Ian Somerhalder had an extremely successful Hollywood career that saw him star in hit television shows like Lost and Vampire Diaries. That’s why it came as a surprise to fans when he walked away from it all to become a farmer in 2019.

Somerhalder Ditches Hollywood For Farm Life

In a new interview, Somerhalder is making it clear that he has no regrets about making this decision.

It’s been about five years since Somerhalder and his actress wife Nikki Reed of Thirteen and Twilight fame moved their family out of Los Angeles and onto a California farm. They quickly found that they didn’t miss the craziness of life in Hollywood at all.

“People have some corn, and I’ve got beans,” Somerhalder, 45, told E! News.

“It’s just very cool,” he continued. “It’s like the way it used to be done, and it feels far, and I’m not trying to sound like sort of incendiary or anything, but to me, it’s far more gratifying and feels way more elevated than being all fancy, which is fun too, but at the end of the day, this is where the rubber meets the road and it’s connective.”

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Farming Comes With ‘A Lot Of Failure’

Though he’s found farming life to be extremely rewarding, Somerhalder admitted that there has also been “a lot of failure.”

“You learn some of the things that you try and plant may not work, but other ones do,” he explained. “And then you get into this system of when the kids are involved and you and then your community’s involved, and then you find yourself living this really cool sharing, bartering system with your neighbors.”

Somerhalder and Reed have made a point of involving their two young children in their farming lifestyle as much as they can. It’s important to the couple to teach their children the strong values that come with being farmers.

“What my parents taught us very early is, if you look around, there is a balance in nature,” Somerhalder stated. “If you give back as much or more than you take, then you will find an enormous bounty of health and happiness and success and all these things that people want and dream.”

“That’s what we teach our kids and our friends teach their kids, is to be respectful of the balance and really appreciate that balance and live that balance,” he added. “And with that balance comes boundless harmony and boundless food and energy and fun and all those things that we want, but you can’t just take and take and take. It doesn’t work.”

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Somerhalder Has No Regrets

Somerhalder had told E! News earlier this year that he has no regrets about giving up his Hollywood career to take up farming.

“I love what I did for a really long time. I love making films, I just did it for so long. We had an amazing run,” he said back in January. “But this is our 2.0 version — about to be 3.0 version.”

Reed agreed with him, explaining that “When you see the way that nature operates, you find compassion.”

Anyone who has experience with farming knows just how gratifying that lifestyle can be. We wish Somerhalder and Reed many years of happiness on their farm to come!

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