If you are going to be a farmer, there is Dukkha, there is plenty of Dukkha. You are looking at someone who was a farmer for a few years, and we realized that there was kind of a war going on within.
We were lucky in the beginning, we had three years before the birds and the insects found us. We had a farm that was basically in the middle of nowhere, it had only been cattle property before, nobody had ever grown a fruit tree within about four kilometers of that land, so the birds didn't know there was any domesticated food there, the birds didn't know there were tomatoes and strawberries and more.
Three years after we arrived, they found us, and they can be very persistent. The cucumbers were the first sign that we were in trouble. This may be similar to you with the slugs and the worms. Cucumbers in Australia have something called the fruit fly, not sure if you have that in Europe. Interesting enough, fruit flies didn't find us for those three years either. One day I am sitting on the veranda and this golden fly landed on my hand. I didn't know what a fruit fly was, but it happens to be golden, it happens to be pretty, the wings go out instead of to the back, it has a different shape to normal flies, much prettier than those black guys that you have seen forever, you know. I was about 30 years old I had never seen a golden fly, so I thought, "It is pretty!" About three days later I go to pick the long cucumbers, continental cucumbers they are called, I go to pick one, "Oh, beautiful, it looks great", I grab one and my hand went right through it and this mush of water was inside; that is what a fruit fly does to cucumbers. It looked perfect, but the inside was total water. So we had fruit flies. We had birds. We had a few other things too, and yes, we tried to do a normal farming job.
Ok, we are farmers, we have to stop these creatures, we have to kill some of them, we have a home, we have this and that. We did it with the intention to grow food for ourselves; we didn't want the intention of killing, but of course we were killing. We could not continue doing it, so we stopped growing vegetables. We made more candles and sold them and bought vegetables instead.
So it is a question you have to ask yourself, do you want to stay being involved in growing food, being in that occupation and yet having to kill personally all those creatures? Or do you want to have a different occupation, buy your food and then step back away from the killing process? And granted, as you all know, we teach that we are all involved in the killing process, but to be directly there doesn't feel good and it is a stronger Kammic intention; it is more on the negative Kammic side to be directly there, than to be stepped back more from it by going to the store and just buying your food. When you think about it, it kind of works like this: You go to a store to buy food, that is all, that is our intention, you are going to the store to buy food. When you are a farmer it is a little different: you are growing food to eat food, that is fine, you might be selling some as well, but then you are adding to that, "I have to kill those creatures to have this food." So as a Buddhist practitioner it is a difficult one, and Rosemary and I did not want to stay in growing food, so then we stopped growing the food.
I did not actually answer the basic question, "What may be the Kammic result?" The Kammic result depends a lot on the intention. The intention can be very strong - we just get really sick and tired of these fruit flies and these slugs and we want to get rid of them. Ok, that isn't so good, as you can imagine. Rosemary and I tried our best to keep the intention in a good way, we were meditators at that time, but it still felt bad. In that way we were getting a Kammic result in the present, whether we will get negative Kammic results in the future or not was not the main issue for us, we did not feel good doing it. So we were getting a negative Kammic result in trying to have farming as our basic occupation. It was definitely a bit of a negative Kammic result which we didn't want.