Farm Olympics

Did you watch any of the Olympics? It's hard not to see a few parallels to farming's physical feats, although I did only catch the highlights due to my full-time participation in the tomato-picking event here on the farm. In fact, for a long time, in Summer Olympics years, the farmers around here held the Farm Olympics, complete with all the events you might imagine: square bale tossing, speed market tent set up, round bale hurdles, triathlon (including pond swim), and the quadrennial favorite, the tractor & trailer back up. It was full of good-natured rivalry between neighboring farms, stories passed down year to year, and, in general, a celebration of the community of many farms all coming together at the hardest-working point of the season for the big neighborhood event.

And farming itself--at least this type of small-scale, seasonal, manual-labor based farming--often seems like an Olympic event done year in and year out. Surely farming would fall into the marathon category. A six month marathon, that is, with vegetables as pace setters, one foot in front of the other until the finish line, invisible on the horizon, inevitably arrives in November. Or perhaps, considering all involved, it's more like the pentathlon (or the dodecathlon, with one event per month): right now we are in Tomato Pick, having arrived here from Squash Pick, and before that, Transplanting.

In any case, here we are in the middle of the season. Up until the April starting gun I plan and prep for this year's trial, finding my niche and developing my style over the past 10 farm years, and then we're off! The event underway, it is up to me to rely only on that training and planning to see how well I can do. After a winter off it takes a bit to hone the relevant muscles, to acclimate to long days of physical work in the heat, to remember the technical skills of doing all the repetitive tasks quickly and accurately--the muscle memory and cognitive training built only through experience. For workers--and I remember this acutely--the first two weeks are nearly impossible; even for long-time farmers the first two weeks each year are a shock. Since the output of the farm is all physical objects (delicious vegetable objects!) created from physical processes, the work put in is entirely involved with manipulating things in the physical world.

One of the farm neighbors, whom I used to live with, ran marathons--no, ultramarathons--50 miles in the woods from which he came home unable to walk up stairs. I didn't get it, and still don't quite, except I realize I feel the same way about farming: there is the satisfaction in voluntarily setting up an almost absurd physical challenge, and then seeing if I can complete it--whether that's the big picture of picking vegetables for 20 weeks straight to pack and deliver 60 beautiful shares three times a week without fail, or the smaller challenges of picking squash every day for weeks on end, picking ALL THE TOMATOES, or getting an unreasonably giant list of fieldwork done before rain or darkness on a 90-degree day, then getting up early to do it again the next day. All of these things are objectively difficult, strenuous, and exhausting, and yet, just as someone might choose to run an ultramarathon, or climb a mountain or twelve, this challenge of the objectively absurd is what offers the satisfaction of completion. (And at least farming yields tasty vegetables!)