Farming and the Fear of Failure

Stacie Gordon is the second of three generations living on Red Hog Farm in Colton, Oregon.  Along with her husband, parents and children, Stacie raises heritage pork, pastured chicken, eggs, milk and vegetables on their nine acres.  Red Hog Farm will not turn anyone away because of inability to pay.  We can be reached by email at staciemao@yahoo.com, or befriend Stacie on Facebook for daily farm updates. This is her first time blogging!

Okay, I realize that it’s a little weird to start my blogging adventures with an entry about failure.  Why not start with one tooting my family’s collective horn?  Why not talk about all of the rousing success we’ve had farming, and how YOU can have rousing success too?  The food revolution will be over by nightfall!!!

The reason that I am beginning this exciting new adventure by talking about failure is that failure is where farming starts.  You don’t know what is going to work until you try a thousand things that don’t.  Everyone who’s ever been to elementary school remembers the story of Thomas Edison, who, when one of his assistants complained that their latest attempt at electric light was a failure, replied:

“I have not failed.  I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.”

I always pictured Edison joyfully jotting notes in his journal as he said that.

Failure in farming can be expensive.  This past spring and summer I attempted to raise close to seventy turkeys, in different dozen-strong batches.  I tried heritage breeds, wild breeds and domestic breeds both old and new…and almost all of them died.  I felt like a murderer.  Turkey poults are not cheap, and I kept thinking that I’d wasted twelve dollars per bird, seventy times…and that’s not even counting feed costs.  When I told my husband Jesse at the beginning of July that I was done with turkeys for the year and would try again in the spring, he would have none of it.  He simply, patiently shook his head and said, “Nope.  We will keep trying until we get it right.”   He did ask that I stick with Broad Breasted White poults, which are only four dollars apiece.

Lo and behold, our next batch has survived and though we still pray for them, every single one of these little turkeys looks like they will make it until Thanksgiving.  It turns out that the temps up here are just too cold for very young turkeys until July or August.  If we want to start them earlier next year, we’ll have to put them in the greenhouse.  Or we could try the kitchen…hmm.

Failure comes in all different forms on the farm.  Maybe a row of vegetables that you’ve scrupulously planted and weeded for months refuses to come up.  Maybe your cow discovers the three-inch-tall corn sprouts and they are GONE before you can even shoo her out of the field.  Ahem.  Maybe an entire colony of bees just…disappears.

Sometimes failure in farming is funny, like the time I worked nearly all day to make a hard cheese, and discovered at the very end of the process that I had forgotten to add rennet.  I could have drained it and we would have eaten it soft, but I was too exasperated and it became duck food.

Sometimes failure is unbelievably sad, like the day we lost a tiny goatling and had no idea why.  One day he was fine; the next he was simply gone.  It is one of the the most frustrating aspects of farming, failing and not knowing why. The failure bothers you less than the ambiguity .  It doesn’t mean that we should be okay with it, or that we should treat life callously, with a “You win some, you lose some” attitude.  We should always try to figure out why something didn’t work.  We take notes, we write journals, we stay up late and then rise early searching for solutions.  But we must let go of the fear that we MIGHT fail.

I think we all struggle with perfectionism.  We listen to that little voice in our heads that sneers, “You don’t know what you’re doing!  Do a little more research first.  Check out somebody else’s setup first.  You need more money/time/seeds/experience/whatever before you can do THAT.” Sometimes that voice is right and you should listen.  More often, however, it’s wrong and you just need to get off your bum and TRY.

Ultimately farming comes down to this:  you will fail.  You will do things that embarrass you, like the time that I had finally milked out my two goats by hand, only to trip on the stairs going up to the house and soak myself, head to toe, with milk.  You will lose animals to disease, injury, heat, cold, or just because.  You will plant things and forget to water them. You will buy an animal and regret is as soon as you get it home. You will spend hours erecting fences that don’t keep livestock in or predators out.  In short, you will fail.

But, you will also succeed.  In June we had a freak thunderstorm that completely flooded one of our pastures.  Jesse and I squatted in water four inches deep to save sixty day-old meat chickens.  We thought for sure that they were goners; they’d gotten soaked and chilled before we even realized that it was raining. And yet, just when we thought we were on the verge of yet another failure, we succeeded and every single chicken survived.

You will have success in farming, but only if you stop listening to that little voice and try.  Just try.  Plant SOMETHING.  Milk SOMETHING.  (But try to stick to a cow, goat, sheep or camel.  Otherwise you may have a hard time selling your milk.)  Raise three chickens for eggs or meat.  Get two ducks to mow your grass.  You will have successes that keep you up rejoicing for days and feed your soul for years, but you must (and will) fail spectacularly first.

See?  Encouraging!  The food revolution will be over by nightfall!!!

This post has been submitted to Food Renegade’s Fight Back Fridays

Tagged as: Agriculture, Blogging, Farmers, Local, Michael Pollan, SlowFood, Sustainable Farming, the Fear of Failure