So how do you live on a farm, anyway?

On Monday, I had to attend the weekly big-deal business meeting at work. Since I'm one of the "creatives," I usually am exempt from such meetings, but now that the economy is going down the tubes, I'm required to start going. We learned that we all need to "pull together" and "work really, really hard" so that we don't, you know, "get wiped out in the extensive corporate layoff everyone knows is coming but refuses to admit out loud."

Basically, I spent the first part of the meeting (which lasted foreeeeeeever) thinking about all the work piled on my desk and how I couldn't do it because I was stuck in a room with sales people speaking in acronymns and totally foreign business lingo. Then I switched to thinking about lunch for awhile. After that, I started to daydream about what would happen if I did get laid off (which is unlikely for several reasons).

Then I decided, layoff or no, that something was seriously wrong with my life. Why was I sitting there listening to all this corporate garbage when I could be, you know, living? Yeah, I know, it's not the most original thought, but there's nothing like a bland-yet-pressure-filled business meeting to remind you that working in the corpo world sucks. Hard. The thing is, I don't even hate my job. I often kind of like it. I can be creative, the hours are flexible, and so on. But weekly business meetings like this have a way of changing my perspective.

So I started thinking that what I really want out of life -- what I've wanted since I was a kid, really -- is to live in the country somewhere on enough land to support a few horses. Not a lot. Just two. Or three. Okay, three horses and one draft mule for my significant other. (He is totally non-horsey, but we've decided that if we ever do live out somewhere more rural and I have horses, he's getting a mule and will ride Western. But he will let the mule stop and eat grass whenever it wants. I tried to explain that if he did this, he would never get to ride anywhere at all, but I don't think he cared.)

Why am I not taking steps to do this? I'm a smart person. If I somehow managed to mold my very non-corporate self into a job like this, then surely I can do anything I put my mind to. Right now, the only way I can imagine this happening is if I continue to rack up experience in my field and eventually pursue a freelance career. But freelancing full time would be a lot of work, probably even more than working this office job, and I'm not sure if that is how I envision my rural lifestyle, either.

So the more I thought about it, the more I wondered: How exactly do you go about living on a farm and surviving financially? I know, I know, I'm really exposing myself as the city slicker I am. Do you just suck it up and drive super long distances to get to a "normal" job? Try to get some income from, uh, farm work somehow? (NOT backyard breeding, I hope!) It just seems that with the economy tanking like it is, it would be more difficult than ever to live in a rural environment. Or am I just totally clueless? Well, obviously. But I'd still like to know.

So if you live on a farm (by "farm" I mean even just that you have a stable and your own horses on the property) how do you do it? And do you have any kind of apprentice program that teaches city slicker corpo slaves how to exist down home on the farm? If so, sign me up. I'm willing to trade 15 lanyards covered with various business logos, a box of nice black pens, the stapler from my desk, and about a million paper clips. Deal?