So complicated and different for everybody it's not even remotely funny. What I learned is that you have to love it 150% to farm and have an off-farm job too. When I say love it 150%, I mean to the point where you can look your wife or kids in the eyes and miss just about everything under the sun to keep at it. If you row crop and have livestock and also work off the farm, you don't realize it until you're deep into it that just about the only time you don't have spoken for 11 months out of the year is when you're asleep. Kids will be grown and leaving the house before you've even realized they were in middle school. They say the small family farms are dying and they're not wrong. Eventually people have seen the end is in sight, and realized that in some cases it'll end with them and don't want to work themselves to death and miss out on everything only for it all to wrap up when they physically can no longer do it. It's all fun when you're in your 20's with no significant other, no kids, and can work an average of 18 hours a day 7 days a week without issue. The problem is when you set things up to obligate yourself to that and those other things come along, there's some decisions to be made. I've heard folks say after a divorce "She knew what she was signing up for when she married me".. well, you may have thought she did, but did she really? Maybe she did... and maybe she thought she could change it a little eventually, who knows. One thing for sure, kids that enter the equation didn't know what they were getting signed up for. Not all kids want to buck hay or ride shotgun in a tractor cab until they can run it themselves. Some of them want to play a sport(s), or be in the band, or any one of a thousand other things that sometimes farmer Dad can't seem to make time to show up for. Some of the bigger farmers don't understand that logic, because they can often break away for things, whether they just do so or they have other help to continue on. I've always thought it kind of ironic, a lot of folks I know that you'll hardly ever see at their kid's events, will never miss a farm bureau meeting or conference or even a small community event of any kind. Farmers are always the first to volunteer to help with anything... even if they are two weeks behind and the sun is shining for the first 4 day stretch in 15 days.. they'll still put it off to go help out. Oddly enough, some of those folks won't climb down from the cab for an hour to run to their kids play even when they've been running strong for the last 10 days and the end is in sight with no rain in the forecast. Don't get your underwear in a wad thinking I'm calling everybody out. I'm not. I've BEEN that person I'm talking about. Working 12 and 16 hour swings an hour drive each way, Only seeing my family for half an hour on HALF of those days when my shift wasn't opposite of everyone else, and then farming every single day I wasn't at work. I've worked a 16, came in and sprayed for 4 hours and showered and ate and went back to work like an idiot. Could have killed myself or others on the road or at work. I once worked a 20 hour shift after working 16 the shift before, and started raking and baling 25 acres after being up almost 30 hours before starting... and of course it wound up not raining after all. Absolute stupidity. I've seen guys kids who don't come around once they leave. I consider myself one of the lucky ones to realize it before it was too late, and I found avenues to cut back. My life feels like it has taken a 180 since then, and even my hypertension has self-corrected. 

Long story short, be honest with someone starting out as to what it might require, and what it looks like both now and long-term. 22 year old me couldn't see past the end of his nose, never mind 10-20 years down the road. It took me decades to understand that my love for farming wasn't a love. Do I enjoy it, heck yes, but it took my Dad passing away to understand that my drive from an early age to farm was because if I wasn't on a fender eating dust at 8 years old, I would have never seen my Dad. Of all the things I was involved with in school, he attended one thing.. my graduation. Didn't even make it to my boot camp graduation because it was in early October. My Mom passed when I was 12, he was all I had, and if I was ever going to see him, it meant being out on that farm, so in my brain it was just automatic. I did my time in the service, came back to the farm and got a job to support me. I got one of those jobs that you just don't walk away from, so I worked the shifts and continued to try to grow my acreage. There was a point where I could have found a more "regular" hour job, or even a good part-time deal and been fine, but once again, it didn't make sense to walk away from that kind of money to still have to work away from the farm anyway. When I finally put two and two together about what I was missing with my family, and realized the why behind how I thought, I was glad I kept the job and decided to pull back on the farming some. I realized it ends with me. Neither of my kids are going to farm or are even likely to live here. There's nothing at all here if you're not going to farm, so why would they stick around? If it's going to end with me, I'm not willing to work myself to death just to get to that ending and miss out on so many things along the way. 

Some of you can identify with or understand this. Still more of you do so but will never admit it. Yet others will think "I don't know what the heck he's talking about, I've never worked past dark a day in my life". I know you're out there.. I've got a full time farmer neighbor that I don't even know if he knows if his lights work on his equipment, everybody is really behind here with 47" of rainfall so far this year, but It's rare to see them go past 7 pm even at that and good for him if they can make that work. That doesn't work out for most folks with public jobs, and that's not a complaint. That's a decision everyone has to make for themselves.