The most frequently asked question I receive are these six words: How did you become a farmer?

Somehow, farming has become the career that no one understands. When, in my job as a part time bartender, customers inquire into what I do outside of the restaurant, the reality of my answer never makes sense to them. Their heads tilt to the side and they shoot a glance at a friend wondering if this is in fact a joke. 'You’re behind a bar' I can hear them thinking. There is this huge disconnect: A farmer in New York? A farmer behind a bar? A farmer?

But after initially being taken aback, the most common response is joy and admiration. “Well, good for you!” people say “That’s a lot of work.” I even had a woman congratulate me in a shoe store grabbing my hand with vigor to shake it as if I had just joined the Peace Corps. I’m not complaining. It’s more than nice to be congratulated for something you love doing. And people are curious, the questions suddenly and rapidly falling from their mouths: How did this happen? Where is your farm? How did you get into this type of work? Can we come and help? What kind of vegetables are you growing?

How could a young person living in a city possibly be growing things; and not just as a hobby but as a profession? After much contemplation the answer is…

I really don’t know.

And, to my great relief it is the answer that most farmers come up with after a moment of thought. You begin as a regular person who just wants to grow their own food. Or someone who grew up with a small garden and parents who showed them how to plant beans and trellis tomatoes. And then somehow you wake up one day, an adult, and you’re running an irrigation system or figuring out how to keep aphids away. You’re building a hoop house or thinning beets. You’re waking up at 5 o’clock in the morning to tiptoe down to the garden.

I remember being in grade school sitting at my desk, jamming pencils, telling people how I was going to be a writer when I grew up. I even started a periodical called ‘The Lexington News’ that I distributed to family members. I made up a weather report and wrote a fictional story about a princess that always ended with ‘to be continued…” Like many things when you are that age my periodical fell by the wayside and I moved on to bigger and bolder things. There was college at a small liberal arts school in New York City that encouraged me to do nothing else but write, and a job in fashion that I felt if not avoided would turn me into someone who cared only about myself. And then there was restaurant work; something I’d always done to support myself throughout high school and college and something that as a New Yorker you find yourself doing just to stay alive.

And, despite the negative connotations, restaurant work seemed to be the one thing that encouraged me to have another life outside of the work place; to try other things, to have a relationship with the restaurant but not necessarily a monogamous one. I tended bar but that wasn’t all I did. And so, with College a few months in my past, I ran towards the other huge thing that had always been a part of my life, food. How did you become a farmer? First, it was just about food.

My parents cooked for me: herbaceous, oily, green, healthy food and I learned about it through their own culture and lifestyle. My mother, the mutt, grew tomatoes in the summer, blossoming from the deep countryside earth of upstate New York and my father, the Greek, had citrus trees and a garden beneath his window and next to his swimming pool in Los Angeles. This meant that the food I had been eating all my life had an origin that I, the writer and bartender, wanted to know more about. I started looking at the opposite coasts where I had grown up very differently. I started growing herbs on my fire escape in Brooklyn. They all died within a month and I cursed the heavens and threw up my hands in the air. But, life went on. How did you become a farmer again?

I visited small and large organically certified or practicing farms on both coasts either helping out or just pushing farmers for knowledge about planting, and sunlight, water and drought but mainly, I asked about them. How did you get started farming? East to West it always seemed the same, an accidental career. Brilliant chemists, teachers, parents, artists all with one common goal: to grow food for themselves and their families. Each farmer had known little or nothing about growing. They’d worked multiple jobs in the beginning just to stay afloat. But still they encouraged. “Try new things”, they told me “think outside the box.”

Months later those herbs on my fire escape were revisited and were turned into lush and fragrant bushes. Try new things. Think outside the box. Months later there was land being offered to me free of charge and a friend who I trusted more than myself to sow seeds along side me and to see everything come to fruition.

“Stand here,” one farmer told me when I visited. She guided me onto the property adjacent to her own land. We were standing about a foot from her soil, just past a sprinkling of trees and a property line and we were literally looking up at her farm. The dirt was stacked and almost completely green, trees filling in the spaces amidst buckwheat and green garlic. She had built up this land for nearly thirty years she told me and at first I stood confused..built up? And then it hit me. This was how you became a farmer. You put your love and sweat into land that you truly cared about. You planted cover crops and added compost to build the soil up and create a strong back bone for your plants. You planted things you had never even tasted but threw in the ground just to see what happened. You took chances and learned and understood and gave back. The land next to their property had all but blown away, flat as a cement parking lot beneath our boots. It was a conventional farm, maybe a hundred acres or more and you could see the soil had been uncared for. It was dry and dull not even a sprout could be seen poking from the flatness. You could see the land next to hers, just a foot away, was dying.

Perhaps what I have learned is that it’s all true. Being a farmer is hard work and thus is deserved of every hand shake and congratulatory address. I’m always happy to find people interested even through their booze hazed confusion. Now, I jump at the chance to tell people why or how I became a farmer.

“It’s just that,” I tell them as I pour another drink, “It’s a very long story.”

*I wrote this piece while interning at Hudson Ranch in Napa Valley.