Farming would be so cool if only. . .

Man, the weather has been so difficult this year and it’s taking its toll. A foot and a half of snow blew through at the start of January along with high temperatures in the teens for weeks. So that snow went nowhere fast. And then not long after that, loads of rain and bad flooding on the lower portions of the farm.

No harvesting of willow in the snow and frigid cold, and then so much of my attention was drawn to the horse barns in the flooding that harvesting still had to take a back seat to my other responsibilities. As a result, even though we got a bigger willow harvest this year than ever before, we’re losing at least 10% of it to early leafing out of the rods still in the field. So frustrating. And we haven’t planted at all yet—besides 50 Brittany Greens a farming class got into the ground a few weeks ago.

Everything feels late and pressured.

And this all happening after last year’s perfect willow growing conditions. We had so many beautiful straight rods in the beds, and though a lot are in bundles in the barns, it hurts to see so much covered in tiny green leaves blowing in the March winds right now.

As a result, I have been a little down on farming in the past few weeks. I hope that general sadness (ennui?) hasn’t translated to my talks to classes or people buying cuttings. I love willow. It’s the best plant in the world and it’s definitely my life’s calling and I think any farm that doesn’t have a plot of willow growing on it somewhere—domestic or wild—is a little sad. But farming is hard.

In the documentary “The Biggest Little Farm”, the Chester’s farming consultant tells them that once they get their farming to live in concert with nature, that their work should feel like surfing. I think about that a lot. I get what he meant in the larger arc of the farm’s growth, but he made that sound awfully easy. Eventually—once the soil was healthy and flooding was mitigated by green growing things, and their ecosystem filled out properly with the right amount of pest animals and predators—that they would just be beach bums hanging ten on sweet swells. That’s too simplistic a read of his intention, but that’s sure how it sounded. Loads of early planning and hard work and eventually, the Chesters would just get to coast.

Farming is like surfing, I guess. In so much as you’re not fully in control of your ride. Nature has a lot to say about whether the day is fun or not. But I’m only okay with that metaphor if that surfing is in a location where there is incredibly variable weather and wave action above a coral reef. Because there are loads of fun days, loads of boring days, and then days when unless you know exactly what you’re doing and are incredibly lucky, you are going to get thrashed and dragged against coral and barnacles and all manner of underwater scraping and slashing wild life.

Occasionally, too, there will be sharks.

I’ve taken this metaphor too far. But you get what I’m saying.

Farming, even farming the best plant in the whole wide world, is hard and fraught with failure. That risk doesn’t make it not worth doing, but it does make it hard to talk about it in glowing terms every day of the year.

Floods. Snow. I can do without both.