Still Humble Pie

Welcome to Throwback Thursday on the Genuine Faux Farm blog!   This is the day of the week where Rob finds an older post from years past and updates, adds, or otherwise modifies what was written and then shares the new and improved version again!  This one comes from August 27, 2017 and references events from that year, but I've added a bit to it as well.  Enjoy!

------------------------------------

Tammy and I have been working the Genuine Faux Farm since 2005, so it's not like we're novices.  Yet, we still make mistakes and things still go wrong.  We still have problems that give us grief and we still don't necessarily like sharing them publicly.  

Yet, here I am, putting these things on the blog, illustrating our failures - why is that?

The biggest reason I have for recording the opposite of success is to enforce some level of reflection so we can try to avoid the same situation in the future.  If you don't think about the causes and reasons for the problem, how can you address them effectively?  The answer to that question is that you can't. 

But, why share them publicly in a blog? Especially for a second time in a throwback post?

First, I highly doubt that enough people read this blog to require a media tour to explain why things went wrong to the general public.  Those who do read this blog are genuinely supportive and/or are interested in learning.  And second, there is no better learning situation than when failure is encountered.  And, we are all about learning here.

And finally, I want to make the point that our farm plan has always been built to absorb failures.  To paraphrase another farmer I respect very much, "If you don't have some failures each season, you aren't trying hard enough."

Everyone Who Farms Has Done This (and will probably do it again)

Don't leave rolls of barbed wire, chunks of fencing, fence posts and other such things near paths or other areas where grass and other growing things will cover them.

Yeah, yeah.  I hear you.

Arrrrg!

There are very few people who have mowed on a farm that can say they have never mowed over something that fowled up the blades.  In fact, I'll bet that the few people who can say that didn't do a whole lot of mowing on a farm.  Simply put, farms have a lot going on.  You set things down 'just for a second' because you only have two hands.  You'll come back and get that after you do this thing or that thing.  You run over it with the mower two months later.

After you swear a little bit, you then swear that you will NEVER let that happen ever again.  

Then, one day sometime later, you find that you have too many things to do and too little time to do it all in.  You only have two hands or only so much room in the tractor bucket.  You set something down so you can pick it up later...

If You're Going to Deviate From the Plan...

When we plan for our season we usually have 'alternative plans' in place for those foreseeable situations that might come up.  But, I can tell you this much - as soon as you get a spur of the moment thought that follows the format of "Huh, I'll just do this instead of..." you'd better take another moment or three to think through it.

Huh, I'll just change the spacing in this field because the plan doesn't look right... ya, right.

As always, there is more to the picture than the heading shows.  And, this post isn't really about all of the details that led to sad chleome flowers in the middle of weeds.  My point is that, while it is good to be able to make adjustments, you should make sure to think through those adjustments.  The worst mistakes we have made on the farm were the result of a rushed decision.

Let's be perfectly clear here.  Every season is filled with numerous quick decisions that MUST be made to move from day to day on the farm.  That is simply part of diversified farming and much of those decisions come about within the larger plan for the season. What I am talking about here is making alterations to the plan on the fly that don't actually NEED to be made.

For example...  If it has rained and rained and rained for days and one area of a field won't dry out, you may have to make a quick adjustment to how you plant things or remove or reduce a crop or two on the season's grow list.  But, if you just look at a field and say, "Hey... I think I'll just change the row spacing for this field," DON'T DO IT!

Remember, you're the same person who just mowed over that roll of woven wire fencing you set down a few weeks ago.  Your judgement in this moment has been found to be wanting.  Trust your former self that put the plan down on paper in January.

You'll be glad you did.

Note: for those who want to know what happened to that row of chleome - it got tilled under soon after that photo was taken.  Oh well.

It Doesn't Count If You Answer the Quiz Question Correctly

It sure doesn't hurt to have a nice pool of knowledge at your disposal for whatever work you may do.  But, darn it, if you don't apply what you know, it doesn't really help does it?

This one frustrates me because we have known for many years that bush beans (especially green beans) usually keep potato beetles out of potatoes well enough that you don't need to worry about the population getting out of hand and destroying your potato crop.  We know this to be true and we plan to execute an intercropping plan every season.  We may modify the plan every so often, but it's there.

So, how is it possible that we did not get it done in 2017? 

First, let me assure you that we didn't lose our crop.  Some varieties did poorly because of potato beetles, but we still got some decent taters.  But, I'm still asking the question - how did we let this happen?

The reality is, we didn't just let it happen.  On a highly diversified, small-scale farm there are limited resources for a very diverse number of crops.  Weather events, equipment failures, or labor shortages can set a subset of crops back simply because the resources were not available to deal with that crop AND all of the others that need something done 'right now.'  Hard choices have to be made and the beans in the taters didn't happen in time to prevent the potato beetle flush that we had to deal with this particular year.  In this case, it made the difference between an outstanding crop and a barely passable one. 

On the plus side, it encouraged me to exercise my "poetry skills" that are exhibited in the photo of the chalkdoor shown above.  And now you are all saying, please do better with your intercropping every season from here on!

Sometimes, It's Not About You

The weather doesn't provide the growing degree days for a crop to reach maturity during the planned period of production.  The sun doesn't come out for ten days straight.  The state of Iowa is so full of herbicides flying all over the place that things don't germinate consistently.  The woodchuck figures out how to get into a coldframe and eats your melon starts.  Excessive rain floods your high tunnel and rots out carrots and beans.  It's just part of what we deal with and it's a big reason why the diversity on our farm is so important.

Eden is missing some beans here....

The excessive rains in July, 2017, resulted in standing water in Eden (our smaller high tunnel).  Green beans do not care for that sort of situation so our formerly healthy plants all had to be pulled.  The good news?  We had already harvested a pound per row foot from these plantings.  The bad news?  We usually get three pounds per foot by the end of the season from rows like these.

But, as I mentioned, the diversity of our crops and the diversity built into our plan tends to result in an overall 'win' for the farm.  For example, we were able to harvest from some of the green beans in our east fields since the loss of these bean plants in Eden.  And, in another week or so the beans in Valhalla started producing - so hurrah for succession planting.  We'll be just fine, thank you.  But, it would have been nice to have the easier road to our harvest goals with beans happily producing in Eden.

Mad Scientist?

We experiment on the farm frequently because we know there is always more to learn and we recognize that experiential learning is very effective.

I'd say there was some seed in that straw mulch, wouldn't you?

Our sprawling cucumber vines always result in some weed issues later in the life of the crop.  We've considered (and even tried) paper mulch, but you can't walk on that to harvest.  We've considered trellising (and tried it), but there's a labor timing issue that just doesn't work on our farm.  This year, we trialed putting some straw mulch between two rows and you can see the result above. 

Apparently, the straw had a lot of seed in it.  We had to find the time to pull the voluntarily seeded 'weeds' and that succession of cucumbers finished with an average harvest.  But, this experiment was NOT repeated.

Let's just say that the scientist who thought up this trial sure was mad when he had to go out and pull all of the weeds we inadvertently planted.

=======================

And there you have it!  A look at some things that didn't go quite as we wanted on the farm in 2017.  Obviously, we dealt with each of them in whatever way we felt best with the time and resources we had available to us.  The most difficult part about them was avoiding making our failures our focus for the season.  Plenty of things went well in 2017.  But, we're human.  It seems like it takes only one failure to obscure ten successes. 

But at least we won't get a big head.