Come on out to the farm for a workday this weekend! We’ll be cleaning up the old barns and sheds and letting folks take a look at the place. We’re starting up around 10:00am and we’ll finish by 3:00pm. We’ll supply gloves, beer, and homemade chili and cornbread. Send me an email if you can make it and I’ll reply with directions.
See you there!
Yesterday, at 8:30 am, we closed on our farm. We have land. We really, really do. Pictures are on the way. We went out after we closed and walked the pastures. Just walked, looked, and began the process of getting grounded. Ross and I sat down and made a huge list of everything that needs to be done before the stock can arrive. We itemized and put dates by everything. We let our friends and families know: this is real, this is happening. We have solid ground on which to work. Real, tangible ground. I thought it would all hit my like a ton of bricks, but the truth is, it’s sinking in, slowly, like a weight, the weight of responsibility. It is not at all harsh or crushing, it just feels like enough weight to hold me to the ground.
I’ve been fairly absent in writing or really doing anything farm-related for several weeks now. Everything has just felt so up-in-the-air; everything felt like possibility, it was an uncomfortable feeling of limbo, the neither-here-nor-thereness of the past weeks was debilitating for me. Too much potential was riding on the potential of land; it was so hard to be sure of anything other than the wanting and the waiting that I could hardly put my mind on anything else for fear that it would slip away if the land didn’t happen. But it did. It really, for sure did.
Farmer Paige, who runs the vegetable farm behind my house brought over a jar of her home-made melome (a kind of fermented blueberry drink, rather like mead) in celebration. It warmed my heart so deeply. I just sat there grinning, drinking some by the fire, feeling unbelievably grateful for my life, for being here, and for the unbelievably kind, open, and generous people that surround me.
I’ve come back to earth. My feet are on the ground. I’m ready to go.
Tim my cheesemonger recently returned from judging at the American Cheese Society (where he sat next to master cheese maker and one of my teachers from VIAC, Marc Druart! Small world, no?). Tim’s been bringing in some of the better things he found there, one of which is a beautiful washed rind, sheep’s milk cheese, Bossa, from Green Dirt Farm in Missouri that won first prize in its category. When Tim said Green Dirt Farm, I immediately lit up with curiosity. We have been in contact with them about the possibility of purchasing livestock from them. They are a small farm that is very similar to what we want our own to be and they work with the two breeds we are most interested in (Gulf Coast Native and East Friesian). Tim had nothing but good things to say about the cheese. I tasted all he had, but I especially liked Bossa and took a wheel home.
First off, I really like the packaging: clean, simple, with a nicely designed sticker (plus the ASC winner sticker is always a marketing bonus) and appropriate, breathable cheese paper. The pretty, orange rind had some streaks of blue and white mould that I’m not sure were intentional, but frankly, were irrelevant to the taste which was phenomenal.
I immediately jotted down this: strong grassy manure notes in the rind, only the mildest hints of ammonia; fruit, smells EXACTLY like a milking parlor in the rind; tastes like a pasture smells, sweet, only mildly grassy, earthy and softly picante (if that’s not too much of an oxymoron). These notes sum up my initial reaction to the flavors. As for texture, it was pleasantly rubbery and creamy, like a washed-rind cheese ought to be. The rind had a bit of a gritty texture to it, which is my only real complaint about the cheese. Overall, I give it a 5.
As many of you out there know, Ross and I are in the throes of building our business plan for our farm. The one topic that keeps coming up in every advisory conversation I have with farmers is the issue of management. Not management of crops or land use, no, that’s the easy stuff. It is the management of people that is tricky: employees and interns. This issue seems to be the biggest bone of contention on small farms right now: how to manage interns, how is that different from managing employees, should a farm have employees or interns, how much structure should be used, what kinds of structures, how much responsibility should be given and when, should there be rewards, how do you deal with inevitable mistakes? The list goes on and no one seems to be providing satisfactory solutions.
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how I have been managed, both on farms and in other “city” jobs. I honestly feel that I have never been well-managed. As I’ve considered my previous management experiences from the receiving end, I have come to the conclusion that there is one main issue that has tainted each experience: persistent failure to communicate, which in at least three instances lead directly to a passive aggressive relationship between myself, my employer, and co-workers. A secondary issue has been that I have failed to demand, as well as failed to be given employment and internship opportunities that were sufficiently challenging and mentally engaging to keep me there. It is from these experiential threads that I hope to put together a theory of management.
With these anecdotal experiences in mind, I would posit a list of attributes a good pair of hands on a farm must have:
1) a good pair of hands, strong, stalwart, and willing in all cases to work
2) a good mind, one that can make decisions, problem solve, and can process mistakes
3) a good spirit, a person who can learn to use the mind to inform the hands so the mundane can become profound and so that each task can become a joyful one
Never hire someone you don’t pay to also think. If you need a lot of menial tasks done, hire a day-laborer or a good kid from the neighborhood. Smart people who have these three attributes in abundance can make outstanding employees. However, in return for their good qualities, an employer must be willing to create an atmosphere where these attributes can fully express themselves. So, in order to attract and keep a good pair of hands, an employer must maintain:
1) clear and consistent lines of communication
2) clear and consistent expectations
3) clear and consistent space for free thought in balance with boundaries
This last guideline needs a bit of explanation. If you want smart people on your farm or at your business, then what they do every day must be mentally engaging, must require them to think hard and think in genuinely creative ways. This creativity can only come from idleness, time and space to sit and think. When we visited Polyface, one of the best things Joel said to me was that the reason Southern farmers are so backwards is that they don’t have a winter to sit and think. It’s about disturbance and rest all over again, only for the mind as well as for the land. Folks need to do, but then they need time to stop and consider what it is they’ve done. Without that time and space, we just keep cogging forward while any improvements are either slow to come or accidental; left more to chance than ingenuity and craft, the very things that, as I understand it, are what much of farming is about. But there’s a balance. Farmers, I think, would benefit from giving this space, but I think they would also benefit from being hard-line defenders of boundaries. In every business, there are boundaries, indeed, in any relationship: there are structures and lines that do not get crossed without serious consequences. These boundaries on a farm should be wide to encourage creativity and learning, but clearly articulated and fiercely guarded so as to prevent a lack of understanding about one’s place.
If you’re in the business of growing food, then just grow food: hire labor, manage them conventionally, get what needs getting done done. But with that simplicity comes the burden of being the person who is singularly responsible for the oversight of just about everything, something much too complex for one person to handle well. One can start walking that fine line of micromanaging, and that’s really more work than I think anybody really wants to do. Traditional management is great if you want compliance with standards of how you want things done, but if you want a worker who is engaged with the farm (which is what I think most interns crave), self-direction works better. I am in the business of growing food, yes, but also educating: the cultivation of minds goes hand-in-hand with the cultivation of crops. That means being both farmer and teacher, and not a kindergarden teacher, either. Though some interns or employees may have a kindergarden-level knowledge of farming (since that seems to be the first and last time kids get exposure to farms and farm life), they need not be hand-held. Smart people can figure stuff out when asked to; it’s the teacher’s job to ask. Of course, this gets us no closer to answering the questions of what do we ask our workers to do and more importantly, how do we ask it.
To address these questions head-on as well as to provide evidence for my thinking that goes beyond the anecdotal, I present a “true fact” about management brought to my attention, as with many good, thought-provoking things, by the good people of TED. If you are not familiar with this organization, you should be. In its most distilled version, TED is an organization that gets a bunch of terrific thinkers together to give an 18 minute speech about their work. In this particular talk, Dan Pink gives some real insight into progressive management strategies that I think, both from his “true fact” and my experience, are very worth pursuing as a core to a management strategy:
Mr. Pink deals with the problem of functional fixedness, that is, we see things and define things based on what we immediately know the thing is for. If you are given a box of tacks, then the box is for the tacks and nothing else; it has been predefined. But seeing a box and tacks, where both are tools to help solve a problem takes a certain openness about the task at hand; indeed, as Mr. Pink says, an ability to see the periphery as well as what’s right in front of you. Incidentally, the brilliant animal behaviorist Temple Grandin writes at length about how animals do not seem to have issues with functional fixedness; they tend to see things just as they are, exactly what is actually there, whereas we tend to skim the details out through a kind of mental clumping based on a pre-existing definition of the object. An example of this phenomenon is the Gorilla Suit trick. In this video, put together by the University of Illinois Visual Cognition Lab, the viewer is asked to count the number of times the team in the white shirt passes the ball. In the viewer’s careful attempt to get the right answer, he or she focuses intently on the white team’s movements to the exclusion of everything else that is going on. Try it yourself. Aiming for total accuracy, count the number of passes the white team makes. Then, watch the video a second time, but this time, don’t count, just watch. And here’s the clincher, once you have seen the whole picture, you can’t ever again fail to see it. Don’t believe me? Try it. Once you’ve done the first part of the trick, try to only focus on counting the white team’s passes without seeing everything else. You can’t do it. The implication of this little example is that once you start to see the whole, you can’t ever not see it as a whole: the periphery is as much in focus as anything else. This phenomenon is exactly what Mr. Pink is referring to in his talk. If we give a person a specific task with a specific goal, that person’s understanding and ability to work within the whole system is crippled. Sure, we get the correct number of passes, but what is the cost of what we miss in the process?
The point is, we tend to see what we expect to see rather than what is actually there. To echo Mr. Pink, this is not a feeling, this is not an idea, this is a fact. This is exactly what the overwhelming majority of human beings do and it is exactly this tendency that we must fight as we seek to find new and better ways of doing things.
Consider the application of these facts on a farm. Most farms manage interns by teaching a skill, say harvesting beets, and then are asked to repeat that skill in the future ad nauseum. Later in the day, they are asked to plant seeds in the same way they were taught ad nauseum. They are told to then repair a fence, make a delivery, etc. All are straightforward, menial tasks. The problem with these tasks for interns is simple: so often the reward is not great enough for this kind of work to be done correctly, efficiently, and happily. Furthermore, if you were to ask the intern in this situation to manage the whole farm for even a day, six months in, she or he would be likely to have huge difficulties keeping everything in mind. When all the operations of a farm are rote, that is, memorized and repeated, understood only insofar as direct instruction, then that person’s total knowledge may be considerable, but it is also fragmented; rendered unstable because it has yet to begin to engage the mind beyond what is a very narrow cognitive scope. The intern in this situation can count the number of passes and can melt the wax of a candle to stick it to the wall, what I disparagingly refer to as the “git-er-done” method of running a business, but at the end of the day, it’s not enough. The question you have to ask as that person’s manager is “what are they missing?”, and more importantly, “am I presenting the information they need to know in such a way that I am setting them up to miss the big picture? Am I inadvertently creating an atmosphere where thinking through something is actually inhibited rather than encouraged?” Interns seem to be constantly taught what to look at, but not how to look. In a nutshell, that is the difference between an intern and an employee. You can give an employee lots of rote farm tasks because you pay them a real wage that directly corresponds to how well they complete tasks. Employees who do more than rote, such as managers, get paid substantially more in kind because you are asking them to both work and think. But based on what I have learned from Mr. Pink, I would posit that you in fact don’t have to pay your interns more to get better results. Indeed, you don’t even have to have employees who are rewarded with a more substantial monetary gains for work. What I am suggesting is that interns can be more productive at less cost if you engage them in creative decision making processes in tandem with rote tasks. Punishment and reward does not work in an intern situation. You’re rarely going to find that gem of an intern who does rote work consistently well without substantial reward. I find, purely anecdotally, that this is especially true the smarter and more educated the intern is.
So, for all these smart, well-educated willing workers coming onto farms, I would suggest using Mr. Pink’s three tools for management:
1) Autonomy
Allow your employees and interns the freedom to manage themselves. This does not mean give them free reign to go nuts, one of the features of freedom is clear awareness of boundaries.
2) Mastery
Give employees and interns especially the opportunity to gain mastery over one or more aspects of the operation. Give them responsibilities from the very beginning with guidelines and deadlines for aspects of mastery. Most importantly, give them room to fail. Understand that mastery comes from failures. Mitigate the consequences for failure for the business by scaffolding the task for the intern.
3) Purpose
Purpose is everything. Most people work best when they clearly understand the purpose of the task, both in the immediate sense and in a larger sense. Make sure your interns and employees always, always, always understand the purpose of what they are doing on both the immediate and mundane levels, as well as how it serves something greater that is meaningful to them.
Put these three words up on the wall of your office and meditate on the ways you can leverage these tools with the people who work for you. I am keen to try a results-only work environment, or a variant thereof. I am definitely going to work to have 20% time or more for autonomous work. My interest in trying these ideas is not just because they are the product of good science and good reasoning; my interest comes from the fact that these are things that, when I have been least well-managed, I have wanted the most. I think there is something in that intuitive pull worth bringing out into the open. I’ll let you know how it goes.
I talk about Michael Pollan a lot in this blog. I should mention that it is not that I mean to. I don’t rally behind him, I don’t think he has any kind of new, special understanding of or insight to our food systems and the ways we eat. Why I reference him so often is simple: he is our mouthpiece. He is the necessary, singular voice that carries the voice of thousands alongside it. He reports about the doings of this our movement and desire for better ways of eating and living. He’s a journalist, and a damn good one, who has generously and happily devoted his journalistic eye to us and helped the general public to at last, take an interest in the wild and weird world of farmers and foodies. His most recent contributions have been largely of a political nature. A common theme among food activists since President Obama was elected is our need to show this president, who has a sympathetic ear to our cause, our movement: make him look and listen. That is the American way, after all, democracy in action. Pollan has turned this need into a rallying cry, one that has most recently gained traction in the form of a farm to school movement.
I’ve spent the last few weeks assisting our local Slow Food Convivium in putting together an eat-in for the national Time for Lunch Campaign. I cannot stress enough how important it is to provide children with healthy, nutritious foods, so I am going to let Mr. Pollan take a stab at it for me through his outstanding New York Times Op-Ed piece that came out this week:
Big Food vs. Big Insurance
By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: September 9, 2009
TO listen to President Obama’s speech on Wednesday night, or to just about anyone else in the health care debate, you would think that the biggest problem with health care in America is the system itself — perverse incentives, inefficiencies, unnecessary tests and procedures, lack of competition, and greed.
No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet.
That’s why our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry. Read more. . .
Boys and girls, meet the marriage of two of our favorite things: cheese and typefaces. Enjoy!
Recently, I stopped by my “other” cheesemonger (not Tim) at Alon’s just to take a peak at what was new. Now, I’m not a huge lover of Alon’s cheese counter; the folks who run it are polite and reasonably knowledgeable, but the selection and presentation of the cheeses is less interesting and less discriminating than Star’s. I’ve come to the understanding that if it’s a cheese I already know, I can get it from Alon’s without too much risk, but as of my most recent purchase I have decided that if it’s new and different, or if it’s a delicate cheese that requires special handling, I stay away. When I was last there, I picked up an intruiging-looking cheese, Shahat. I was drawn by the unusual packaging: an octagonal cardboard box with a minimalist typeface. I was further drawn to it by its mixture of sheep and goat milk, and even further interested by the fact that it is an Israeli cheese; not something one sees everyday, to be sure. From the sturdy packaging, I assumed that these cheesemakers took the handling of their cheese very seriously. Indeed, the back of the box has specific handling and temperature instructions (think the packaging of VB&C’s Bonne Bouche). When I got home and opened the box, I found to my great surprise, that the cheese was tightly wrapped in plastic. It had also been in the plastic long enough for the p. candidium to grow into the folds and crevices of the plastic, giving it odd little fins (not a good sign).
Here is is after I took the plastic off, notice the fins on the bottom and how it looks like the plastic is still on.
At this point, I knew that the odds for disappointment were getting pretty high. Cutting it open confirmed my bad feeling:
Something crazy happened to this poor cheese. It had about four different textures going on inside, none of which were consistent. In some places it was a dense, dry paste, in others it had an open structure, and in others it looked like it was trying to become creamy, but ended up looking greasy, like the fat was separating from the protein. It was bad. One corner of the cheese looked like the rind had completely died off and the inside of the cheese in that area was discolored and slightly foul to taste. Pretty much all I got out of the cheese was sourness, slight bitterness, and strong ammonia. It was edible, but not altogether pleasant. Interestingly, I opened it back up a couple of weeks later, just to see what, if anything might have happened to it. Indeed it had changed:
Look at that pretty, soft new p. candidium growth! I mean, the cheese is not any good anymore at all, but it shows very clearly that the rind was being killed by the stifling conditions of plastic wrap.
This experience is a case-in-point for the critical importance of good packaging and storing. Cheese is a living food. As such, it respirates, i.e. it breathes. If someone wrapped plastic all over your body, you would eventually die. Even if you could still breathe through your nose and mouth, your skin would eventually rot from trapped moisture. This is exactly what happens to cheese, especially high-moisture bloomy and washed-rind cheeses. Gross. I have to wonder whose fault this really was, though. Was it an issue with customs? Is it a regulation that imported cheeses must be wrapped in cellophane? Did Alon’s wrap these cheese when it arrived? Why was special “breathable” wrap not used? Who knows? All I know is that this was a sad circumstance for what could have been a lovely cheese. I give it a 2, though it’s unfair, really to rate a cheese that has been so abused.
At least according to the Huffington Post:
Is Becoming a Farmer the New American Dream?
by Makenna GoodmanIn the post-Omnivore’s Dilemma reality, where farmer Joel Salatin is known far outside his county, it doesn’t take a genius to say it: farming has totally blown up.
What I mean is, alongside the cultural idolization of growing your own, there has been a notable increase in college graduates who opt to spend their first year out of college on a farm. These, mind you, tend to include (but are not limited to) folks who could otherwise get jobs in the film, art, banking, engineering, psychology, academic, etc. worlds–if they need a job at all. But more than just recent graduates; there is a growing number of young people opting out of school altogether, or on the flip side, actually up and leaving the corporate world after years to start farms, collectives, co-operatives, and even communes. There are kids quitting their high-level jobs in the city, moving to small-scale farms or homesteads in Vermont, and haying their butts off for no pay other than a roof and food (like my friend who worked at the #1 restaurant in NYC, and now picks squash blossoms in South Royalton, VT). And there are a number of flush youths who are cashing in their trust funds–in some cases–for cows. But why? Because unless you invest in a big-organic company that sells to WalMart, there’s not much money in farming. It’s a touch-and-go kind of life, incumbent on the weather, commitment, responsibility, and hard work. In this economic climate, especially–look at all the dairy farms going under–why is farming becoming a desirable life for young people who have the luxury of choice?
Some might say it’s a passing trend, like flannel shirts in Williamsburg. Some might say it’s because there’s a dearth of “real” jobs, and farming is a good interim experience until the economy perks up. But perhaps it’s something more profound: you know, a deeper desire to get back to the agrarian life. Or, a more emotional reaction–a re-establishment of home values, a switch in the long-term goals of the entitled, and a deepening need for connection to one’s food, and work ethic. Perhaps we’re looking at a new world of homesteading, manual labor, and life on the land. A life of farming, in other words.
But are these kids real farmers? Because alongside manual labor, some of them might also be writers. Or painters. Or teachers. Some of them might not even sell their food; they’re just into living off the earth’s bounty.
According to Gene Logsdon–to whom Wendell Berry refers as “the most experienced and best observer of agriculture we have”–the answer is yes, they’re real farmers. If they’re serious about it. If they love it. If they work hard. In his book Living at Nature’s Pace: Farming and the American Dream, he talks about this very issue:
It seems to me that, living at nature’s pace on our little farm, I come closer to making my living from farming in a literal sense than “real” farmers. Carol and I raise most of our food including our meat, and some for other family members, keep a garden almost an acre in size, produce half of our home heating fuel from our own wood, derive most of our recreation and satisfaction from our farm, grow corn, oats, hay, and pasture, keep a cow and calf, two hogs, twenty ewes and their lambs, a flock of hens and broilers, and sell a few lambs and eggs. I’m sure I spend more time living on our farm than any industrial farmer in our county does. When they are not golfing in Florida or fishing in Canada, they spend a lot of time in the coffee shop or in my office telling me how farming is going down the drain….But urban people are also bringing agrarianism back to the cities. Developers build subdivisions that look and function like yesterday’s villages or neighborhoods. Gardens and home businesses are planned into the landscape, as are nearby retail and service shops. Some communities even utter the almost forbidden words, “neighborhood schools” again. New neighborhood houses of worship in the ghettoes, small and humble and unassuming, return in the shadow of the abandoned cathedral-like churches. A surge of market gardening and farmers’ markets recalls those years not so long ago when thousands of tiny truck farms, using horse manure for compost in their hotbeds and coldframes, supplied their cities with vegetables and fruits nearly year-round. The term “urban farming” turns out not to be an oxymoron. Chicago is even encouraging animal husbandry as part of its urban farming projects. In the heart of Cleveland, in the shadow of skyscrapers, horses plow garden plots. And with the returning agrarian spirit comes its wonderful offspring, agrarian ingenuity
[....]
I think I hear a faint rustle under the blacktop of shopping center parking lots, under the abandoned animal factories of yesterday and those yet to be abandoned tomorrow. Not only are the weeds pushing up through the cracking pavements, making way for the trees, but the irrepressible agrarian impulse is pushing through too. As long as humans are free to follow their hearts, there is hope.
I’ve already spoken at length about my feelings about this trend-cum-movement among the young, educated, and well-resourced. Yes, there are some who aren’t cut out for farming and who are in it for the “romance” or the desire for a meaningful, post-college “experience.” These folks will either become disappointed and move on to other things, or they will fall in love and spend their lives in the service of that love, no matter the hardness of the work. I’ll say it again, current farmers must be willing to teach their craft and engage the young and talented. To quote Joel Salatin, “if we don’t romance the next generation into farming, no one is going to do it.” We as farmers must be receptive to the wooing of our many suiters.
Last week I canned and I canned and I canned. I traded a gallon of milk with Farmer Paige for about 40 pounds of tomato seconds from the farm. So many tomatoes. I put up a total of 10 and a half quarts of plain tomatoes, and another 10 quarts of tomato sauce. By the time I got to the last of them, they had started to ooze and mould beyond the point of salvation, so the compost got a little bit extra fermented goodness this week. The photos really speak for themselves:
A couple of weeks ago, one of my favorite splurges arrived in the mail. Culture Magazine enticed me with a sexy, sexy photo of Jasper Hill’s Winnimere and I was won over. I joined their Centerfold Club (a.k.a. the cheese porn club). So now, every few months, a beautiful and often hard-to-find cheese arrives at my doorstep. The last go-round was Dafne, a superb goat’s milk cheese from Goat’s Leap creamery in sunny California. It is a seriously pretty cheese. Packaging had done some damage to it, however: the bottom of the cheese had some blue mould spore contamination and some of the downy coating of penicillium camemberti had died off, either as a result of improper packaging, or just an imperfect balance of geotrichum to penicillium ratios. Regardless, it was a stately cheese, decorated by a simple olive leaf (I think it was olive), broken in half and crossed over the surface of the round. As a bloomy-rind cheese, I expected the typical oooey-gooey center. Instead, I was surprised to see a dense, moist, friable paste; velvety really is the word for it. It was consistient throughout, as opposed to having several layers of maturation within, typical of many bloomy-rinds. It was very, very pretty.
I cut a wedge out and smelled it, expecting to detect at least some of that musky, super-earthy goatiness, but there was hardly any. When I first tasted it it was disappointingly neutral, too “clean” as some cheesemakers call it, referring to the extreme hygiene in dairies and especially problematic in pasteurized cheeses. Of course, it could also have been a bit too young, since as I enjoyed it over the next week or so, the flavors continued to develop and increase in complexity, but subtly. This cheese is subtly complex. Controlled, might be a good word. As I continued to taste it, it was clear that the rind was doing its job, as that’s where all the flavor was coming from. It was lovely: floral with only the mildest hint of earthy goatiness; mildly sour and sweetly lactic. There is complexity in this cheese, but you have to wait for it. As it got a bit older, I sprinkled some over a plate of sliced tomatoes with basil and my best balsamic vinegar. It was fantastic this way. The cheese had strengthened in flavor, but was subtle enough to compliment the tomatoes and vinegar without being either overpowering or absent, as is the case with most goat cheeses. Overall, I give it a 4.
