On Amnesia and Crop Planning
Considerations from Sarah, Spring Equinox 2023
Golden hour of stretchy shadows (wildly, this was March 2021)
Every spring equinox has a certain excitement to it, but this year is the most universally welcome one I remember. I don’t know a single person who didn’t feel beat up by this past winter. The farmers, who might normally be emerging from winter rest and eyeing spring a little wearily, have been waiting to get into their fields for so long that they are restless to start. And the non-farmers (who I admittedly sometimes forget also have to deal with weather) have been facing what feels like daily disruptions of power outages, flooding, cold, and historic snowfall. We are ready to be done.
Conveniently, the sun was out yesterday morning with the arrival of spring, and we have our first outdoor transplanting on the schedule, though none of us is yet in transplanting shape. Spring is weird here. We are in the middle of our current season and already at the beginning of the next. Being at both the beginning and the middle at the same time is confusing, physically. Certain muscles are already tired and others I haven’t used in months. Anna is feverishly crop planning in between harvest plans. We are trying to hire a magical person to replace (some of) her work this year. We are trying to get maintenance done on our equipment before we need it. We are both very stressed and yet there isn’t that much to physically move fast on.
Having to plan our next production cycle before we’ve finished the one we are in is the awkward dance we have to do. Most farms have to do this to some extent, but our winter focus makes it more pronounced, since we are so much still in our harvest window. Storage crops for next winter need to go in the ground as soon as frosts end, so we have to determine what scale and market we are trying for before we’ve really seen this season out. Onions were the first crop to get seeded: we gambled a little and seeded sixteen thousand, less than we did last year but we chose only our favorite two varieties. We put our seed potato order in, our biggest financial commitment to a certain amount of production. Less than we did last year but more than we thought we’d do again. During potato harvest last year—which we felt ill-equipped for and dragged on for weeks—we all said, over and over again, “never grow this many potatoes again.”
We are going to do it again. Not quite as many, but almost. It’s seasonal amnesia. The sun comes out on a spring equinox morning and it’s easy to forget what winter was like. It’s great to have harvested fifteen thousand pounds of potatoes in a way that it’s not great to be harvesting them. Now, in March of 2023, we have all those potatoes to sell; those sad sunburned people pulling the potatoes out last fall were different people, younger people, 2022 people. We inherited these lovely potatoes from them. We start to make a crop plan not so very different from the one that just a month ago felt nearly impossible. After all, we did it! Some version of it, at least. So we make the plan, we get the plants in the ground. This year we’ll get more of them in earlier, and hope that makes the difference. At some point, I will scream at a billowing hoop house, “never again!” And then the wind will die down and the sun will come out and I’ll think, it wasn’t so bad.
I’m grateful for it, this amnesia, the same way as I imagine people who give birth are. In the moment it feels too painful to continue, but only a small time later I remember that it was hard, but in a vague way, and what is life without a little pain anyway? As we interview applicants for our crew-of-one this year we emphasize how they’ll need to be okay working in cold and wet conditions, but we say this cheerfully. We make it seem very doable. It is doable! We did it!
This pleasure-in-retrospect is a common feeling for me, and I don’t think I’m alone. I feel it about individual harvests, projects, entire seasons, vacations. If anyone asks whether I love writing, I usually say that I love having written. A certain type of person (none of you!) sometimes believes farming to be immune to this, like it’s more meditation than work. The myth that farmers in their fields exist more fully in the present moment than other workers, not worrying about the coming week, month, year, not simultaneously planning next week’s tractor work while worrying about the wind forecast while hoeing a bed of lettuce while also worrying whether hoeing this lettuce is really the right thing to be doing at that moment…well, maybe some of them do. I sometimes look across the fence at our neighbor farm and believe that’s how they are doing it, fully in the present with their whole being, sure in their decisions, clear on their task.
It’s not how I am doing it.
To be sure, there are many farm tasks that get you out of your head and into your body, force the worrying brain to rest for a few hours. Especially with a crew. So fun to race-hoe your way down a row, so fun to get into a transplanting rhythm, so fun to fireline things. But that’s a finite feeling and much of the joy of farming, for me, is a nebulous blend of satisfaction in past work (I really love looking at a weeded field in that pre-sunset light at the end of a day), fleeting joy in the present (fitting exactly the number of transplants into a bed that you needed! a fun-looking carrot!) and a swirl of imaginings and planning for the future. It’s why my decision-making process is tenuous at best. I only ever touch down very softly on any given choice, ready to bounce away again like a balloon torn loose from its tether.
As a farmer, this driftiness of mine is a little troublesome. I change my mind a lot, which can make me seem unconfident (and is annoying to Anna). It’s useful also. I have learned to trust my feelings about things, to adapt to new conditions, to push when I need to push and rest when I need to rest. “Tell me, what else should I have done?” is the line from Mary Oliver that I have branded on my notebook. It’s a few lines before the big one about the wild and precious life, and it’s the one that keeps me sane. “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is,” she wrote, “I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down / into the grass…how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, / which is what I have been doing all day.” I can think of nothing more important.
But the intuitive process is not the one that is needed for crop planning, it turns out. What’s needed is math, and trial and error. My “feeling” that we should start fall heading broccoli in June turns out to simply not be the case, which is how we ended up with broccoli in September our first season (that I even know those dates is due to the actual numbers in our crop plan, because now I “feel” like we started those in July). Fortunately, It’s Anna’s job to write the crop plan this year. For Anna, the crop plan is an attempt to evade the amnesia, an externalized memory of the season. It can’t be argued with. But the crop plan is also a story we are telling ourselves about how this season will go. We are making some guesses, about how much more efficiently we can grow, how much better we can use our growing space by getting more accurate with our timing on many crops, how little labor we can get away with. It is the place where this all gets worked out in hard numbers, where the memory of last year blends into the projection of the next. It’s a past, present, and future tense document, both a work of wild imagination and a weekly task list. It encompasses a little amnesia, a little spring hope, and a lot of unknowns.
We also have actual data, of course, but it all starts to seem sort of nebulous when the experience of a season gets translated to a spreadsheet. We live by it all season—everything that happens in the field is a mere tinkering with the fundamental structure of the year that the crop plan bestows—but the closest it can come to resembling the reality of the field is in the margin notes beside specific crops (Too late! Too early! Never again!). Those fifteen thousand pounds of potatoes we harvested last year, each and every pound of which we moved at least three times—from the soil to a bag, from the bag to the truck, from the truck to the cooler, and now twice again as we haul them out of storage and to the root washer—on a spreadsheet we can move with just the click of a mouse. The difference between wholesaling five thousand pounds and eight thousand pounds is a matter of a couple keystrokes (and a magical six thousand dollars) on a spring spreadsheet. The experience of it, one fifty-pound bag at a time, is a matter for our autumn selves.
The biggest unknown is that starting next month, Anna will be working off-farm. Well, off this farm. She’ll be right next door, running harvest at West County Community Farm. We decided this together and it’s exciting and scary at the same time. I’m looking at a season of often working alone, more often than not making decisions by myself, both a freedom and a fear. I will have to trust myself, daily, in a way that I have never fully committed to before. I will have to be sure about things, at least for long enough to convince myself to do them.
In a few weeks, I’ll be left with this plan, this prayer, and my task for the year will be to make it a reality. I will try to implement it as faithfully as my inclinations toward intuition allow. There will be moments in the season when I will be sure it’s all wrong, when I remember planting earlier, or later, days when the list of tasks in no way matches the plan and entire weeks when we veer so far of course we won’t be sure whether the story that is unfolding in real time is in any way related to the beautiful tidy story Anna is writing now. Intuition will serve me well then, I hope. I’ll have to operate in this wash of memory and instinct and absolute unsureness, simultaneously revising the past while dealing with the present while making notes for the future, just like we all do. I’ll be confused, and then sure, and confused again. And no matter what little decisions I make, or don’t make, the plants will grow, and hopefully they will bear some resemblance to the plants we planned to grow, and sometime later we will head out to harvest and see what it all amounted to. Our spring selves and our fall selves will meet, and converse briefly, and agree or disagree, and then winter amnesia will come again.
Truly, what else should we have done?
