Homesteading With a Corporate Job: Our Rising Oaks Story

You don’t have to choose.

Rising Oaks Family Farm · ~1,000 words · 5 min read

Maybe you’re standing in the grocery store aisle, wondering if homesteading with a corporate job is even possible. You turned over a package of ground beef, felt a quiet unease you couldn’t quite name. Maybe you’ve scrolled through homesteading accounts at midnight, nine kids tucked in and laptop open, and felt the pull of something slower, more rooted, more real.

We have seven kids. I have a demanding corporate job. We don’t have time. We don’t have land. We don’t have the first clue what we’re doing.

We said all of it. And then, in 2019, we started farming anyway.

This is our story. Not because we’ve figured it out (we haven’t) but because we’re a few years down the road you might be standing at the beginning of, and we want you to know: you don’t have to choose.

The Wake-Up We Didn’t Ask For

We’re a Catholic family of nine. I’ve spent two decades in financial services, MBA in hand, doing the kind of demanding corporate work that doesn’t leave a lot of margin. My wife and I weren’t farmers. We weren’t even particularly outdoorsy. But somewhere along the way, we woke up to what was actually in our food supply and couldn’t un-see it.

The more we researched, the more unsettled we became. The industrial food system isn’t designed around your family’s health. It’s designed around yield, efficiency, and shelf life. We knew enough about systems and incentives to understand that the interests at work weren’t ours. And once we knew that, we felt a responsibility to do something about it. Not just complain. Act.

So we did the only thing that felt honest: we decided to take ownership of our family’s food.

Two Acres, Some Chickens, and a Lot of Humility

We didn’t start with 150 acres. We started with 2. And we started with chickens, because everyone starts with chickens. They’re forgiving enough to survive your mistakes, which in year one, there were plenty of.

“We didn’t know what we were doing. We read books, watched videos, called people who knew more than us, and lost a few birds along the way. That’s just the truth.”

From chickens, we added pigs. From pigs, cows. Slowly, the operation grew. Not because we had a grand plan, but because each step taught us enough to take the next one. We moved from 2 acres to 10, then from 10 to the 150 we steward today. We now raise beef, pork, poultry, and dairy under the name Rising Oaks Family Farm.

That name isn’t accidental. It’s anchored in Isaiah 61:3, the promise of beauty from ashes, strength from mourning, oaks of righteousness planted by the Lord. That verse has been a compass for us when the work gets hard, which it does. Regularly.

Faith Wasn’t the Backdrop. It Was the Foundation.

Isaiah 61:3

We didn’t start this farm to be countercultural. We started it because our faith calls us to stewardship of creation, of our family, of the bodies God gave us. When you believe that the land is not ours but entrusted to us, farming stops being a hobby and starts being a vocation.

That framing has sustained us through the hard seasons. And there are hard seasons. Livestock that don’t make it. Equipment that breaks at the worst possible time. The sheer logistical weight of running a farm, raising seven children, and maintaining a demanding career simultaneously. Faith doesn’t make those things easier. But it gives them meaning, and meaning changes everything.

What It Actually Looks Like to Do Both

I’ll be honest with you: I’m not waking up at 4 AM to muck stalls before my 7 AM calls. That’s not our reality. We’ve built systems, hired good people, and learned how to delegate. My 20 years in leadership made me a better farm operator, probably, than I would have been otherwise. You learn fast that you can’t do everything, and the goal is to build something that doesn’t require your constant presence.

My wife carries an enormous weight here, and that’s worth naming. This is a family operation in the truest sense. We make decisions together, struggle together, and celebrate the wins together, even the small ones, like the first calf born on our property, or the first time a customer told us our beef changed how they thought about food.

Is it a lot? Yes. Do we recommend it for everyone? No. But for the right family, faith-driven and intentional and willing to learn and not too proud to fail publicly, it is one of the most meaningful things we’ve ever done.

We’re Still Figuring It Out

We want to be clear about this, because the internet has enough experts on mountaintops looking down at everyone still climbing. We are not those people. We are a few years ahead of you on the same road. We have made expensive mistakes, held animals that didn’t make it, questioned our decisions, and had plenty of conversations that started with “Why are we doing this again?”

The answer, every time, comes back to the same things: our faith, our family, and our conviction that how we eat and how we live are not separate questions. We’re not trying to go back to 1850. We’re trying to build something honest and rooted inside a modern life that has room for both a corporate career and a pasture full of cows.

That’s what Rising Oaks is. Not a perfect farm. Not a finished story. Just a family that decided to stop waiting until the conditions were right and start doing the work.

You don’t have to quit your career. You don’t have to have the perfect property. You don’t have to have it figured out before you start.

You just have to start.

Ready to take your first step?

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Your First 90 Days on the Homestead · Free at risingoaksfamilyfarm.com