We say: Come on in; the farming's fine.

We left our jobs as engineers and went into business together, establishing a Rockwall County farm that grows flowers, herbs and produce for the Dallas-area market. We find the work to be both extremely hard and fantastically rewarding.

We started out primarily as specialty cut-flower growers with a small percentage of total planting space in vegetable and herb crops. But due to the overwhelming demand for local, fresh, healthy food, we have done a complete turnaround. Even now, we have a long way to go to meet demand. We have never advertised. Other than a few newspaper stories and mentions in regional magazine articles, our customer base has grown strictly on word of mouth.

Point is: There is a fast-growing demand for the kind of agriculture we practice.

Although we both love working the land, we have also grown into healthy-food advocates since we started farming primarily food crops. The state of our industrialized food system is alarming. The fast-food industry has significantly changed not only our culture but also how we as a nation treat the environment and the creatures we get our food from – and not for the better.

Consumers are getting wise to this and changing the way they shop for food. Yet even if you buy non-processed conventional and organic foods in grocery stores, you may not realize that most of it travels an average of 1,500 miles before it gets to the shelf. That represents a tremendous amount of wasted energy and results in a food product that is neither as healthy nor as nutritious as what we can pick from the ground and feed to somebody within hours of harvest.

While we each made a great living in our previous high-tech jobs, we paid a high price in terms of stress and health. After sitting behind a computer for years, taking home good money and yet not knowing what real good we were doing in the world, farming has given us exactly the opposite experience.

It is hard to describe to somebody the satisfaction in knowing you are feeding people healthy food. While we may not be making the same money as we did in our previous lives, farming has proven to be far more rewarding in just about every other way.

The fellow farmers and food producers we've met are some of the kindest, most well-adjusted people we've ever known. And our customers' dedication continues to amaze us.

We feel that organic farming is a viable option for young people. Aside from the unmet consumer demand, the price of conventional (and non-local organic) food will keep rising with energy costs. Besides, we are fast becoming a country that cannot feed itself.

We tell people interested in farming to go for it, even if they start on a very small scale and even if it is only part-time. The best way to start out is to find a farmer willing to mentor, which is easier to do in areas where there are still many active farmers. We've volunteered at local farms to learn from other farmers' experience.

Look for land to lease or rent. Land prices near urban areas are usually too high to make it feasible to purchase for farming. On the other hand, being close to an urban area means more customers and potentially better prices. And the farther the food has to be trucked to market, the more it hurts the bottom line. Some folks solve this problem with unconventional ideas, such as using vacant city lots or renting backyard spaces. It's a complex challenge, and meeting it requires trade-offs.

There will be times when crops are lost to insects or weather hazards. If you are diversified in your planting plan, with multiple crops planted at multiple times per year, your risk is less than the farmer who plants hundreds of acres of the same crop.

It's not an exact science, which was a big difference for us compared to what we were used to in engineering. But the same troubleshooting skills we honed in our previous jobs benefit us in farming. In fact, the work is much more challenging mentally because there are so many more aspects to it than in most conventional jobs.

Truly, there's never a dull moment for farmers. But if you are up for the challenges – the weather, the bugs, the long hours and more – it's an amazingly rich way to live.

Laurie Bostic and Kim Martin own and operate Barking Cat Farm (www.barkingcatfarm.com) in Heath. Their e-mail address is This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

How do they do it?

The primary method of retail sales at Barking Cat Farm in Rockwall County is via the CSA model.

CSA – community-supported agriculture – is a system in which subscribers pay upfront for the growing season. Each week everybody gets a box with the same contents, representing a sampling of whatever crops are coming in at the time. The farm has a Food CSA, a Flower CSA and an Egg CSA. When the owners opened CSAs to subscribers, they filled immediately, and they now have waiting lists for each.

Any food or flower crops that don't go into the CSA boxes are sold off the truck each week.