My Freelancing Story - From Motherhood to Beginning Farmer

freelance
Written By Lexi Wright

Getting started freelancing was a long journey for me and looking back, it’s shocking how long it took me to realize this was my path. I came to freelancing during college but had no idea what I was doing was freelancing at the time. In college and in my early post-grad years, I had organizations occasionally reach out to me needing help with projects they were working on like designing newsletters, editing videos for conferences, writing articles for newspapers or publications, and troubleshooting their social media challenges. Back then, these were just fun projects to me that sometimes also involved a little extra cash.

From Side Hustles to Freelancing Full Time

Fast forward a few years and I had my first son and started exploring ideas for making more money to pay for daycare. It didn’t make sense for me to be a stay at home mom financially for us, but I also wasn’t making enough that we were going to be able to grow our family if some things didn’t change. We really wanted more kids, and during this time I spent a lot of hours researching side hustles and additional ways to make money outside my full time job. When my second son was born, this drove me to push harder on this so that we could stay financially stable as we started paying for two kids under the age of two in daycare. I got started finding my first freelance clients in a few Facebook groups and on Linked In by publishing some articles about what kinds of services I wanted to offer clients (online marketing) and connecting with business owners I was interested in working with. This gave me my first few clients and I worked in the evenings and weekends to provide website editing, social media content creation, and email and blog writing for these clients.

When we had our third child, I started to get burnt out. My pregnancy with her was more challenging than it had been with my boys and I was feeling the stress of being a working mom who had full-time office job I cared a lot about, but sometimes required travel or long days, and balancing kids doctors appointments, sick days, and the physical toll my third pregnancy and postpartum took on me. When my infant-to-work program access ended when my daughter turned 6 months old (which was an incredible program by the way! I’m not sure I would ever have returned to work without it after my second baby), I chose to step away from my full-time career and take to freelancing full time.

Freelancing and Motherhood

My daughter stayed home with me until she was about 10 months old and I feel so blessed to have been able to work with clients from home while still enjoying that time with her. Since taking on a full roster of freelance clients, we had a fourth baby who also stayed home with me until she was about 9 months old. But now that our family was complete with four kids under the age of five, I was suddenly confused on my mission. I had started freelancing so that we would have the opportunity to have more kids (or so I thought!). Now that we were done expanding our family, what was my “why?” Well it turns out I had a bigger one that had been there the whole time, I just had never taken the time to understand it.

Freelancing to Farm

Throughout this time we were growing our family, we also were working to find ways we could be involved in production agriculture. My husband and I both grew up in agriculture, living in rural Kansas and having ties to farming, but the opportunity to return to a family operation was not one that existed for us. So we got jobs and purchased our small piece of land and a fixer-upper farmhouse on 20 acres and did our best to do what we could with it - raising goats, chickens, and keeping our horses on it and renting pasture wherever we could for our small group of cows. We lived pretty frugally and did what we could to save up for the equipment we needed like feeders, panels, a tractor, trailer, hay, a truck, and paying off our cows.

How Do We Get Started as First Generation Ranchers?

But we wondered if hobby farmers is all we would ever be. It takes so much capital to get started farming - regardless of whether you work with the bank or not. Either you need lots of capital to buy things outright, or you need capital in collateral to show the bank, and then you pay interest to buy the things you need, hoping you can make payments and there’ll be something left over at the end to invest back into the operation. Financially this put us under a big strain. We were putting every extra bit of money we had into our farm, but did it make any sense? Would we have anything to show for it? Or would we be better off giving up this dream and putting that money away for when it comes time to helping our kids get their own start in life?

The Messy Middle of Off-Farm Income

To be honest, we still don’t know. We’re in what I like to call “the messy middle.” We’re still trying. We haven’t given up on this dream of making our livelihood in production agriculture and raising our kids in that lifestyle. It’s basically all we talk about and all we think about. How can we make it work? How can we make good financial decisions to get us there faster? How can we build a first-generation ranch in a way that will be profitable for our family so we have something valuable to pass on to our kids one day? Right now, we’re in search of the right property to help us get to the next level - ideally something with a house and a few hundred acres that will allow us to expand.

The Next Generation of Agriculture Producers

My big why for sharing my freelancing journey online is to help start the conversation about opportunities for the next generation to be in production agriculture. For me, I feel like even though I’ve known I wanted to be in production agriculture since I was a little girl, I’ve had to scratch and claw my way to get there - and honestly, I still am. I don’t want that for my kids. If any of them have any desire to be in production ag, I want them to be able to do it as soon as they’re ready. I don’t want them to have to wait until they’re 45 to be able to buy something to get started or until they’re 55 before we’re in a good enough financial position to pass something on to them.

I think a lot of people who are involved in agriculture - or dream of being involved - face this issue. If they are on a multi-generational operation, they’re faced with making decisions that keep the business afloat now, but also position the business to be something of value for the next operator - whether that’s family or not. This means investing in new equipment at the right time so it’s not junk when you’re ready to pass it on, but still figuring out how to afford the payments. It means buying land at the right time and right price. It means managing your cow herd so you have a good balance of aging but healthy cows as well as young cows that will be productive for years to come.

We know there is a huge barrier to entry for beginning farmers and ranchers. We know farming and ranching can be financially and mentally stressful job. I think it’s time we start talking about how we can set our kids up for something better.

If we love this industry so much, I want to be part of the movement of people that makes decisions out of love for the future of our industry, not just to get by the way things are and always have been.

For us, growing my freelancing business has been a game-changer in allowing us flexibility in the season of babies and farming on the side. It’s allowed me to be able to hustle hard when we want to make extra income and to take a step back when I need it for my personal well-being as we adjust to changes in our family. Without my freelancing business, we would never be able to even consider the possibility of expanding our operation.

So this is your formal invitation to join our journey - to enjoy the messy middle of trying to make dreams come true, and to strive for a better future for the next generation of ag producers who have so much passion for this industry. I would love for your voice to join the conversation. And if freelancing sounds like something you would like to try as a vehicle to help you get closer to your goals, I hope I can be part of your journey too.

Lexi Wright
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