When the Farm Stops Cooperating

Farming has a rather uncomfortable way of teaching you that good intentions are not enough.

You can wake up early.

You can employ good people.

You can buy seed, fertilizer and machinery.

You can make plans.

And then the farm can look at all your plans and quietly say, "That is interesting. Let's see how this goes."

Over the past month, I have had one of those lessons.

We have had to let go of two farmhands and, eventually, the farm manager.

At the same time, we have scaled back production considerably.

For now, the farm is largely back to its essentials: livestock and crops under the greenhouse.

It was not a decision I made lightly.

Anyone who has spent time around a farm knows that reducing production feels almost like admitting defeat. You spend years trying to make the place more productive, and then you find yourself deliberately doing less.

But sometimes doing less is not giving up.

Sometimes it is simply accepting reality.

One of the biggest problems we have been dealing with is our borehole water.

The water has gradually affected the soil, particularly through sodicity and salt accumulation. What looks perfectly harmless coming out of the tap can become a very different story after passing through the soil for months and years.

The plants notice.

The soil notices.

Eventually, the farmer notices.

Productivity begins to decline.

Crops that once performed well become increasingly difficult.

And suddenly you find yourself spending more money trying to persuade the farm to produce what it used to produce naturally.

That is one of farming's more expensive jokes.

You can keep adding inputs to a problem that is not really an input problem.

Sometimes the soil itself is telling you something.

And perhaps people can do something similar.

Over time, I also began noticing another problem on the farm.

Learned helplessness.

There is a point at which someone encounters a problem so many times that they stop trying to solve it.

The response becomes, "That is how we have always done it."

Or, "It cannot be done."

Or simply waiting for somebody else to come and fix it.

The dangerous thing about learned helplessness is that it can look like experience.

A person can become very knowledgeable about why something will not work without ever becoming particularly interested in making it work.

Then there is its more mischievous cousin:

weaponized incompetence.

This one is particularly interesting.

It is the art of doing something badly enough, or slowly enough, that eventually somebody else takes over.

It is a remarkably effective strategy.

If you are responsible for a task and consistently demonstrate that you cannot do it properly, there is a good chance someone will eventually say, "Never mind. I'll do it."

Congratulations.

You have just been promoted from being responsible for the problem to being the person who creates the problem for someone else.

I have seen enough of this over the years to know that it is not always deliberate.

Sometimes people genuinely lack the skills.

Sometimes they need training.

Sometimes they are simply overwhelmed.

And sometimes, unfortunately, they have discovered that incompetence can be surprisingly comfortable when somebody else is willing to carry the consequences.

The challenge for a manager is knowing the difference.

That is where leadership becomes uncomfortable.

You want to be patient.

You want to teach.

You want to give people another chance.

But a farm does not operate on sympathy alone.

The cows still need feeding.

The greenhouse still needs attention.

The crops still need water.

The weeds have absolutely no interest in your employee-management philosophy.

They will grow whether the staff is motivated or not.

And livestock have never once accepted "we are having a difficult week" as an excuse for missing feeding time.

That is one of the things I have come to appreciate about farming.

It exposes excuses very quickly.

A construction project can sometimes be delayed.

A meeting can be postponed.

A report can wait until tomorrow.

A cow does not care that the manager had a bad day.

The farm operates according to biological time.

That has forced me to rethink what we are trying to achieve.

Perhaps scaling back production is not failure.

Perhaps it is an opportunity to reset.

We are keeping the livestock.

We are keeping the greenhouse.

We are addressing the water and soil issues.

And we are reducing the areas where we are spending resources without getting a reasonable return.

There is a lesson here that extends well beyond farming.

Sometimes we keep pushing because we are afraid that stopping will look like failure.

We continue investing money into something simply because we have already invested so much.

We keep people because we are uncomfortable making difficult decisions.

We keep businesses, relationships, projects and habits alive long after the evidence suggests that something needs to change.

But persistence and stubbornness are not the same thing.

Persistence means continuing toward a worthwhile goal despite difficulty.

Stubbornness sometimes means refusing to accept that the strategy needs to change.

The farm has reminded me of that distinction.

There are seasons of abundance.

There are seasons of growth.

And there are seasons when you have to step back, understand what went wrong and rebuild.

Perhaps this is one of those seasons.

I don't know exactly what the farm will look like a year from now.

But I know this much.

We will keep learning.

We will fix what can be fixed.

We will stop doing what no longer makes economic or practical sense.

And we will continue.

Because farming, like life, rarely gives you perfect conditions.

Sometimes the water is wrong.

Sometimes the soil fights back.

Sometimes the people you trusted disappoint you.

Sometimes you discover that the problem is not the farm at all, but the way you have been managing it.

And sometimes the wisest decision is not to plant more.

It is to stop, look carefully at the ground beneath your feet, and ask a very simple question:

What is the farm trying to teach me?

I suspect there is still a harvest in that question.