Joy Diversification
Don’t know if you know this, but farming is hard. It’s tough physical labor, of course, but it can also be an anxiety-rich profession relying on the vagaries of weather behavior.
I have a friend who works at a local orchard just a few miles from our farm and every April, I cross my fingers for her and hope that spring settles in properly after warm weather in March. If the temps stay warm, only a badly-timed drought will give them trouble later in the season. But if another late frost comes once the peach and apple buds have started to bloom, that can mean a giant loss of harvest.
We talk on the phone a lot when the weather is poor, commiserating. When the weather is fine, we go weeks without talking—both busy with all of the work that the bounty of good rain and sun and temperature brings.
My main two “crops” on the farm are grass, of good pasture and hay for boarding horses, and basket willow. Both crops could be successful with similar weather. Willow might like a little bit more rain than grass—but both hate a drought. Baling hay requires a solid week of not a lick of rain to cut it, dry it in the field and then get it baled.
When we’re in the height of haying season with 40+ acres to bale, my dad and I would be pleased as punch to have three straight weeks of no rain to get it all in all at once. That would be a long stretch of no rain for basket willow and would necessitate some watering. Horse pastures would also start to slow down on growth.
But since I can’t control the weather, I like to think of having crops that need different weather as “joy diversification“. If we get loads of rain when I wish I could be baling hay, at least the willows are happy and the pasture is thriving. If it’s incredibly dry and we get the hay in, that’s a thrill, but that work doesn’t leave a lot of time to water willow or inspect it for bug or blight infestation that sets in when its stressed.
There’s still nagging anxiety when any of my crops aren’t doing well or getting the natural care that they need. But it sure does help to be able to shrug and say, “well at least the other thing is happy.”
Likewise, I used to have a very close relationship with the farm only in the blissful stretch from late spring to mid fall. I knew the birds of summer. The weather patterns that brought early floods in March or the metallic cloudless overhang of the too long rainless stretches of July and August. Spring leafing weather. Corn weather. Tomato Weather. Apple weather. With nothing to grow in the winter, though, there was little reason to brave the farm in below freezing temps.
Now that I run the horse boarding barns and grow willow, the winter on this land has opened up to me in a way that I deeply love. Horses have to eat—all the time, apatently—and so no choice about not being there for them. But willow is a crop that requires most of its hands-on labor during the winter months.
Basket willow is harvested once it has gone dormant and lost all of its leaves. Sometimes that happens by late November, but more likely late December through early March. Harvest is done by hand, clipping each rod off the thousands of willow stools I have growing in beds in two main locations on the farm. 10-40 rods per stool, means I’m clipping about 300,000 rods a harvest season. (With Abby helping this year, of course, half of that). And that number will only increase.
We also plant at the same time we’re harvesting. We’re also grading and sorting the giant bundles of willow we bring in by size and rebundling them to dry out for weaving later. And different weather pushes us towards different work.
This is the general weather-to-work direction we take:
0-30 degrees: Inside work, cutting plywood forms, attaching extra thick rods to plywood forms to dry out for bases or ribs or handles of baskets, trying new weaving projects out of last year’s harvest, planning classes.
31-70 degrees and rainy: grading and sorting willow, maybe cleaving and shaving willow skeins
31-49 degrees and sunny: harvesting willow
50-70 degrees and sunny: planting willow
Regardless of weather during the winter, there’s always willow work to do.
And now I know the farm in winter too. There are lessened bird calls—more raptor shrieks than birdsong, but also the plaintive calls of Canada geese navigating overhead all season long. Most jarring is the otherworldly gurgle caws of Sandhill cranes charting their course north to south and then back again. Their calls pull you from anything you’re doing. Give you pause. Make you pay attention outside of yourself.
The natural world is not as gray and tan and boring as I had dismissed it as being for much of my life. I don’t like winter or cold and I have been ungenerous to the deadened landscape that comes with it. If you look long enough, there are startling oranges and yellows out there in the bare branches, hazes of dried umber seed heads blowing in undulating waves a foot above the ground even in January. A flash of orange fox. Cardinals sitting and darting, sitting and darting. The magic hour still turns everything vanilla and orange and nostalgic; the river a deep ocean blue, high and white-capped close to sunset.
And the sky in winter. So clear and pale blue or filled with towering cumulus castles. My favorite though is the iron gray and steel blue lowering clouds that roll in over the hills darkening the sky, but leaving patches open—always out of view, down the valley or behind the tree line—that allow sun to slant in along the ground. The trees’ bared limbs darken in color. The fields look alight. They glow. There’s no time the farm is more beautiful than when it’s transformed to a darkling plain.
Farming, livestock management—both are fraught with a lot of disappointment and loss. Certainly there’s happiness and celebration too. But as important as it is to diversify economically on family farms nowadays to keep enough money coming in so as not to lose the place, it’s important to diversify joy as well so as not to lose your temper or your good cheer or, if being completely honest, your mind.
