That’s certainly been the case in Wisconsin. The region’s farmland has been so saturated with small-scale farmers in recent years that the Dane County Farmers’ Market, in Madison, has a five-year waitlist for securing a booth to sell produce. Chris Holman left a career in the military and academia to start a small farm with his wife outside of Madison. For The Atlantic’s series of interviews with American workers, I spoke with him about running a farm with no agricultural background, and how his other professions have helped him be a better full-time farmer. The interview that follows has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Adrienne Green: How did you become a farmer?

Chris Holman: Getting into farming was not totally an accident, but it was something we did not see coming. This is our seventh season, so the USDA considers us beginning farmers, but also because we’re still learning. Neither Maria, my wife, nor I grew up on a farm. I moved from Oregon, where I had started an Arabic program after being a linguist in the military, to Madison, Wisconsin, to start a Ph.D. program. The discussion about raising animals and growing vegetables was based on my having nine months [with nothing to do] before my Ph.D. program started.

I thought about getting a part-time job, but I figured that I had enough in my savings to try something different. The initial idea was to start a hobby farm to grow our own food. At the time, Maria worked at the [Madison’s] Tornado Steak House, and they actually ended up buying six chickens a week from us for their Sunday night chicken dinner. We felt like we were kings of the world.

Then, another restaurant wanted to talk to us, but the owner said they would need about 40 chickens a week—which was far beyond what we had been producing. It was the fork in the road: Do we pursue this demand and use it to grow a bigger farm? Or do we stick with what we've been up to? I said, "Let's try it out." We pooled our resources, took some of our savings, and bought the infrastructure we would need to raise a lot more chickens. In our first years, we raised 4,000 chickens. My point of view was that if the farm ever imploded because we didn't know what we were doing, a fallback position in academia was still there.

Green: How did you learn how to run a farm? It doesn't sound like agriculture was a part of your background.

Holman: The first year was exceptionally difficult because we still lived in Madison and I was teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. So when we tried to find land for the farm, the cost was pretty prohibitive. Maria's folks had some land a couple hours away that we rented from them. Her mom who would monitor the animals while we were away, and her father helped us get shelters built for the animals. We drove back and forth between Madison and the farm every weekend, and when it was time to take the chickens in for processing, we'd have to do it in the middle of the week. I would pick Maria up around 11:00 p.m., we would drive and get to the farm around 1:00 a.m., go to sleep, wake up at 4:00 a.m., catch a bunch of chickens, take them to the processor, come back, shower, and then go right back to Madison for work.