the farmer or no one because the farmer quit. 

The government typically does that to artificially keep the prices of food down. And they give that $3 to me through a series of programs, preferential loan terms, and business tax write offs– letting me write off my mileage for deliveries, grants to build infrastructure, or 0% interest loan on my tractor. 

So it’s weird for me to hear people whining about farm subsidies because those same people BENEFIT from them and also an entire network of subsidies seen and unseen. 

Without these farm programs you’d pay the true cost for food, which quite frankly, you can’t afford to do, don’t know how to do yourself, etc. 

Let’s make this relevant to today. The current administration is dramatically shifting those dollars away from small farms to large corporations… which is why you’re seeing a DRAMATIC shift in the market as small farms like ours have to deal with these economic forces. 

In the past, government programs and tax incentives covered those losses. But now we are? Hell no. I can’t afford to subsidize the food you eat at the cost of not feeding my own family. 

Hence, more and more small farms and ranches are doing exactly what we are doing because we cannot bear the burden of lifting up your personal finances. 

Want smal farms? Want a local food supply? You want more “farm subsidies.” (Programs and incentives to make it financially viable to keep going.) 

Want more corporate farms? Want a food supply that “self-regulates” and lets a little poop get into the water to clean veggies or a little chicken-fat-born salmonella to get on jalapeños somehow? Then you want less “farm subsidies” but accept the fact that people will die of preventable food borne illnesses and people will die of malnutrition in the richest country on the planet

This is original content from Adam McLane. © adam mclane

You can read about it here.

At the time of his arrest I’ll give you one guess where this guy was a working? At a private charter school as a school counselor. Here’s a video of him reading a book on empathy to children.

Clergy sexual abuse is endemic to churches because they refuse to stop it or put real systems in place to prevent it.

They systematically protect the abusers reputations as an extension off protecting the churches brand. In this case, the lead pastor protected a man he knew murdered his wife and sexually abused underaged girls for 19 years.

The former senior pastor is not a hero for going to the police. In my opinion he could be charged as an accessory after the fact because he hid it.

This is original content from Adam McLane. © adam mclane

I said that before I was a farmer. And now that I am? I think you need to demand a refund from your seminary because you learned marketing and bad business mantras when you should have been learning how to prepare the soil, plant, cultivate, fertilize, and harvest.

How in the world can you “shepherd a flock” when you’ve never worked with sheep and goats?

I might not draw a paycheck from a church but starting a few years back my neighborhood became my congregation and you know what? I think rejecting the Church Industrial Complex and attempting to make my life Good News in the Neighborhood is way more effective than any church I’ve ever been part of. I do more pastorin’ now than ever.

Want to know what faith looks like? Take a day off during your harvest season. Want to find your purpose and a reason to get out of beet Get some livestock. Want to know what it means make an impact on a family? Grow their dinner.

Want to know what healthy organisms do? They multiply.

You won’t learn that at a conference, you’ll learn that in the fields.

This is original content from Adam McLane. © adam mclane

Google AI summarizes it like this:

For me, identifying dips vs. cul-de-sacs is found in the data. “Does the math, math?”

For our farm dead ends have included:

• Farmers markets / popups / road side vending (we don’t live close enough to a major, consistent market to make the math work)
• Crops that sit in the field a long time (too much can go wrong and we can’t compete on price with the grocery store)
• 24-weeks of a CSA (competes with farm-to-school, team exhaustion)

None of those were bad things. The math just didn’t work and was never going to, so we had to push them aside to focus our energy on things that will work.

That leaves the rest of the stuff we’re currently pushing uphill.

• Taking our nursery year-round
• Long-term soil building
• Figuring out how to monetize our goats
• Wash/Pack/Cold storage — now that the grant money has dried up how are we going to fund that?

The trick with “The Dip” is that pushing a rock up a freaking mountain all the time gets tiring and annoying if you don’t make enough progress. Too little progress and you want to quit.

This fall and winter we’ve gotten tired and many times stopped to ask ourselves, “Why don’t we just quit the vegetable side of our business altogether, focus on a part-time nursery, grow some flowers, and get jobs?”

That’s the problem with being a mission-based person, isn’t it? We’ve said that our mission with the farm is to increase access to locally grown foods. When we ran the food pantry we saw that in the raw. We can’t escape reality— this area needs more fresh food, if we can build a system for that, we’ll be fine AND meet a very real need.

It’s a funny thing to start seeds and sign leases to expand your vegetable operation while also wondering if you can even sustain a vegetable operation for another year.

It’s a funny thing to think about applying to jobs and narrowing the business down to just the nursery and flowers while also talking to people about taking on much more land to grow way more vegetables.

That’s “The Dip”. Self-doubt, contemplating quitting, wondering if you’ll ever get this danged rock to the top of the hill– that’s all part of perseverance.

Look, I hate hiking uphill. I hate it.

But just like I’ve long said to people who are thinking about quitting boring, safe jobs to pursue their passion, “You’ll never experience the thrill of free fall until you jump out of the plane” I also know that as much as I hate hiking uphill there’s nothing quite as awesome as getting to the top, extending your tired, flopping arms to the sky and knowing you did something you didn’t think you could do.

Yes, we’re exhausted this time of year. Long nights, short days, lots to do– it’s not easy to stay motivated, especially when the local vibe is so negative right now. Then I turn the TV on to disassociate from that and the negativity on my TV isn’t any better.

So here I am.

Suns up fatty.

Time to feed some animals, plant some veggies, sow some seeds, and push that stupid rock.

The summit is somewhere out there. I’ll only get there if I keep pushing.

This is original content from Adam McLane. © adam mclane