The Spider in the Web

I wake up early and get right to work -- heading straight for my couch and my cozy blanket. There I might do an hour or so of farm work: scrolling through Instagram to see what other farmers are showing us (there is one particular farmer who grows bazillions of carrots and beets on perfectly flat, sandy ground and has got his weed management down to a perfect science. What a show-off, and so incredible.) and answering the load of emails that have come in overnight.  But my most important work is texting with other farmers.

Since we got past the era of the telephone on the wall, times have really changed for all of us.  Right about when that happened, farmers markets were also starting to sprout all over the area. And all through the last 20 or 30 years, more small farms have come into being.  In the olden days, if you wanted to talk to a fellow farmer that you didn't really know, you had to drive to their farm and introduce yourself. My parents did that all the time -- that was how they learned to grow vegetables, really.

Nowadays, we can watch farmers all over the country do their best work.  I know when folks have started to pick garlic curls and I should go out and look more closely at our own patch. When everyone in North Carolina has got their potatoes in the ground, we are still waiting for some dry soil, but we know it will be our turn soon. It is not really a way to learn to farm but it is certainly a way to check in with other experts, from the comfort of the couch.  I have to admit that I personally do not post -- I don't know if I have any pictures that I really want to share with strangers -- but there must be lots of farmer voyeurs like me, watching others at work.

But what is really good is the web that we have constructed, with PVF as a big spider. This sounds evil but this spider is a spider that doesn't eat the farmers it catches, it feeds them.  We lure farmers in, get them settled in our sticky web, and then make sure they are getting what they need so they want to stay right with us.

This process is a long, slow, persistent one, just like a political campaign or community organizing.  As the spider, we must be dependable and transparent, make no sudden or unfriendly moves. We just keep reaching out and inviting others to join us.

And what are we trying to do?  Maximize the amount of food that gets to the right place, for a fair price. I hate it when I hear about a surplus that is getting wasted.  Our farm has a CSA that is big enough to accommodate other farms' excess. The other farms just have to grow their vegetables to the same standard we do, and we will do our best to find a home for whatever they want to sell.  Right now there are 11 farms who are part of this flexible arrangement.  Some of them only have too much for about three weeks of the year, some of them grow stuff specifically for our CSA, and some of them are only right now realizing that this may be the best way to operate this year, as we are all adjusting to the changes that come with covid-19.

So this morning I texted with Casey who usually goes to market with a gigantic load, but who has chosen to find other avenues this year. His farm is avoiding the coronavirus by staying home, growing as much as they can, and putting it into a home delivery system that was established by a fellow vendor. They are selling just about everything they can pick, and they only leave the farm to deliver a whomping pile of boxes to the pickle factory, where bags are packed.  I am standing at the ready, ready to take whatever Casey doesn't package up for the pickle people.  We have an excellent relationship, built over the last ten years -- he and his wife worked for us for four years and then went on to manage a gorgeous farm in a more rural area.  They are a fierce competitor in the market, but we have been good friends since the beginning and we take all their surpluses, happily.

The moral of this story is that friendships and relationships matter all the time. You have to take the long view ALL THE TIME. You never know when someone might need your help, and you should always try to give help when asked. You will always be someone else's priority if you need their help, if you stay in touch and you say yes.  Last summer I was picking basil at 7:30 in the morning, on a tight schedule, getting ready to load for market, when I got a call from Casey who was broken down on the side of the road, with a humongous market load. He wasn't asking for help but he was telling me he would be late to market, where we were supposed to meet to pick up some of his squash and cucumbers. We mobilized and found a way to help him salvage the day. It took two of our trucks to get his load off the side of I-66 and into Dupont Circle, and he only sold about 2/3 of what he had hoped to sell, but it was better than losing it all.  And this is just one example of how we maintain our farmer relationships, so that all of us can move as much food as we possibly can.

Farmers are particularly able to help each other in times of stress and need -- we can send a crew to help fix a blown-down hoop house, we can tackle a job that is too big for a small farm to handle on its own, we can even send a tractor driver every Thursday when a farmer friend has broken his foot and can only watch everyone else from the porch for 8 long weeks.  It is harder to imagine other small businesses being able to jump to the rescue so easily, but I am sure there are many examples that I don't know about.  Our farm is generally more able to help because we have a lot of people and a deep pool of experience.  We can build, we can dig holes, we can harvest, we can go to market with a half an hour of warning. We have been doing all of that for years, and that is part of the reason we have 11 participating farms in our unofficial web. 

Most spiders are good spiders. And they do really good work. We will continue to maintain our web and lure in farmers who grow the way we do.

Plum Black Absence

My next door neighbor will recognize that reference. It is totally obscure. It is the name of a paint color. Only someone who does puzzles regularly would be able to guess what color that might be. That is the color that my neighbor, the architect, first selected for the walls of the Common House. It's white.  Not a glaring white, but a white with some tones in it.

Tonight our neighbors gathered  on the greenway, all in masks, grouped by household because those are the only people we are allowed to be near, observing our nightly Happy Hour. It is the only way we get together in person now. Four Greenes sit in a row on their short lawn chairs, swaddled in a blanket. My sister and brother-in-law sit next to each other on their folding chairs.  I lean on my golf cart and Rebecca leans on me. Noel is wrapped in his pillow case mask, standing next to Rhonda who sips her drink by lifting the bottom of her mask.  We leave six feet between each group. We have been meeting for almost a month, and the conversations still revolve around the covid news, day after day.

But this evening Gordon kept stopping our chatter, pausing to listen for a moment. He was noticing an absence of noise. Not silence, but an absence. The noise from Route 7, usually a steady undercurrent in the river of sound, was intermittent.  There were these moments of not-sound. We could hear other things. Birds, wind, frogs far away.

This is how the last month has been, four weeks of not-normal-life. Like people all around the country and the world, we are filling our days differently. We all wonder how rich the Zoom people are by now. There is much more hiking and walking from home. People are learning about all the trails that have always been all around us and seeing the frogs down in the streams.

But there is so much that we all miss. We can't go anywhere but the store. We can't see our friends and family in real life, unless they live right here. We can't eat anything unless we cook it (I guess some people are getting food from restaurants but not most of us). And poor Jon can't cook what he wants because his family won't let him go shopping until this curve is smashed a little flatter.

And yet, we know so well that we are the lucky ones.  This absence of normalcy is not the same as  poverty, or fear, or illness.  This is just a life without the usual texture, but it is not a bleak life. We can stop and listen to the lack of traffic, and hear something else.

It seems pretty clear that we won't ever return to the way things were during the first week of March. But some of what is normal -- hugging, standing close to the person who is talking to you, sharing a meal, kids in school -- that will come back some day. And for a while, we will know enough to appreciate those comforts.

Years in the Tractor Seat

In our family, we kids started doing tractor work when we were less than ten years old, and we were trained in a very linear way, first one skill, then another, then another. Always with an emphasis on efficiency, safety, and not hurting the equipment. We were asked to do tasks that went on for hours and hours and hours (mostly mowing) and we were only asked to do it when we were the best person for the job, not because it was fun or because we wanted to. Sometimes it was fun. We didn't always want to do it.

We learned how the tractor is supposed to sound when it is working at its best level, when it is not straining and when it is at maximum output. We learned how to manage on hills, how fast or how slow to go for different tasks, and what to watch for so we didn't cause damage to implement or tractor. Lani spent the most time on tractors, then Charles, then me. Anna was the least interested and the least requested. I did not have to hook up my own implements so often -- I was generally set up and told what to do and I did it. Lani and Charles were much more mechanically adept and they did everything from beginning to end. Hooking up tractors is not complicated but it takes an awareness of many different things, plus a good back and a lot of patience, actually.  

The sequence of learning for me was : pulling something (wagon), raking (a machine that is towed and the gears are related to the wheels, not a Power Take Off, is adjusted by lowering and raising the whole boom by turning cranks), mowing with a rotary mower (PTO, but you don't have to be too terribly precise about perfection because you can go over an area again if you miss something), mowing with a sickle bar mower (much more complicated, PTO, multiple skill sets required), disking with hydraulic disks, baling (never got good at it, just did it because I had to, super complicated). That was pretty much it for the years between 4 and 24 years old. Many, many hours of those jobs. In later years, we got more varied equipment, but the skills I learned in those first 20 years all applied to all that followed. Now, I have been driving tractors for over 50 years. I know that people learn enough to get by in just a few years, but I will say that like anything else, years matter.  

This is all to say that we can't teach anyone very much in a year. We can share the experience of operating equipment of different types in different conditions. But learning to do anything for real will take years. In the last five years, I have learned so much more than I knew before because I have had to become the person who gets ground ready in Loudoun. Before that, I only did it in Vienna. Completely different soil, completely different tractors and even different kinds of spaders. It has been an education, shifting to Loudoun and all the different things we do.

Here is how I think about tractor work, now that it is almost exclusively my realm, due to bad knees and also being in charge of the whole sequence.  I make lots of decisions while I am on a tractor. I decide what parts of the plan need to be changed due to soil conditions. I decide when it is time to do stuff and when it is not time quite yet.  I am in charge of how it all unfolds. This is one of the most interesting and satisfying parts of my job. As Carrie has learned, we have to be ready for the plan to change on a moment's notice, whenever the soil says.  So sometimes I think we will do one thing and instead we end up doing seven things in fast succession. This is just how it goes.

I can help teach someone to be a tractor operator, but not a tractor driver. In my experience, it is like the difference between working on a farm and being a farmer.  I did not claim the title of farmer until I was maybe in my late 40s and possibly even later.  It took that long for me to get from being someone who works on a farm to someone who was a farmer. But part of that is because I was on a farm with other farmers already in place. I took direction for the first 20 years, I did things the way I was taught for the next 20 years or so, accumulating skills, and then finally I was ready to start to think and plan. To me, that’s when I got to claim the title of farmer.

There are much quicker paths to becoming a farmer nowadays. Young people and old people are learning from conferences and workshops and mentors and videos. They get lots of advice from people who have spent years in the tractor seat. But there is no substitute to putting your own butt in that tractor seat and learning what 2100 RPM sounds and feels like when you are mowing or spading. There is no substitute for being in the same boring movie over and over and over, even when you know just how it is going to end. That is how you get to be a tractor driver and eventually a farmer.