When Chrissie Manion Zaerpoor bought a farm in Oregon's lush Yamhill County, she brought everything she'd learned as an Intel engineering manager with her.
With a lot of hard work, Chrissie, 45, and her husband Koorosh Zaerpoor, 50, turned Kookoolan Farms into a successful producer of organic dairy products, poultry, eggs and vegetables.
Your mid-life career jump might not be as dramatic as the switch the Zaerpoors made from engineering to organic farming. Even so, you can follow their lead to take what you know and apply it to a new opportunity.
Chrissie Zaerpoor switched careers not because of some long-held dream, but because she needed a new job. In 2004, after years of working together at Intel, she and Koorosh fell in love, left their respective spouses and got married. But corporate policy forbade them from continuing to work together, so Chrissie opted to quit and look for a business she could run and that Koorosh could help on the side while still working full time at Intel.
They settled on farming and bought five acres in 2005. Chrissie had already jumped on the organic food bandwagon to cure ailments she blamed on her high-stress job. Moving from organic shopper to producer was a logical next step.
Farm as Factory
At Intel, Chrissie ran a group that developed prototype processes and transferred them to factories for high-volume production. From the start, she incorporated what she'd learned in the corporate world into farm work, treating it as just another type of factory. "When we learned how to milk cows, for a while we were in research mode, not trying to sell anything or have a clean jar of milk," she says. "It was learning how to get milk out of the cow without getting her mad and getting kicked. We set out a development outline, addressed things one by one, and then worked the process. We were the manual labor until we were confident enough to train someone else."
The couple went through the same steps when it came to raising and slaughtering chickens, which they sell at their farm store and a Portland farmer's market. "We needed five licenses from five state agencies," to butcher chickens, Chrissie says. "It was like qualifying a factory for Intel production. I used all the same Intel processes to do it, general project management skills and being able to keep multiple projects and workers going at the same time."
A Modern Egg and I
The learning curve was steep. If you've ever read The Egg and I, Betty MacDonald's classic 1950s memoir of life as a newlywed city girl transplanted to a rural chicken farm, the Zaerpoors' story will sound familiar. The couple was naïve about everything. Their first tractor was the backyard garden variety, which they quickly outgrew. Chrissie was so ignorant of the basics, a neighbor had to explain how to use the tractor's bucket to scrape mud off a field into a muck heap, a farm fixture.
Their first year on the farm, the couple routinely worked 100 to 120 hours a week. Putting in so much time wouldn't be most people's notion of an ideal mid-life career change. But it's no different from any other start up, Chrissie says. "Every waking moment becomes wrapped up in the business."
Five years in, Kookoolan Farms is thriving. In addition to selling raw milk, eggs and freshly butchered chickens, the couple runs a CSA program that provides fresh produce to customers 17 weeks a year. Their weekend cheese-making classes made a recent Food and Wine list of 100 Tastes to Try. The Zaerpoors also sell mead and kombucha tea, and they recently begun butchering and selling pork, lamb and beef raised by a dozen nearby farmers.
Risky Business
Farming is a risky financially because all their money is in it. "Our home ownership is our business," Chrissie says. "Our income, savings, retirement, property ownership, the stability of our relationship and therefore our family stability, they're all the same thing. How dumb is that?
"On the other hand, it sets you up so you can't fail," she says. "You can't let it fail. That's what propels you to make it successful."
Over time the Zaerpoors hired outside help. The extra hands allowed the couple to act on another dream: becoming foster parents. Earlier this year, they took in three three siblings, ages 7, 6 and 4, on the farm. Chrissie's 9-year-old-son lives with them; she also has two children in their 20s, and Koorosh has two older children who live elsewhere.
If she knew then what she knows now, Chrissie isn't sure she would have made the switch. Still, if she'd chickened out, she wouldn't have accomplished so much,
"It's true for any wonderful life," she says. "You have to be so focused on getting it you're willing to give up just about anything else. A lot of people say, 'Wow, you're living the dream.' I roll my eyes because it wasn't a dream getting to this point."