Farming on a small family farm can be a very cyclical way of life. A ten-minute hailstorm can wipe out a year’s worth of work. Cycles are 12-18 months, and can stretch into a 24-30 month downturn with two years of bad weather in a row. I draw the analogy to the current economic downturn as this–it’s the weather.  In bad-weather scenarios, the wisest path can often be to dress and act accordingly.

In my experience, farmers (I include my mom, Fern, who’s 82 and still living on my family’s farm back in Indiana, still going at a pace that would be considered ‘active’ for someone half her age) are some of the most improvisational people you’ll ever meet. Here are three ways that family farmers typically deal with or hedge against the down cycles:

1) Improve infrastructure. There’s always a fence that needs mending, an implement that could use some re-tooling, an out-building in need of paint.

2) Diversify the portfolio. The farms that best weathered the bad weather had multiple revenue streams: A range of crops and livestock; they produced non-farm income by taking jobs that helped support and maintain the family farm lifestyle. Could mean doing mechanics’ work; could mean playing with a dance band, or auctioneering. I never knew a farmer that didn’t have multiple ways of earning money.

3) Education. The farmers that are most resilient were always learning. Reading, networking, experimenting with new (and old) agri-tech, expanding their horizons — those were habits. One’s mind, like everything else on the farm, had the obligation to grow.

In what seems like a lifetime ago, I worked on the film Country, which stars Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard. It was interesting in a clinical kind of way to be on location outside Waterloo, Iowa, helping tell a story about a family farm that was floundering and doomed. As part of my work, I did video interviews with half a dozen Iowa farmers, some of whom had lost their farms, others who’d figured out a way to survive and and, in some instances, thrive during an economic downturn that put the squeeze on them like other business sectors are getting squeezed today. Along with observing Lange and Shepard, who were falling madly in love at the time, canoodle steamily on exterior sets where the winter temperatures were well below zero, the farmer interviews were the most compelling part of my Country gig.

What I learned about those farmers was an affirmation of what I already knew: The farmers who survived and thrived were nimble, flexible, idiosyncratic in their approach to their business. They were not bound by scripted behaviors–doing things the same way their folks and grandfolks had done it. The farmers who stuck to the old script? Those were the ones who lost their farms. The farmers who got creative and responded to the changing times by changing their behaviors are the ones who lived to farm another day.

I remember talking about this with Wilford Brimley, an actor who was just coming into his own at the time Country got made, at age 65, after many, many years of effort to succeed in his chosen profession. Forty years of taking bit parts, working odd jobs like blacksmithing, and dealing with a level of rejection that most businesspeople cannot even fathom let alone tolerate, had steeled Brimley to the point where he had little sympathy for family farmers or anyone else who gave up–on anything. “These people losing their farms,” he said to me at the time, “are the same ones who’d be losing the dry cleaning store if they owned that.”

Brimley made two points with that statement. First, that a good part of success is simply never giving up. In Iowa, where ‘they’re so by-god stubborn they can stand touching noses for a week at a time and never see eye to eye’, the survivors and thrivers at the time were just as all-around relentless as Wilford Brimley. Second, Brimley’s statement highlights how there are qualities inherent in businesspeople who can navigate through the turbulent waters of a down economy that set them apart from those who get swamped. It doesn’t matter whether your profession is farming, acting or dry cleaning. These qualities can all be grouped under the rubric of…(guess what?)…improvisation.

When I’d bring this up in conversation with my fellow dotcommers, people would stare at me like I’d just said I expected beanie-copters to be making a big comeback soon. Douse? How un-real. How un-important. Nobody lives on the land any more.

We walk on dead skin through insulated, ventilated, carpeted chambers, through grottos of polished glass and granite, into cocoons of silicon and fiberglas and stainless steel, and we are seldom in actual physical contact with the Earth, the very entity that sustains us. That is simply the way the game of life is played, and how most people choose to behave in order to derive productivity and wealth from it.

Today, quite suddenly, we have the ability to change the way the game is played, and Wild Blue Communications is one of the agents of this change. By offering high speed satellite internet to rural areas in 48 states, Wild Blue makes it possible for people who live remotely to participate in the Networked World. Think of it! Instead of your only real estate choice being a starter condo owned by an absentee landlord in a crappy part of a big city, it’s conceivable that you can own 10 acres — or 40 or 200! — with a stand-alone home and several out-buildings in an area where your rooster is your alarm clock. Yes, no longer is the country lifestyle the domain of the lonely and longing Barbara Kingsolver heroine. Tom and Huck and Becky, meet Tai and Erica and Kuldip. Those of you who choose to bake bread and can beets while the CAD models for your Chinese theme park project download (Wild Blue delivers 1.5 Mbps downstream, 256 Kbps upstream) may now choose to do so. Yes, the small family farm is coming back, thanks to Wild Blue. And this time, most of the manure is virtual.

Wild Blue, based outside Denver in Greenwood Village, Colorado, is a partnership of Liberty Media (33%), IntelSat (30%), the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative (16%) and other other, smaller investors like EchoStar, Bell Canada and Kleiner-Perkins. The company launched its first satellite in 2005 and today is busy building out its network to reach everyone who wants to tame a horse during the day and Ruby on Rails at night.

Families who have traditionally lived on small farms don’t necessarily do it because they like the work. The work is a pain in the patoot. No, the big reason families live on small farms is because of the lifestyle. The freedom. The space. The potential do do exactly what they want with a nice big chunk of land. I have always suspected that many small farmers are secret artists, for whom the land is a canvas, and the life they and their families etch onto it, their art. Wild Blue, the only provider of its kind, makes it more possible than it has been in a long time for a modern family to etch a life in the Earthly medium.

David Leonard, Wild Blue’s CEO, estimates that “there are currently ten to fifteen million U. S. households in areas where there are fewer than 100 homes per square mile,” and identifies this demo as Wild Blue’s market. “I don’t think there’s a massive social migration back to the land, but there’s definitely a niche in the population that wants to do that, and wants more space,” he says. Leonard says that Wild Blue, whose subscriber base grew 38% in 2007, will generate $40 million in cash flow this year and will be at an annual run rate of $80 million by December. That’s the short term. Longer term, he sees the company adding to its reach with $350 million in addition capital investment over the next three years.

For those of you who might want to weigh playing the small family farm game, here is a check list of PROS and CONS of life in the country provided as a public service by someone who lived it for eighteen years:

PROS: Your own archery or skeet shooting range. Your own golf hole, or your own croquet court where players must wear all white and drink gin rickeys when they play. All the gardening you can eat, and then some. Horses. Trees you know by name. A barn with a carpentry shop and an art studio and a recording studio and a basketball hoop and a skateboard ramp and chickens. Room for dogs and children to romp. Physical labor. Pick up trucks and tractors, and stuff you can hook to them and pull around. Your very own pitchfork, and more cool tools to bludgeon, probe, slice, carve, plane, whip, knife, nail, hammer and chop than you’d see in three Saw movies. Small bridges over meandering creeks. Snakes, crawdads, beavers, foxes, wild turkeys, deer and many other exotic creatures in close proximity. Wild blackberries. Owls and other birds, singing away all day. Your own lake, that you can name yourself, where you can fish for fish you eat for dinner that night. Four wheelers and dirt bikes and your own track that you build yourself. A cow you can milk yourself and her cute calf that you give a cute name, like Tuffy. The only one running around like a chicken with its head cut off is the chicken with its head cut off. Big bonfires. Quiet. Storms. Sunsets. Stars.

CONS: Many things on a farm can cost you a finger, or worse. Some really spooky sounds come from the woods at night. Horseflies. The poisons are not under lock and key. Traveling anywhere by air takes at least all day. Someone has to gut and scale the fish you catch in your lake if you want to eat them for dinner and it’s not going to be you. Chronically dirty fingernails. Worms and bugs and spiders and mice and ticks and mites and chiggers and other exotic creatures in close, sometimes intimate, proximity. Gravel roads send vehicles straight to hell. People who visit you from the city will constantly ask, “What’s that smell?” when you can’t smell anything out of the ordinary. Many of the neighbor kids will own shotguns. That cute calf, Tuffy, will grow into a 1200 pound steer and someone will buy him and eat him, and you will have to explain it to a child who will cry about it. One day you discover your barn on fire, and you see a car parked on a hill two miles away, and you know whoever is sitting in that car started the fire. You never find out who it is. You and your family will soon flee to the comfort and safety of the big city.

For sure, this move is not for everyone. It is, after all, the boonies we are talking about, and you will, by definition, become a hick when you move to French Lick. But anyone who has spent significant time living on the land, even those of us who were held hostage there (call it the Stockyard Syndrome), will tell you that what you gain from the experience outweighs what you think you are missing.

In the Networked World, we all have the potential to reassemble splinters of history and knowledge into productive new forms. Maybe it’s not dousing we’re doing, maybe we’re not using the forked limb of a peach tree to do it, maybe what we feel tugging at us is not water. But if we make the inquiry, if we listen well…we will feel…we will find what is concealed from us…and whatever it is that we find will offer fresh sustenance to us and our communities.