Farming is a busy and often frenetic enterprise and it’s all too easy to let things slip into disarray, which is why getting organized and staying that way require Constant Vigilance. As a former disorganized pack rat, I speak with some authority here. Imagine how much time, energy and money are wasted in saving, then losing, then looking for, and finally re-purchasing an item that you were so clever to have saved in the first place. But if you’re going to keep every scrap of iron, every broken tool handle and every piece of string for a future need, then remember well: when you need it, if you can’t find it, and have to go to town and buy another one anyway, then you should have thrown it away in the first place. Thrift and frugality are wonderful traits that have kept farmers in business for centuries. I encourage you to think constantly of ways to make your farm run smoother by becoming more organized and by utilizing simple innovations on your place.Ĭonstant Vigilance and Common Sense Thrift Each farm is unique and you’ll have to find unique solutions for your particular problems and needs. I hope that you will take from this the spirit of innovation and thoughtfulness that I’m trying to convey rather than the particulars. If that be true, then we need to root out the devil and make the details work for us rather than against us.įor this issue I thought it might be interesting to show a few of the details that I have put in place at Littlefield Farm that go a long way toward making day-to-day operations more efficient and smooth running. And we know that the devil is in the details. That said, I continue to work on the details. Now, after a dozen or so years of improvements I finally feel like this farm too has nearly achieved that elusive sense of order and completeness that a successful farm embodies. At that time the place was overgrown, overgrazed and neglected, having been used only as rented grazing land for many years. Upon arrival at Littlefield Farm in 2005, I started over. However, just about the time the farm was finally approaching a place of mature completion, we moved. It was moving, albeit slowly, from a place of disorder to one of order. I was constantly pecking away at some project du jour and slowly the farm began to take shape. I bought an old horse barn with no roof for $800 and, with the unwitting (and free) help of friends (true friends), moved it onto the place. We threw up some sheds with rough cut lumber for harvesting and tool storage. You can well imagine these early efforts: short on time, short on money and short on organizational skill, but long on ambition and dreams. I sat backwards on a homemade stoneboat pulled by a team of tired, but honest grade-Belgians to lay down drip irrigation lines. I didn’t have a harvest shed so I stuck an old bathtub and clothes dryer out on the edge of the vegetable field and proceeded to wash and spin hundreds of pounds of salad mix a week.
Handy note full#
I collected every piece of free junk I could get my hands on: old rusty tools, half rotten boards full of nails, pallets, and all manner of odds and ends.
I first started farming on a shoestring budget, while burning the candle at both ends working as a school teacher, building our own house and raising a young family. I learned about reverse entropy the hard way. A precisely tuned and carefully honed farm is something that need not benefit the present generation only it can and should be passed on to succeeding generations in better condition than when the current generation started out. “sustainability”, when a farm moves inexorably from chaos to order. Farms and the people who work them have a greater chance of long-term success, i.e. As vital as it is, “sustainability” must be about more than sustaining the fertility of soil: farmers and the farms they husband must themselves also be sustained. The challenge is to successfully navigate these turbid waters through the seasons and profit economically, biologically and personally. The operation of a successful farm involves a complex array of decisions involving crops, livestock, weather, markets, strict planting and harvesting windows, life and death, pests and weeds. Call it reverse entropy.Ĭontrary to the bucolic notion of the “simple” country life, farming is anything but simple. The good farmer should manage the farm in such a way as to move gradually toward an ever higher state of order: better crop rotations, tighter fences, fewer weeds, better maintained machinery, finer tuned horses, more biologically active soil, etc. I believe, however, that good farming should challenge this cardinal rule of thermodynamics. LittleField Notes: On Getting Organized & Devising Handy ContrivancesĮntropy is the concept that everything in the universe moves from a state of order to one of disorder.
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