Animal Farm 101
By Quinn Bonney
Not so long ago—halfway through my junior year at Warren Wilson College—I decided to become a farmer. What began as a whimsical thought has since evolved into a daily immersion into the rhythm of the land and animals and farm life in the rolling hills of western North Carolina, where I’m paying the beautiful, soaking-wet, deranged price of that crazy decision.
My day-to-day life isn’t too different from that of any other college student. I go to class, study, hang out with friends, and eat slop in the dining hall. The difference is that I do these things with cow and sheep poop smeared all over my pants, and probably smelling pretty ripe. No one complains about it—at least not to my face. I think my fellow students are accustomed to the grime by now, or just too polite to say anything. As for me and the other Farm Freaks, as we call ourselves—we wear the poop and carry the stink with pride.
Here at Warren Wilson, every student works. We move through the hum of the campus machine, each of us a cog in its gears, eight to 20 hours a week, doing time on one or more of 50-odd crews: running the mail room, dining hall, queer-resource center, or biology labs, or composting, gardening, landscaping, newspapering, etc.
Before the pandemic, I’m told the crews were more than labor forces; they were communities, each with its own heartbeat, its own culture. The Heavy-Duty Crew, tasked with cleaning the dorms, once stood as the most cohesive. They took pride in the work from which others turned away and found meaning in the refuse left behind by their peers after nights of laughter, study, and partying.
Today, only the farm, garden, and landscaping crews seem to carry forward that sense of belonging. Something about working on the land brings people together in a different way than other jobs.
We are a strange group, the Farm Crew—practically a cult, drawn to each other in a way that might seem strange to outsiders. One thing could be that we keep up the annual tradition of making a calendar with photos of us doing our daily chores bare-ass naked.
My path to farming was accidental. After two years of running the campus newspaper and feeling thoroughly burnt out, I needed a change. Talking to people all the time was draining. I was sick of emails, interviews, and administrators breathing down my neck about the newspaper’s “PR problems.” I began searching, at first unconsciously, for a way to step back. My mother said I needed more sunlight, and I agreed. One of the original draws for coming to Warren Wilson was the 1,200-acre rural campus in the Appalachian Mountains, and I had yet to take full advantage of it. The farm life called to me, and besides, they had great toys.
Growing up, I was always obsessed with tinkering—taking apart appliances, breaking things (much to my parents’ dismay), and fixing them again. Any time something broke or my car had troubles I would be giddy with excitement about trying to fix it, even if it ate up far more effort and time than taking it to a shop. It wasn’t about being cheap—although that certainly was a benefit. It was about pride in doing something myself, whether it was fixing the suspension, repairing the air-conditioning compressor, or replacing the tie rods. I believed it then, and I believe it now: Being a mechanic is just playing with big, greasy, metal Legos. It’s just as fun too.
I still relish mechanical work, even at its most grueling and frustrating. While I worked as a summer camp cook a few years back, 16-hour days nonstop, I blew the engine in my car. So, as a person who had no time in the day to do anything but sweat over a hot stove, I did the most absurd thing possible: Bought an engine off eBay and did a full engine swap in a gravel lot next to the chow hall during my short breaks between meals. It’s something I wouldn’t ever want to do again, but it was Type 2 fun—awful and miserable in the moment, but a lot of fun in retrospect.
All of which factored in to why I decided to return to my tinkering roots and try my hand working on the Warren Wilson campus vehicles. The first thing I did was go to school administrators with the idea of restarting the Auto Body Crew to maintain the work fleet. They shot down the idea right away, though, due to a lack of funding and no crew supervisor.
Instead, they pointed me toward the barn and suggested the Farm Crew might need a mechanic.
If you’ve ever been around a farm and seen the abuse put on farm vehicles, it’s a sorry sight. In my farm’s case, a frightening one. When I went over to check things out, I found a fleet of vehicles, many of them missing lights and doors, that had been worked on for decades by students, mostly MacGyvered into operation with electrical tape and fence wire. There was an SUV named Baby that could only be started by flipping a knife switch, turning the key to a specific point, and pushing a button glued to the dash—all because replacing the steering column was too expensive.
What really caught my attention was the tractors, massive diesel behemoths that from the minute I saw them, I desperately wanted to take apart and rebuild and operate. Though I knew practically nothing about tractors or farm implements, I somehow managed to convince the managers that I should be the one to fix them, an opportunity for which I was woefully underqualified.
This is what I think college’s greatest value is—Warren Wilson’s, anyway: Dumb opportunities that students get to fuck up and from which we then get to learn.
It’s been over a year ago now, and I have never learned so much in my whole life. Not about biology, anthropology, or art, but about how to put up a high-tension fence, rebuild a motor, and weld just about anything. Since signing on with the Farm Crew I’ve also kindled a love for animals, too. I still do most of the engine work but have joined the ruminant sub-crew that manages the cattle and sheep. I spend my days moving cattle and setting paddocks, and it’s truly euphoric.
I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life. I’ve been a chef, sailing instructor, journalist, astronomy teacher, and a scoopologist at an ice cream parlor. Farming trumps all of these.
Lately I’ve been worried that I might be caught up in a romanticized situationship with farming, and that I’ll eventually move on and become obsessed with some other job. But then again, farming takes a lifetime to really understand. My managers are masters of the weather, soil, vegetation, seasons, veterinary science, mechanics, finances, and the land—knowledge that can’t be solely taught in a lecture hall, but that has to also be learned through direct experience.
A friend of mine only truly understood how to properly use a sledgehammer after they crushed their own hand with a poorly aimed swing. You learn by doing, and that knowledge leaves its mark in broken fingers.
I’m by no means a masochist, but I’ve never enjoyed myself more than when my Farm Crew friends and I herded cattle through the freezing rain, soaked to head to toe, with everything imaginable going wrong. The farm experience has changed everything for me. I’m sorry to my parents if they’re reading this, but I don’t put the same energy into academics or college that I did when I arrived at Warren Wilson. I go to class and do my work, but my mind wanders; I end up researching tractor hydraulic parts or thinking about what I need to prepare for the afternoon’s sheep working session.
Once I graduate from here, I don’t think I’ll use my anthropology and sociology degree for much, except to sound overly academic at parties or pull some 50-cent word out in a debate. My brother is probably right that what’s essentially going on here is that I’m paying good tuition money and room and board all to have my labor exploited.
But maybe we are all a little exploited in one way or another. Either way, I think there’s something valuable in this kind of work that goes beyond a paycheck, or a diploma.
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Quinn Bonney studies cultural anthropology and sociology at Warren Wilson College and is due to graduate in May of 2025. His best friend is a cow named Judy who likes to have her head scratched. He doesn’t know what he does in his free time because he’s yet to have any. Quinn is a former photojournalist in the Fredericksburg area and promotes his photos on Instagram: @photo.quinn.
