You could see the pride in Wyatt Bolding’s face as he inspected the perfectly manicured rows of his 280-acre soybean crop in West Carroll Parish, Louisiana.

“I walk this field a lot to make sure it’s doing well,” he told us. “We’ve been blessed this year and the crop looks great. The beans are kind of jumping right now.”

Blessings were a theme that Wyatt – a twenties-something farmer who’s just getting started in the business – kept coming back to during our recent tour of his farm.

“Farmland Partners has been a blessing to me because they’ve given me an opportunity to grow my farm,” he explained. As a young farmer, “it’s just kind of hard to find ground, especially good ground.”

Without finding land of his own to rent and cultivate, his family’s farming operation wouldn’t have been large enough to support Wyatt’s dream of returning to the farm with his wife after college.

Getting into farming is difficult unless you’re born into it or you have mountains of money, he explained. And it’s still challenging even if you have deep pockets and an experienced agricultural family to lean on.

But it’s a challenge Wyatt embraces and knows he’ll overcome with hard work and a little help from people who want to see him succeed. In fact, he just signed a lease extension with Farmland Partners.

“That’s an answer to a prayer right there,” he concluded. “In life, I feel like everybody has a calling, and I feel like this is my calling.”