Cracking the Red Fire Code

Not long into my visit, I joined Ryan and Sarah for lunch at their farmhouse. Their kitchen was small but well-used, packed with cookbooks and hand-labeled herb jars. They served bean sandwiches, open face on local nine-grain bread and topped with thick-cut cheddar. As we ate, I asked Ryan how he ended up becoming a full-time farmer. I figured that if I wanted to understand what made his life appealing today, I needed to first understand how he got here.

As you encountered in Rule #1 and #2 of this book, by this point in my quest I had developed an unconventional theory on how people end up loving what they do. I argued in Rule #1 that “follow your passion” is bad advice, as the vast majority of people don’t have pre-existing passions waiting to be discovered and matched to a job. In Rule #2, I then countered that people with compelling careers instead start by getting good at something rare and valuable—building what I called “career capital”—and then cashing in this capital for the traits that make great work great. In this understanding, finding the right work pales in importance to working right. As Ryan told me his story over lunch, I was gratified to realize that his life provides a terrific case study of these ideas in action.

To start, I’ll emphasize that Ryan did not follow his passion into farming. Instead, like many people who end up loving what they do, he stumbled into his profession, and then found that his passion for the work increased along with his expertise. Ryan grew up in Granby, but is not from a farming family. “Growing up, I had little exposure to professional growing,” he explained. In middle school, Ryan was drawn to a universal interest: making extra spending cash. This entrepreneurial streak led him to a series of schemes, from taking on a paper route to collecting cans for the local recycling center. His business breakthrough, however, came when he started collecting wild blueberries and selling them by the carton. “I put up an umbrella next to the road,” he told me, “and started my first farm stand.” This, he discovered, was a good way to make a buck.

Ryan advanced from wild-picked berries to selling extra produce from his parents’ backyard garden. Looking to increase revenue, he then talked his parents into letting him take over their garden. “My dad was more than happy with that arrangement,” he recalls. It was here that Ryan decided to get serious about career capital acquisition. “I read everything about growing that I could get my hands on… zillions of different things,” he told me. Soon he expanded his parents’ garden to cover most of the backyard, bringing in compost by the truckload to increase yield.

By the time Ryan was in high school he was renting ten acres from a local farmer and hiring part-time help during the summer harvest. He took a loan from the Massachusetts Farm Services Agency to finance the purchase of an old tractor and expanded his business beyond his farm stand to also sell at a farmers market and to a small number of wholesale clients. After graduating high school, Ryan headed off to Cornell’s agriculture college to further hone his skills with a degree in fruit and vegetable horticulture—returning home on the weekends in order to keep his rented fields healthy.

Here’s what struck me about Ryan’s story: He didn’t just decide one day that he was passionate about produce and then courageously head off into the countryside to start farming. Instead, by the time he made the plunge into full-time farming in 2001, when he bought his first land, he had been painstakingly acquiring relevant career capital for close to a decade. This might be less sexy than the daydream of quitting your day job one day and then waking up to the rooster’s crow the next, but it matches what I consistently found when researching the previous two rules: You have to get good before you can expect good work.

As lunch concluded, I had learned the Red Fire history, but I was still unclear on what exactly made its presence so appealing. As we left the kitchen to tour the farm, however, an insight began to develop. I noticed that as Ryan explained his crops, much of his early wariness fell away. Ryan is shy. When he talks in front of crowds, he tends to rush his sentences to completion, as if apologetic for interrupting. But once he got going on his farming strategies, explaining the difference between Merrimack sandy loam and Paxton silt loam, for example, or his new weeding strategy for the carrot beds, his shyness gave way to the enthusiasm of a craftsman who knows what he’s doing and has been given the privilege to put this knowledge to work.

I noticed a similar enthusiasm in Sarah when she discussed her efforts to manage the farm’s CSA program and public image. When Sarah joined Ryan in Granby in 2007, she was already an advocate for both organic farming and community-supported agriculture. She had studied environmental policy at Vassar, where she’d stumbled on the college’s Poughkeepsie Farm Project CSA. Inspired, she started her own small-scale CSA program after graduating, in nearby Stafford Springs, Connecticut. Coming to Red Fire gave Sarah the opportunity to promote these beliefs on a larger scale—a challenge she clearly relishes.

This, I came to realize, is what’s so appealing about the Red Fire lifestyle: control. Ryan and Sarah invested their (extensive) career capital into gaining control over what they do and how they do it. Their working lives aren’t easy—if I learned anything from my visit to Red Fire, it’s that farming is a complicated and stressful pursuit—but their lives are their own to direct, and they’re good at this. In other words, the Red Fire appeal is not about working outside in the sun—to farmers, I learned, the weather is something to battle, not to enjoy. And it’s not about getting away from the computer screen—Ryan spends all winter using Excel spreadsheets to plan his crop beds, while Sarah spends a healthy chunk of each day managing the farm operations on the office computer. It is, instead, autonomy that attracts the Granby groupies: Ryan and Sarah live a meaningful life on their own terms.

As I’ll argue next, control isn’t just the source of Ryan and Sarah’s appeal, but it turns out to be one of the most universally important traits that you can acquire with your career capital—something so powerful and so essential to the quest for work you love that I’ve taken to calling it the dream-job elixir.