The Journey of a Horticulturalist Folk Singer: Sean McFarland’s Story

When I talked with Sean McFarland, I found out something I never knew about him during our time at Leavenworth. Sean wasn’t the farm kid I always thought he was.

Growing Up Military, Finding Music

“You know, honestly, I actually didn’t grow up on a farm,” Sean told me. “My parents both came from a farm background. But I grew up a military brat.”

Every Christmas and summer, Sean’s family would return to one farm or another. But his childhood was spent on military bases and in big cities, moving constantly. “We moved at the beginning of summer and I moved into a neighborhood and I have no friends to bike around the neighborhood with,” he said. “I mean, boom, one summer gone. You move in the middle of the school year. And for the rest of the whole school year, you’re just a new kid.”

The constant moving made friendships nearly impossible. Sean would make bonds, then they’d get broken. Make new bonds, and they’d get broken again. His dad was a high-ranking military officer who treated the family like soldiers under his command. But there was one constant in Sean’s life: music. His father played guitar, though he had a rule that none of the kids could touch it.

Around age 14, Sean started sneaking his dad’s guitar out while he was at work. One day, his father caught him. Sean thought he was in trouble, but his dad’s response surprised him. “Oh, you’re interested in this? Let’s show you some chords.”

From Squash to California’s Gray Zone

After high school, Sean went to trade school to learn guitar making, then switched to studying horticulture at a state college in South Dakota. He started farming squash and became quite successful at it. But when his brother moved to California, Sean discovered something most people didn’t know about at the time.

“My brother moved out to California and it was a secret almost at the time that everybody in California knew that they didn’t really tell everybody else,” Sean explained. “And that is that you could grow marijuana in California and that it was legal.”

Sean visited his brother and realized the culture was completely different. “No cop was going to bust you for smoking a joint on the street. And you could walk into a store and walk out with plant and wave at a cop on your way out.” It operated in what he called a gray zone, with growers using greenhouses that couldn’t be spotted from above by federal aircraft.

“Every farmer grew pot. Every dairy farmer grew pot. Everybody had land, basically grew pot,” Sean said. So he took his profits from squash farming, bought land in California, and started growing medicinal marijuana.

The Call That Changed Everything

Sean was ambitious. Too ambitious, as it turned out. He was trying to grow as much as possible while staying under the radar. But in June, he got a call from his neighbor that would change his life.

“I get a call from my neighbor who always calls me with my friends are driving too fast past his house,” Sean remembered. “I live up a very steep mountain and my neighbors are like a mile down the road.” Sean expected another complaint about speeding trucks. Instead, his neighbor said: “12 unmarked vehicles just passed my house that it headed your direction.”

Sean grabbed his employee, jumped in his Subaru in his pajamas and sandals, and drove down an abandoned logging road on his property. They hid by a waterfall all day while federal agents searched his place. When he finally returned that night, his house was tossed and his crop destroyed.

The problem started with a legal sale Sean had made to a licensed buyer who took five pounds across state lines to South Dakota. When the buyer got caught there with 90 pounds, the attention brought federal involvement. “What’s funny is I actually only sold him five pounds,” Sean said. “I sold him five pounds of some of my less desirable pot, which I could have just, I honestly like I didn’t need to sell it.”

The Wrong Thing to Say

Sean spent the night getting drunk, trying to decide what to do. His mistake was going to his sister’s house. He woke up surrounded by 20 armed federal agents yelling at him to come out with his hands up.

Before they took him away, a Homeland Security investigator sat him down and tried to make a deal. The agent said he’d go do some things, then come back with an offer. When he returned, he told Sean: “The deal is that you’re going to tell me everything you know. And after you’re in prison, a judge is going to look at you and say, how did Sean McFarland act when he was in between a rock and a hard place?”

Sean started laughing so hard that he saw veins pop in the agent’s head. “My dad in the military that that was a phrase he would use. Talk about what made a man a man. What would Sean McFarland do when he was in between a rock and a hard place? Act like a man.”

The angry agent asked how old Sean was. When Sean said 32, the agent shot back: “You’re going to be 40 before you get out of prison.” Sean just kept laughing.

The Long Road to Leavenworth

Sean spent two months bouncing between county jails in different states before finally making it to South Dakota, where they bonded him out after just three days. He got a renowned attorney, Tony Serra, to take his case pro bono. The waiting period lasted two years, which Sean said was worse than prison itself.

When it came time for sentencing, his attorney had prepared him well. “The day I got on bail, he was like, all right, good. I’m glad we got that done. Let me let you know how this is going to go. You’re going to prison. You definitely need to say that you are a weed and booze addict because you’re going to get a year off.”

Sean received a five-year sentence but knew he’d serve about three years with good behavior, halfway house time, and the drug treatment program. There was one small delay: he was in the middle of getting a dental implant to replace the tooth he’d lost in that Oakland jail beating. The judge allowed him to finish the dental work before reporting.

Finding Present-Moment Living

Looking back, Sean connected his childhood experiences to how he handled prison. All that moving around as a military kid taught him something valuable. “What I do have is the very big appreciation for what’s in front of me. And I’ve learned how to really commit to who’s in front of me, to what’s in front of me and to do right here, right now.”

That mindset served him through his entire sentence. “That mindset I had going into prison, through prison, and getting out of prison,” he told me. Sometimes the hardest lessons from childhood become the tools that help you survive the worst chapters of your adult life.