Plagued by Self-Doubt

Several years ago, I met a person who informed me that they had started a new vegetable growing operation and that they fully expected to make $100,000 in gross sales by their second year of operation.   They weren't asking for any feedback, so I didn't offer any.  Clearly, they simply wanted me to be impressed that they were going to succeed and leave me in the dust - at least that was the implication they seemed to be pushing in our conversation.

After this conversation all I could think was that either they really did know something I didn't know or they were clueless and had no counter-balance to their overly healthy sense of self-importance and confidence.  Or perhaps, they just thought destiny/fate was going to smile on them in a special way.

Apparently, destiny/fate did smile.   But, the smile destiny/fate gave was either tinged with regret, irony or tiny bit of malice (perhaps all three) as this person didn't make it through their second year of growing.

This, of course, causes me to think a problem with our local foods systems that I should talk about more in later blogs.  But, for now I'll just summarize:

When we first started in local food production, the goal we (and many of the growers who started when we did) had was to increase the total amount of local foods being consumed.  It turned out that the piece of the pie for local foods did not grown all that much.  That means we often found ourselves competing with the very same people we were trying to cooperate with - an uncomfortable situation, at best.

Peanuts by Charles M Schulz

My favorite cartoonist as I was growing up was Charles M Schulz.  Even as a child, I found his humor and story lines to be amusing and engaging.  Now, as an adult (if I may be allowed to call myself an adult for the time being), I find even more meaning and humor in his work.  The cartoon above reminded me of the conversation I outlined above.  It also got me to thinking, which is a dangerous pastime of mine.

Perhaps self-doubts, plague that they are, are healthy when you balance it with reasonable amounts of confidence, stubborn willpower, work ethic, knowledge, experience and critical thought.  Every diversified farmer that I have met and come away feeling that they were (or would be) successful expressed, in some way, that they had a healthy level of self-doubt.  This is not to say that they didn't also exhibit confidence that they would overcome adversity and do what was needed to succeed.  What I mean to say is that they weren't so blind to think that they were infallible.

The awareness of self-doubt encourages us to ask important questions - one of which is "what am I missing?"  After all, we are imperfect and we all have things to learn - even about the things with which we have the most familiarity. 

So, here I am in 2023, plagued by self-doubts once again.  And, here I am asking myself, "What am I missing?  How did we miss the boat when it came to increasing the size of the pie so we could effectively increase the number of small-scale, diversified farms that produce food for local communities?"  Actually, it's not a new question and it is not an easy question to answer.  Hey, it's even a difficult question to ask.

Part of the answer is that things like this require a culture shift.  And culture shifts are hard to make happen when louder, corporate voices tend to dominate the conversation.

Then there are the more personal things.  As far as the Genuine Faux Farm in 2023 is concerned, we're not overconfident and we're keeping our eyes wide open.  On the other hand, we are confident enough to know that we can make good things happen here and we are pretty good at what we do.  It's a balancing act - a healthy balancing act.

We just need to remember that if we throw a low, outside-but-over-the-plate fastball to a left-hander, the ball is going to come back through the box at a high rate of speed and knock our shoes, glove, shirt, hat and socks off.

Many farms, like ours know this to be true.  But, we need to stop throwing that pitch when it comes to growing demand for local food producers.