“I’m gonna delete my GitHub, buy a cow, and never look at a terminal again.”
— Every burnt-out developer, ever.
You’ve heard it. Maybe you’ve said it yourself, after a failed CI pipeline at 3 A.M, or during a standup where “just one more sprint” feels like a life sentence. The phrase “I’ll leave tech and go farm” has become the developer’s weary mantra: part fantasy, part coping mechanism, whispered into lukewarm coffee or typed into a late-night Twitter thread.
For most, it’s a metaphor; a longing for simplicity, slowness, and meaning in a world of abstract logic and infinite scroll.
It’s not a metaphor. It’s my inheritance. It’s memory. It’s mission. It’s home.
I didn’t dream of farming as an escape. I lived it, breathed it, and got dirt under my nails before I ever touched a keyboard.
My First Repository Was a Rabbit Hutch
I didn’t grow up staring at screens. I grew up on a farm, a farmer by lineage.
My parents aren’t hobby gardeners. They’re export growers. For decades, they’ve cultivated French beans that end up in European supermarkets, papayas, okra and spongy gourd (tindora) destined for diaspora kitchens, and biringani (eggplant) that gleams like polished obsidian under the equatorial sun. Their farm isn’t just land; it’s a living supply chain, a testament to resilience, and my first classroom.
My earliest “project” wasn’t a microservice. It was rearing rabbits at age six: building hutches from scrap wood, mixing feed from kitchen leftovers, and learning, the hard way, that predators (stray dogs) don’t respect your MVP.
By eight, I’d claimed a corner of the family plot as my own; just three banana suckers, a row of onions, and a trellis of peas climbing toward the sky. I watered them at dawn, talked to them like they were friends (they were), and tended them every day like they were my first real responsibility.
Even now, when I return to the countryside during holidays, I don’t just “visit.” I dig. I plant tomatoes, prune papaya trees, and test compost ratios like they’re hyperparameters. The soil remembers me. And I remember it.
Why the Joke Hurts; and Why It’s True
Let’s be honest: modern tech work can feel like building castles in the cloud while your soul starves.
- - You ship features no one uses
- -You refactor code that’ll be deprecated in six months
- - You optimize for “engagement” while the planet burns
- - You’re told AI will “change everything”; but your job feels smaller, not bigger
Farming, in contrast, offers irrefutable truth: plant a seed. Nurture it. Harvest (or learn why you didn’t). No ambiguity. No vanity metrics. Just life, death, and the quiet miracle of growth.
That’s why developers romanticize it. But here’s what the meme misses: farming isn’t peaceful; it’s relentless.
My parents wake before sunrise, not for a standup, but to check irrigation lines before the heat sets in. They negotiate with middlemen who pay pennies for produce sold at euros per kilo abroad. They pray for rain but fear floods. They lose entire crops to blight or border closures, but still they start again. Because that’s what farmers do.
Farming isn’t a retreat from reality. It’s reality; raw and unfiltered.
So when I say I want to “leave code for farming,” I’m not chasing a pastoral fantasy. I’m honoring a legacy, and upgrading it. I’m not quitting engineering. I’m expanding it into the soil, the seasons, and the silence between bird calls at dawn.
Not Abandoning Tech: Reclaiming It for the Land
I don’t want to burn my laptop and live off-grid. I want to build a farm where code and compost coexist.
Imagine:
- - AI models that predict crop disease from drone imagery
- - IoT sensors monitoring soil moisture in real time
- - Automated irrigation systems driven by weather APIs and local rainfall data
- - Blockchain-ledgered supply chains so consumers know exactly where their food came from
- - Computer vision models trained on local crop diseases using images from a basic Android phone, not a satellite
- - Soil sensors built with Raspberry Pi and LoRaWAN, sending moisture data to a dashboard I’ll code
- - Automated shade nets that roll out when temperature hits a threshold; triggered by a weather API and a cron job
- - Transparent export tracking so a shopper in Berlin can scan a QR code and see my father’s hands harvesting the beans they’re about to cook
This isn’t sci-fi. It’s necessary.
Smallholder and export farmers like my parents are the backbone of global food systems; yet they’re often excluded from the very technologies that could reduce waste, increase yield, and restore dignity to their labor.
As an engineer, I have a responsibility: to build tools that serve the soil, not just the shareholders.
My dream? A farmhouse; not as a symbol of escape, but of integration. A place where my Kubernetes cluster hums in the same room that stores seedlings. Where my poetry is written under a mango tree, and my CI/CD pipeline deploys updates while I prune tomato vines.
The Deeper Truth: We Are Ecosystems, Not Endpoints
I love engineering. I thrive on designing fault-tolerant systems, debugging race conditions, and watching a neural net finally converge. But I’ve learned something vital:
A life lived only in the digital is disembodied.
You can’t debug loneliness with a linter. You can’t refactor grief into a clean function. You can’t Dockerize your longing for belonging.
But when I press my palm into warm earth, when I smell the petrichor after the first rains, when I watch a papaya flower turn into fruit over weeks, I remember: I am part of a cycle larger than any sprint.
My poetry, my engineering, my code, my garden; they’re not separate pursuits. They’re different dialects of the same language: creation.
So when I say I’ll “leave code for farming,” don’t hear burnout. Hear homecoming.
I’m not quitting engineering. I’m expanding its definition: to include pollinators, pH levels, and the patience required to wait for a seed to sprout.
Grow What Matters
To every developer scrolling through this, weary and wondering if there’s more: I see you. I’ve been you.
But maybe the answer isn’t to flee the terminal. Maybe it’s to re-root your tech in something real.
You don’t need to buy a cow. But you might ask: What am I really building? Who does it serve? Does it help life grow, or just data grow?
Because in the end, whether you’re training a model or transplanting seedlings, you’re still tending to something fragile, hopeful, and alive.
And that, whether in soil or silicon, is sacred work.