About the Author

Sean Carlton is a writer and small-scale farmer living in the hills of West Virginia.

Prior to farming, Carlton spent more than a decade inside large bureaucratic systems, including twelve years in federal service. He reached the GS-14 level, working in technical and advisory roles that intersected with land use, infrastructure, data systems, and regulatory processes. His career placed him close to the mechanisms that define modern “stability”: long timelines, credential escalation, risk management, performance optics, and the normalization of burnout as professionalism.

By the time he exited his former career, he had done everything the system prescribed. Advanced degrees. Senior pay grade. Property ownership. Retirement planning. Credit optimization. On paper, it worked. In practice, it demanded total submission of time, attention, and agency in exchange for promises that kept moving further out of reach.

Carlton left the traditional path not because he failed inside the system, but because he succeeded enough to see its full cost.

He and his wife liquidated their assets, walked away from mortgages and institutional careers, and relocated to rural West Virginia, where they built a one-acre farm from the ground up. They raise chickens, rabbits, and quail, grow food for their household, and are working toward full energy independence. Their daily labor now centers on food production, land care, and building systems that function without constant institutional permission. From their farm, they also operate a no-barrier community food pantry as a practical response to food insecurity in a region where formal support systems increasingly fail.

Carlton’s writing reflects that transition without romanticizing it. He does not frame exit as purity, escape as enlightenment, or self-sufficiency as aesthetic. His work focuses on the mechanics of dependence, the economics of compliance, and the psychological traps that keep people participating long after they recognize harm. Rather than offering optimism or reassurance, he writes from lived consequence, documenting what withdrawal actually costs and what it makes possible.

Exit Farming: Starving the Systems That Farm You is his first book. It is not a memoir of aspiration, but an account of decision, loss, and replacement. It is written for readers who already sense that something is wrong and are willing to confront what agreement requires once it stops being theoretical.

Carlton continues to write about work, institutional failure, collapse, and autonomy from the perspective of someone who has stepped out of the abstraction and into the labor. He lives on the land he works, eats the food he raises, and structures his life around resilience rather than optimization.

He is not interested in fixing systems designed to extract.
He is interested in leaving them intact and unnecessary.