The Game of Farming

I hardly know the first thing about poker, but I like knowing how things work so when I came across How To Be A Poker Champion In One Year in The Atlantic, I opened it right up. To my surprise, I realized the author's approach to becoming a poker champion in one year is similar to what I enjoy about farming--although with a longer learning curve.

"Poker is all about comfort with uncertainty, after all. Only I didn’t quite realize it wasn’t just uncertainty about the outcome of the cards. It’s uncertainty about the 'right' thing to do."

I can make all the plans in the world--and I do, over the winter--but the longer I farm, the more I accept that there is no certainty in them. How can there be, when the implementation of those plans is necessarily reliant on weather yet to come and other unknowable factors related to the essential problem of farming: imposing human order and human desires on inscrutable natural systems.

I used to aspire to the perfect season, where all the ground was perfectly prepared, the seeds all sown according to winter plans, each vegetable abundant--because surely if I made the perfect plans, with the perfect execution, that would inevitably lead to perfect agricultural results. But as much as that is my starting point, in the end I am not working with a mechanical system; there is no certainty here on the farm. Being good at farming is not about knowing how to grow stuff (plants just do their thing, really) or even the methods (although there are indeed incremental improvements and new innovations each year), but about honing one's decision-making ability and making the best decisions each day, moment-to-moment, based on the situation at hand.

There is no "knowing" what to do, as if it could be learned in a textbook; my job is to figure out what course of action is most likely to work out best, accounting for some intuitive sense of how bad and how likely the worst results might be, as well as how likely the best results might be. For sure the longer I've farmed, the more conservative I've become, favoring decisions that are very likely to work out acceptably, and with little downside risk--even though this inherently leads to a similarly small chance of perfection. To borrow from a different card game, to "shoot the moon" is not a viable farm strategy; that perfect result is an impossibility.

“Less certainty. More inquiry,” Seidel relates to Konnikova in the poker article.

Assessing what may happen and understanding why past results were the way they were is a more useful approach here than feeling any certainty about how to proceed. I realize that I use my years of observation of my own successes and non-successes--as well as the much longer experience of my neighbor farmers--to game out what might happen as a result of any farming decision, in order to assess the likelihood of positive results. Will the soil crust before the seeds emerge, or perhaps the rain will come--or what happens if it rains too much, and would it be a net advantage to delay until later? The longer I farm, the more chances I get to observe and understand why things worked out the way they did, and the more granular detail I can build into my imaginary model to make more informed decisions about what is most likely to be the most advantageous course of action in any given situation. I enjoy, each year, being able to understand deeper levels of detail, to be able to act with closer tolerances during short windows of opportunity--not to know what to do, but to have a clearer sense of what is most likely to work.

"The object of poker is making good decisions....When you lose because of the run of the cards, that feels fine. It’s not a big deal. It’s much more painful if you lose because you made a bad decision or a mistake.”

So too with farming. I can't know what's best, and I surely can't get it "right" every time--there may not even BE a "right answer" every time. The best I can do is to make good decisions, good gambles, and know that I've played my best hand no matter how it ends up going in the end.