Just to finish off the last story, there was no check from the USDA in January and meanwhile the government was being viciously dismembered, starting on January 20. I did not hold out much hope that this little program would be honored. Two other farmer friends got payments that month but we did not. I stopped thinking about it. And then yesterday we got a letter from the USDA in the mail, saying they had deposited $14,000 in our account in late February. We didn't notice because that is the same time that our CSA payments are pouring in. So it did work. Amazing. I have decided to think of that as the money that will pay for all of the seeds this year. That way expensive seeds just don't seem quite as expensive. Thank you, Joe Biden, and all of the federal workers who quietly keep things going. Efficiency is not the only measure of success, obviously.
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All around me, my friends and fellow senior citizens are retiring. When our book group started over a decade ago, every member of the group was employed. Now I think there may be 4 of us left, out of 12, and one beloved member died a few years ago. That is a lot of change in ten years.
I recently made an unpremeditated public announcement that I am planning to "retire" in four years. I always say that I really cannot retire until my mother does, and she is still working at 89. But it is time for other people to be able to start planning on a change of leadership, and deadlines always help.
Then I started to wonder what my job really is. There is an easy answer, but that's not the one I am wondering about. What parts of my job will be hard to write a description for and who will want to do it?
About a month ago, Jon and I went on a brief road trip. On the last morning, we were visiting some friends and I got a frantic phone call, kind of early for a Saturday in the winter. It was Sue Moutoux, calling from the ER. That morning, her husband was unable to move for unknown reasons, and they called an ambulance. Sue gathered up all his medications and papers and got in the ambulance without her phone. And then she discovered that she could only remember about three phone numbers. One of them was mine. The mind works in mysterious ways. She needed me to locate one of the farm workers so she could help to get everything back in order -- finding her phone being the first piece of business. I called my brother in Colorado, knowing he would have the middle son's number, and I called him to tell him about his dad. Then I started to call everyone in Wheatland, trying to figure out how to reach the Moutoux employee. Eventually Stephen conjured the number and problems started to get resolved. Charles was diagnosed with pneumonia and antibiotics worked and he came home after a few days, so that was a relief.
So, I am a switchboard operator.
Every year we order potatoes to plant, and the order comes all the way from Colorado. Because shipping is so expensive, we make it possible for others with smaller orders to put their potatoes on the same truck. By now there are about ten small farms who add their potatoes to the pile. It is no trouble for us to share the truck space. It is a little bit of trouble getting the potatoes unloaded and sorted out. I can't remember why it happened this way, but one year Stephen and Benjamin had to rig up a very long set of cables to pull the pallets back out of the 40 foot long trailer. I think we didn't have a working pallet jack and the trucker never brings one. But most of the time, I unload the potatoes and Carrie helps me to get the piles organized.
A different form of switchboard operation, but still pretty much the same job. So, that is one part of the job description -- being part of a web of connections, and sitting in one of the hubs, holding threads.
Another part of my job which may be hard to define: I get to be the primary gatekeeper. In the real world, this would be described as hiring. But our farm is weird. We do hire people, but we also accumulate them. Dozens of volunteers and other associates gravitate to this place. We can't take them all. I turn away lots of potential help. So, without much input from my co-workers, I let in the small trickle of unconventional helpers that give this place its character, in many ways.
Here is an example, and I have no rational explanation for why I said yes this time, except that it was such an interesting idea. Several of us were working behind the stand, getting vegetables ready for the CSA, something we do many days of the week. A woman we had never seen stopped by to say hello, with a big smile and so much enthusiasm. She was picking up a CSA share for a friend and she had never been here before. She wondered if we ever took volunteers. Her "mum" grew up on a farm and really needed something to do. She was good with her hands. She came from Ukraine. She needed a purpose. She didn't speak English. I said yes, she could come for two hours on Fridays. That's usually what I say when someone has potential. So, this woman's mother, age 78, got dropped off on Fridays and got right to work. Zina cleaned onions and garlic, she bagged arugula, she cracked garlic seed in the fall. She loved it. She could only say thank you and hello, but she was so full of joy -- and efficiency -- that we missed her on the days she wasn't there (her work days increased as the weeks went by).
Zina is one of a parade of helpful, kind. quirky people who make such a difference here. I can't take credit for all of them -- some of them just find their way in without an invitation. But I mostly get to choose who works with us, and that is not a straightforward task.
There is one more job that I know others will be able to do, they just need to start thinking like this. I allow my mind to come up with ideas that have not been tried before. Systems, buildings, calendars, signage, messaging, sales. Many other people think about things that I do not think about much: seed varieties, cover crop mixes, cleaning up, purchasing, maintenance. My job is to try to think of ways to improve what we do. Ideas arrive in unpredictable ways. You just have to be ready to grab them when they pop into your head.
A few years ago, I noticed that we were working really hard not to make mistakes when we were creating market loads. For decades we had stacked each load separately in the cooler, keeping a list for each market. It suddenly occurred to me that this was foolish. Since then we have behaved like a normal warehouse, with stacks of the same vegetables, easily recognized. We don't do inventory management like real businesses, we walk into the cooler and look to see what we have. Our mistakes have gone almost down to zero. We make fewer mistakes when there are two of us loading than when it is just me. Turns out I am so not a detail person, even though I keep track of a lot of details. I rely on my systems completely.
When my brother was in college, he accepted a leadership role at Fairchild. Back in my day, the job was "President." When he was there, it was "Loose Ends Coordinator" or LEC. I think that may be the perfect description of the invisible parts of my job, and I need to start documenting so someone else will know what loose ends may be dropping into the abyss.
I understand that this wandering job description is absolutely no different from anyone else who runs a business. I think about my next door neighbor who started a professional firm, ran it for his entire career, and then pro-actively and carefully executed an exit strategy. He is much better at details than I am, but I have a much, much bigger group to help with this transition.
Part of making something come true is just to talk about it. So that is what I am doing here. I am talking about starting the process of shifting myself out of the center. I don't want to go away completely. There is too much about all of this work that is meaningful and satisfying. But it would be a disservice to the farm if other people didn't know what it takes to keep this place going. I have only begun to make that list.
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