The Value of “Hard” Work

I’ve been wanting to write for a long time and the ideas are constantly overflowing.  Many times they make their way onto small slivers of scrap paper.  On the back of receipts, invoices, or junk mail.  Even scrap pieces of wood if I’m in the middle of building something to house a swarm I caught three days ago (bees start to rebel after being cooped up for too long).  Sometimes these ideas become script when driving, or while scampering from one place to another dropping off eggs, picking up animal feed, or buying irrigation materials for that project that always seems to get pushed to next week, and the week after.  And then there’s this idea, the one that I’m reading about now, that although has never been written down in some unintelligible scribble like all the others, it’s the one that I’m constantly reminded of daily.  I’m reminded of it in this way – as I sit here writing I’m doubtful I’ll even have enough time to actually complete this paragraph.  At any given time we have a few pages of unwritten chores, repairs, prototypes, experiments, cleaning projects, advertisements, and trips to check off in order to maintain a slow but steady course towards making our farm a place where a livelihood can be realized and can manifest itself by letting us work a little less away from the home.

At this very moment, I wish I was finalizing a proposal to our local coop showing all the details about how we can work together to supply them with product.  This too may have to wait since something has to finally be written about why it’s so much easier to go the 9 to 5 route and squeeze a steady paycheck than providing many families with some of the most basic uncontaminated necessities for life – "good food".  At the heart of the issue is this…we are like most farming families: it’s still necessary at this point for us to have outside income and simultaneously, not only sustain our farm, but improve upon it.  If I had the time, I’d do some solid research and add a nifty little graph of the percentage of farming families with at least one partner working an outside job to support the farm.  Alas, that will also have to wait for another time.

You see, there’s a double standard for farmers or those who wish they could farm some day.  Not only are they expected to produce more food with less inputs than ever before in history, they are expected to do it for only what it costs to produce a crop or for even less.  At a recent conference Dr. Ricardo Salvador stated that 17% of every food dollar goes to farmers for the raw products necessary to produce all the other foods we are accustomed to.  In addition, he stated that given all the other links in the chain required to make innumerable food choices available at an instant and on a whim, that percentage is justified.

Unfortunately, trying to divide the food dollar pie into ever more slices to match expectations that food and unlimited variety should be available at a moments notice strains an already stressed revenue stream.  Today's expectation that food should be cheap (roughly 10% of average income) does the opposite of keeping farmer’s at home where they belong.   When we do not value our most basic necessities and are trained by a market-economy that food should be cheap, and when it’s true production cost is constantly obscured, we destroy the potential for making a living from farming.

Here’s an interesting little story from a past weekend farmer’s market:

A man in his 50’s, possibly touching 60, walks up to our table in shorts and sandals, casually taking in our story among the informational displays.  His facial expressions and body language as he read the signs didn’t really register as cynicism or frustration at the time, until he came back some time later.  Anyway, we spent a few minutes with him talking about our peppers, squash, and eggs.  Finally, we mentioned our honey and asked if he’d like to try some.  He answered shortly with, “You ever hear of diabetes?  I can’t eat it.”  So rather than going into the mechanics of how the body readily absorbs the dextrose and levulose of honey in a benign way compared to all other sugars that tax the bodies digestive system and liver, I decided he wasn’t in a pleasant mood this morning, and by asking him if he’d like to try a sample of honey, I may have struck a sensitive nerve or two.  So we helped the man to make his purchase of two heads of garlic so that he could be on his way.  We placed the two perfect little heads into a large thin plastic bag and in exchange the man handed us $2.00.

We were happy!  We charge $1.00 for the large heads and $0.50 for the small ones.  Although we haven’t checked with all the other vendors, this is a price we arrived at by talking with a few farmer friends and by looking at prices for locally grown garlic.  But also bearing heavily on our decision was the fact that we knew how much effort actually went in to growing this garlic.  Myself and two volunteers spent an entire morning hunched over 100 linear feet of garden bed planting these little guys.  There was the prep work of fertilizing the soil with heavy compost that had to be produced or hauled.  There was also the purchase of the seed garlic from another farmer with similar growing ethics to ours.  Out of that seed we further selected one by one, the best cloves for planting, breaking the heads open with our own hands, and choosing as though each one was a magic bean and had the potential to make the most delicious gigantic head of garlic we had ever seen.

The potential of that possibility is always half the satisfaction for me as a farmer.  And then of course there was the mulching, weeding, and watering for several months from November to May before harvest.  An early summer forced an early harvest that took another several hours of being hunched over this same bed digging in 100 degree weather and carefully placing the fragile heads into darkened crates for drying.  Another month later each one was trimmed by my better half and by an unpaid volunteer who appreciated a break from being cooped up in front of an office computer.  For her effort in seeking this hands-on education, she received a cut needing a band-aid and probably numerous bruises since she arrived a few weeks earlier.  As you can see, the sweat of five people and even some blood went into this garlic.
 

Now, this farmer’s market is new, and small, and because it’s summer it’s also a little slow.  However, somehow the man who purchased our precious garlic was still shopping a half hour later.  Amazingly, he hadn’t purchased anything else except two other heads of garlic.  He strolled up to the same edge of our table as I was helping another customer, and widely extended his arm holding our bag of garlic.   

I heard him say as my customer continued to chatter away in front of me, “I’d like to return this.  I got two heads for fifty cents over there.”

I couldn’t help but wonder if he would have done the same if that garlic came out of his garden, or if he had ever tended a garden of his own.  I wanted to ask, but it didn’t seem worth it since it seemed to me this man may have been on a mission, and perhaps even unintentionally.  You see, we’ve all been trained from an early age to wield our power - that currency in our pockets - in a way that creates competition and drives prices down ever further among producers of Things.  That’s capitalism…the path to a “strong” economy.  In the act of returning our garlic this man believed he came out ahead by a buck-fifty and found a better deal.  More seriously, it is also possible that he may have felt confused and cheated as a result of these fluctuating garlic prices.  Afterall, garlic is just garlic, and eggs are just eggs right?  No matter who produced them.

Sadly, we are no longer trained to appreciate good work and industriousness.  Few of us can recognize it these days.  Afterall, when was the last time you made hummus in a Tarahumara bowl created by a master woodworker, or held a clay Mata Ortiz pot with a one of a kind design never again to be duplicated by the potter who trained their entire life in the pursuit of perfecting the work on which the life of an entire village depends.  Most of what we own these days is planned for the waste bin before it’s assembled and has a finite amount of useful life before it even sees the shipping container bound for the USA.  We throw most everything away eventually, and cherish little in our transient lives based in Things rather than soil.  What will you leave to your children?

Our inability to recognize good work and industriousness fooled this man too that Saturday morning.  You see the “…over there.”, our customer was referring to was another vendor who didn’t actually grow the garlic he sold.  In fact, he grew nothing on his table.  Half of his items were out of season or impossible to grow within 1000 miles without cost prohibitive methods out of reach for many of us smaller scale family farms.   Compost never touched the soil those vegetables grew in.  By the way, if you ever see grocery tags on the veggies at a farmer’s market, ask yourself, ‘who are you really supporting?’.

To many of us still, it appears that not even the food we put into our bodies is worth $2.00 of hard work to our neighbor willing to farm desert land without chemicals.  If this moral dilemma is something we are not willing to recognize and shine a spotlight on, then farmers will always struggle a little harder each year to make their livelihoods from the land they gratefully pour their lives into.  

Fortunately farmers continue to farm in spite of this dilemma, because agrarianism and the act of farming represents a hope that at some point we’ll once again value hard work and industriousness, as an expression of our culture.