Downright Dirty
In light of a conversation this weekend with our farming friends about employee woes, we realized we are fortunate to have the people we have working with us day in and day out. We don’t always get to do exactly what we want all the time. There are tasks on the farm that we dread. Green beans are the least favorite item we have to harvest, largely because there are so many and they don’t hold well in the field so we can’t really push it off until tomorrow and jeopardize the crop. In order to pick the entire 250’ three row bed, two of us would need to spend about 4 hours harvesting. We grow bush beans, so it is a lot of bending over.
Friday we had every crop crossed of the pick sheet except the beans and there was only an hour left in our day. Enough procrastinating! We had a wholesale order to be delivered that afternoon calling for 60 lbs. It had been raining all day. We were on our second change of clothes and soaked through again. But our crew, tackled the task with little complaint.
Every week there is physically taxing, downright dirty work on the farm. Pulling thistles and weeds as tall as our ten year old, ripping out expired brassicas, picking rock, hauling manure and the list goes on. But we have come to learn that even the worst of jobs can be tolerable and maybe even fun with the right people working with you. We are fortunate enough to have those people on our farm. Not a single one of us wants the other to overdo themselves or have to pull more weight. We are always taking turns on the fork, or on our knees, or with our hands in the cold water to make sure we each get a break. And there is no whining and very few complaints other than joking about the who is more miserable. The simple humor and vegetable puns never end and an accidental bump into the pile of poles with the van full of harvest bins keeps us laughing for days. A far cry from our days of laboring on a road crew or being in a dramatic office setting. We love what we do because of the people doing it with us.
Carrying on,
